Have you ever tried to remember the name of a web browser you used in the mid-90s? Maybe it wasn't Netscape, maybe it wasn't IE, maybe it was something weirder? browsers.evolt.org is sitting there quietly on the internet, holding onto the actual installable files for over a hundred web browsers, many of which have been forgotten by just about everyone.
The archive was put together by Adrian Roselli, one of the founding members of evolt.org, a web developer community that started back in 1998. The evolt.org community itself has since closed, but the Browser Archive is still active, and still being maintained. As recently as early 2024 they were adding archive.org collection links to supplement the downloads. Someone is still tending this garden.
The main page is basically one giant alphabetical list of browsers with the developer or company listed next to each one. And the range is just wild. You've got the big names, sure. Internet Explorer is there, with subdirectories for Mac, Win32, Win16, Solaris, HP-UX, and even Pocket PC builds. Netscape Navigator is there. Mozilla and Firefox. Safari. Opera. But those aren't the reason you visit a site like this.
The reason you visit is for entries like Cyberdog by Apple Computer, or HotJava by Sun Microsystems, or Santa's Browser by Branded Browser Technologies (I mean, come on). There's I-O-D-4 - The Web Stalker by a company called Escape. There's Surfin' Annette by SpyCatcher. There's SurfMonkey. There's Nuthin' But Net by PAKSoft Productions. Each name is a little time capsule of an era when nobody had settled on what a browser should be called or what it should even do.
I clicked into a bunch of the individual archive pages just to see what was there. The Amaya page is particularly thorough, with builds for Linux, Solaris, AIX, multiple Windows versions, plus language packs in German, French, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, and more. The Arachne page has versions spanning from 1.2 beta 7 up through 1.73, a DOS-based browser that people were actually using well into the 2000s. Then there's Home Page Reader from IBM, which was a screen-reader-based browser. Just a single 28MB zip file sitting there, waiting for someone who might need it or want to study it.
Some of the archive pages are sparse. AWeb, the Amiga browser by AmiTrix, just has one directory labeled "amiga" from the year 2000. Air Mosaic is a single .exe from 1999. But that's part of what makes this feel real. This isn't a polished museum exhibit. It's someone's carefully maintained collection, preserved as-is, with README files and file sizes and timestamps from the late 90s and early 2000s still intact.
What I keep coming back to is the sheer variety. The list includes browsers for platforms that barely exist anymore. BeOS (NetPositive). Amiga (AWeb, iBrowse). DOS (Arachne, DOSLynx). There are kids' browsers like KidSafe Explorer and NetForKids. There are accessibility browsers like pwWebSpeak Plus and Talking Browser. There's WorldWideWeb (Nexus) by Tim Berners-Lee himself, literally the first web browser ever created.
The site itself has a simple, functional layout. No JavaScript frameworks, no animations, no nonsense. It looks like something from the web it's trying to preserve, which feels exactly right.
If you care about web history, or if you ever want to actually run an old browser to see what the web looked like through its eyes, this is the place. Go poke around browsers.evolt.org and see how many of those names you recognize. I'd bet it's fewer than you think.