WorldWideWeb was the first browser/editor from 1990. It's still going, and I have a call with it's creator later today, to help finish it.
Mosaic came after and is the father of firefox, chrome, netscape. The main thing done by the VCs was to add multi media and remove the editing facitlity. The web was supposed to be editable by its users. VCs shifted that to the servers, which they owned.
HTTP and the web browser were released together. It was actually designed to transmit notes and other stuff. The first version didnt have HTTP PUT, but that was added later, with a scaling architecture. Which is why it took off.
