Arena

Arena was the World Wide Web Consortium's early test bed for HTML 3.0 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS1). It also became one of the first browsers to support alpha transparency in PNG images (possibly the very first), although this feat was somewhat diminished by the fact that it didn't support background images at the time--except for its own ``sandy'' background. Nevertheless, it was a useful browser for testing PNG images under Unix.

Subsequent to the release of beta-3b in September 1996, Arena development was taken over by Yggdrasil Computing, which managed roughly 60 beta releases over the course of 16 months. The browser never achieved 1.0 status, however, and development essentially ended in March 1998 (though a final 0.3.62 release with minimal changes showed up in November 1998). Yggdrasil's Arena web page is at http://www.yggdrasil.com/Products/Arena/, and old versions are still available from the W3C's page at http://www.w3.org/Arena/.