Cyberjack was the name for a Web browser application created by

Delrina Delrina Corporation was an Form (document), electronic form company in Canada that was acquired by the American software firm NortonLifeLock, Symantec in 1995. The company was best known for WinFax, a software package which enabled computers equ ...

in 1995. It was sold as a stand-alone product, and was also bundled as part of Delrina's

CommSuite 95 CommSuite 95 is a communications software suite launched in 1995 by Canadian software company Delrina. History Beta testing started in August 1995. CommSuite 95 was a collection of 32-bit programs created specifically for use with Windows 95. It i ...

offering. In addition to the Web browser application, it also included an ftp client,

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

newsgroup reader, an

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

client, a graphic interface to

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services and more. It used a Wizard-based front-end that provided access to all of these services. It was touted as being the first 32-bit based Web browsing program, and was aimed squarely at

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

users. It could transform seamlessly from one application to another as required, a feature that would not be emulated until later browsers of the late 1990s. As an application it had two main drawbacks: its browser application was incapable of rendering tables, which were then becoming predominant in Web site design, and it also lacked an email client. While table support was added more than a year later, fro
the original
by that time it had lost important

mindshare Mind share relates to the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion. When people think of examples of a product type or category, they usually think of a limited number of bra ...

. In the end, it could not compete against other browser offerings that were offered for free, such as the contemporaneous

Internet Explorer 2 Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 (IE2) is the second, and by now discontinued, version of Internet Explorer (IE), a graphical web browser by Microsoft. It was unveiled in October 1995, and was released on November 22, 1995, for Windows 95 and Window ...

, which came out November 1995 and

Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in ...

. Although marketed by

Symantec Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier ...

, the Cyberjack suite was written by a small South African startup, Vironix Software Laboratories. Vironix was owned by Dave and Paula Hall and originally operated from Westville, Durban. During the development of Cyberjack the majority of the programmers moved to a new office in

Muizenberg Muizenberg ( , Dutch for "mice mountain") is a beach-side town in the Western Cape, South Africa. It is situated where the shore of the Cape Peninsula curves round to the east on the False Bay coast. It is considered to be the main surfing spot i ...

, a beach town near Cape Town. The entire programming team consisted of only about six developers, roughly one per Internet application. The suite was sold to Delrina, which was later bought by Symantec. However, it came to market at about the time that the

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

/Netscape Navigator

browser war Browse, browser or browsing may refer to: Programs *Web browser, a program used to access the World Wide Web *Code browser, a program for navigating source code *File browser or file manager, a program used to manage files and related objects * H ...

was developing, and the small programming team with limited resources could not keep up with the pace of browser development. After Cyberjack was discontinued by Symantec, Vironix went into liquidation although some of the members of the Cyberjack team went on to develop the WebFerret application.

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External links

* * * {{Internet suites Gopher clients Windows-only software Windows web browsers Gopher (protocol) 1995 software Discontinued internet suites

See also

References

External links