Presented in 1994 with OS/2 Warp, it was hailed as the best browser by Internet Magazine in their November issue and leveraged its position as the only native browser in OS/2 at that time. It was a "coming attraction" in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML. Almost immediately after the introduction of OS/2 Warp version 3, IBM dismantled the development team and that relegated the WebExplorer to the annals of history. OS/2 Warp 4 included it, but also included a link to download an OS/2 version of Netscape Navigator 2.02, which was late for shipping on CD. IBM had already planned the substitution of WebExplorer. In 1995, it was added to AIX, IBM's proprietary UNIX platform. A 1996 review in PC Mag found that WebExplorer "lack several standard features" and wasn't very strong in terms of multimedia support. The IBM browser shipping with the IBM Internet Connection suite, WebExplorer Mosaic, was based on the Spyglass Mosaiccode base and was found by the reviewer to be "far superior" to the OS/2 version, which was developed solely by IBM.
Some of its parts could be reused in other programs and scripted with Rexx. Some external companies used this capability to offer an enhanced browser with IBM's rendering engine
A page could define what the animatedthrobber should look like. It was implemented through a non-standard HTML tag. OS/2 users created several animations. The later introduction of web frames leads WebExplorer to confusion on modern pages
A menu option Links collecting all the links in the page. It was used by IBM VoiceType for voice navigation
Java applets
GIF support
Proxy authentication
Image map
Webmap "hierarchically displays your complete path through the web; a pointer denotes the current site, but any site can be revisited with only a mouse click."
Version history
There were severals builds released by IBM. IBM released some beta builds and also fixed many bugs in WebExplorer, one beta including support for Java.
Criticism
The browser doesn't support Frames and the installation of plugins like Java was complicated.
