The first networks that were the foundation of the Internet went online in the late 1960s. For the next 25 years, the Internet remained the exclusive province of technocrats. The browser changed all that, giving real people unprecedented access to information. The basic functionality needed to read an article is fairly easy to use, and even novice users can view content from across the world in a reasonably nice layout. That's it for the benefits.
Browsers fail to support the actual task of browsing the Web.
Netscape Navigator does not have many navigation features, and Internet Explorer does not help users explore new information spaces. Page viewing is truly all they excel at. Forget about it. Within months, the browser was running out of steam, and programmers struggled to get beyond the confines of HTML, designed purely to display fixed text and graphics pages. The answer was JavaScript, a huge kludge that accelerated the move to two-way communication within Web pages.