Today in History: Revolutionary browser Mosaic launched in 1993
NCSA Mosaic 1.0 is widely regarded as the first browser to gain mainstream support and paved the way for the internet as we know it today.
The National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) launched Mosaic, the first browser to include images inline with text, on this day a quarter of a century ago.
Despite being considered the first graphical browser, Mosaic had been preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise and ViolaWWW in terms of the first browsers.
What set Mosaic aside from the rest however, besides the fact that images did not need to be opened in a separate browser window, was the fact that it was able to support several of the early internet protocols, including file transfer protocol and network news transfer protocol.
Its success with the mainstream public has been largely attributed to its simplicity.
Links were blue and underlined, easy to pick out. You could follow your own virtual trail of breadcrumbs backwards by clicking the big button up there in the corner.
Its intuitive interface, reliability, Microsoft Windows port and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web, as well as on Microsoft operating systems.
At the time of its release, NCSA Mosaic was free software, but it was available only on Unix. That made it common at universities and institutions, but not on Windows desktops in people’s homes.
The NCSA team put out Windows and Mac versions in late 1993. They were also released under a noncommercial software license, meaning people at home could download it for free.
The installer was very simple, making it easy for just about anyone to get up and running on the web.
Marc Andreessen, the Mosaic-browser project leader, left NCSA in 1993 and founded Mosaic Communications with Jim Clark, the co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI).
Andreessen and Clark renamed the company Netscape Communications in 1994 and released the flagship Netscape Navigator browser. The newer, more powerful browser soon grew to dominate the fledgling web, quickly surpassing Mosaic.
Netscape’s domination was short-lived however, as Microsoft launched Inter Explorer in 1995 which surpassed Netscape Navigator in browser share in 1998.
The downtrodden Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, but it failed to take off.
The Mosaic-Netscape-Mozilla browser eventually found new life as Firefox, which was released a decade after the first Mosaic browser.
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