Alternative Web? The big "selling" point of Mosaic and other early Web browsers was bringing diverse information sources together into one application! Gopher, WWW, WAIS, FTP, and probably others, all available in one program, and a GUI program at that, unless you were stuck using Lynx over SLIP or some other bizarre excrescence of the dial-up age.
The fact Web browsers won rather disproves your whole notion.
I guess. The fact that no human can plausibly consider writing their own web browser from scratch these days seems telling. Nor really can any real human seriously consider finding a bug in a web browser, tracking it down in the source code, and submitting a patch.
Web browsers have become satanic mega-behemoths of inscrutable code. (I'm too lazy to look--are there more lines in Chrome, deps included, or the Linux kernel?) They are the utter antipode of the Unix philosophy, and arguably an engineering abomination.
The fact Web browsers won rather disproves your whole notion.