
Viola Web Browser (2009) - peter_d_sherman
http://viola.org/
======
quie8eeW
There is something very wrong with that page : its source code contains links
to porn website in <div> elements with `display: none` styles.

I suppose the page was cracked, or that the domain was bought by black hat
SEO. HN should probably not gives it credit by linking it.

~~~
hoistbypetard
Ugh. Well spotted.

------
badsectoracula
Another early browser is MidasWWW. I found some code dump or something a few
years ago and tried to build it[0] and after a few modifications to fix some C
stuff that i guess at the time were accepted by compilers, i got it mostly
working. The main issue (as can be seen from the image) is the main bar
placement - from what i could tell the browser was made using a modified
version of Motif for some workstation which wasn't 100% compatible with the
"standard" Motif. The fix would probably be trivial but at that point i had
lost interest :-P.

I uploaded the modified code to Mediafire[1] some time ago when someone asked
for it, just in case you want to try compiling it yourself. Note that most of
my changes were quick hacks to get things compiling, not proper fixes. The
dates in the archive indicate the files i modified. The original code can now
be found at GitHub[2] (though i'm not sure if it is the exact same code i used
myself - looks similar enough though).

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/W37vhBW.png](https://i.imgur.com/W37vhBW.png)

[1]
[http://www.mediafire.com/file/sr956k2fokms73d/file](http://www.mediafire.com/file/sr956k2fokms73d/file)

[2] [https://github.com/dckc/MidasWWW](https://github.com/dckc/MidasWWW)

------
peatmoss
I am reminded also of the Cello web browser which I remember briefly using in
the early days of the web.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_\(web_browser\))

~~~
cosmojg
Considering the uncanny similarity in names, I wouldn't be surprised if one
inspired the other.

~~~
gnufx
Cello didn't have Viola's salient features, did it?

~~~
ebj073
What were those?

What I remember from Cello was that it was very simple. It just contained the
bare minimum of functionality that a browser needed to support. I don't think
there were any extras. It also had a very small executable size.

I think it's correct that the name, at least, and maybe some of the
functionality, was derived and inspired from Viola.

~~~
gnufx
ViolaWWW features: stylesheets, scripting, document embedding, at least.

------
bergheim
Anyone else just get good vibes from seeing this? Before everything became
1984 with a couple of companies controlling the internet..

I mean. Blogs! Blogrolls. RSS. I miss the old days.

Now get off my lawn.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Webrings. Catalogs of sites, described and sorted by humans!

------
gnufx
If only...

There were a number of browsers with "applets" in different languages later in
the '90s, at least: Hotjava (however it was CapitalIzed) with Java, Grail with
Python, MMM with Caml (light?), and something for Tcl (I think). You can find
mention of them in the Emacs 21(?) browse-url code; well, maybe not the (why-
you-should-not-use-) Tcl one. As far as I remember, nothing came of the
proposed Guile version. There ought to have been one for NeWS, but I don't
remember. Probably just as well Emacs/W3 didn't join in.

There were also languages with "distributed scope", as opposed to "mobile
code", particularly Obliq, and maybe Kali Scheme. I'm not sure why the concept
seems to have died.

------
tpmx
Creator:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20101018012531/http://www.xcf.be...](https://web.archive.org/web/20101018012531/http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei-
Yuan_Wei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei-Yuan_Wei)

> Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Pingtung County, Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley
> High School in 1986. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University
> of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the student club, the
> eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF).

> In the 1990s, Wei was a founding employee of Global Network Navigator, one
> of the first Internet-based businesses. Later he worked for various Palm OS-
> related businesses. Since 2008, Perry has been living in both Taiwan and the
> US, and has devoted most of his time to taking care of his ill family member

I remember GNN:

[https://web.archive.org/web/19961024024732/http://www02.gnn....](https://web.archive.org/web/19961024024732/http://www02.gnn.com/)

------
dredmorbius
What's struck me is how much of the current browser functionality was
established by this time: graphics, tables, scripting, bookmarks, and
stylesheets. But also the missing elements: the notion that browsed content
would be persistently available, for example, was and remains absent.
Understandable posibly in an age of 100 MB main storage, less so with
terabyte-sized disk common.

Management of the browsed corpus is also apparently out of scope.

~~~
gnufx
There were a number of fairly sophisticated hypertext systems around then
(like the basis of viola). I was an early WWW user when it was mainly a
question of using the line-mode browser for the CERN documentation, and it
seemed incredibly primitive to someone who'd being developing with high-
resolution networked hypermedia. The significance of the protocol and naming
escaped me, unfortunately.

------
agumonkey
Call me passeist but I'm intrigued.

also once upon a time I got the old sunOs java based hotspot.. it was so
removed from the mainstream understanding of browsing, you had a main button
to reclaim memory or see stats :)

ps: do you guys have some numbers on memory use and cpu requirements for these
kind of programs ?

~~~
gnufx
> hotspot

hotjava?

I don't know about memory usage, but I was probably running such things on a
48MB Pentium 1 then.

~~~
agumonkey
yeah I got confused sorry

I forgot how much ram this sun ultra 10 .. maybe 256MB

------
bratsche
I just love the domain name. :)

------
shoes_for_thee
How do you get a dozen violists to play in tune?

Shoot 11 of them.

bdumtiss

~~~
acheron
What's the difference between a viola player and Dr. Scholl's Footpads?

Dr. Scholl's bucks up the feet.

Apparently viola jokes as a genre are 300 years old:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_jokes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_jokes)

~~~
shoes_for_thee
I mostly associate them with the early internet, thanks to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Barry_in_Cyberspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Barry_in_Cyberspace)

