MacWeb's major attraction was its ability to run well on low-end hardware footprints as well as fast page display. This compactness led to MacWeb's inclusion on many "Internet starter kit" floppy disks and CD-ROMs that were popular at the time. TradeWave also developed a similar Microsoft Windows browser named WinWeb. However, they were eclipsed by more full-featured competitors such as Netscape Navigator, and development was eventually abandoned.
The first public release was 0.98-alpha on May 31, 1994, and the final official release was version 2.0 in 1996. An unofficial patch "2.0c" was released by Antoine Hébert in 1998 to correct a problem on old machines not supporting color QuickDraw.
Although one author in 1995 called MacWeb the second web browser released for the Macintosh,[2] this is not quite true. The text-only MacWWW browser became available in 1992, with the graphical Mosaic released for the Mac the next year.
MacWeb pioneered the "click and hold" gesture to display a popup contextual menu. This mouse gesture was commonly used on the Macintosh before the prevalence of two-button mice on the Mac platform.[3] MacWeb's preferences dialog allowed users to customize display styles on a per-tag basis similar to Cascading style sheets[4]
^Morgan, Eric Lease (1995-09-26). "Chapter 3: Macintosh-based WWW Browsers". Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: A Macintosh-Based World Wide Web Starter Kit Featuring MacHTTP and Other Tools. version 1.0h. Retrieved 2017-09-05.
