It is difficult to define a product or service that truly changed the world after it was released because it would take years to see that change. Just as the iPhone changed the world of technology, the Mosaic web browser, released 30 years ago, actually changed the entire world.After the preliminary release in January 1993, version 1.0 of Mosaic was released 30 years ago this month, on April 22, 1993. Of course, Mosaic isn’t the first web browser released. That honor belongs to WorldWideWeb, developed by Tim Berners-Lee a few years ago at CERN in 1990. Other browsers were released later, such as Viola and Cello. But Mosaic was different.
Mosaic changed everything
The scanner was originally developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, graduate students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Unlike previous web browsers that showed text and images in separate windows, Mosaic’s biggest innovation was that it could display both text and images in the same window. We could say that Mosaic compared browsing websites to reading a magazine page.Mosaic also allowed users to click hyperlinks to go to other pages or sites instead of manually typing a URL address. It had an easy-to-understand user interface design. The familiar buttons to go back and forth between sites or to refresh a page are now used with Mosaic. Versions of Mosaic, which were first released for Unix systems, were later released for Windows and Macintosh in 1993.
The polished stone era of the internet
The need for a closed internet service such as AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and other online services that emerged in the 1980s was beginning to fade. All you needed to access the Internet was an ISP and Mosaic installed on the system. The NCSA’s official Mosaic website states that as of December 1993, “more than 5,000 copies of the browser were downloaded per month, and the center received hundreds of thousands of email requests per week.” It should be noted that this was a period when most homes could only connect to the internet with 28.8k phone modems. Those years were the polished stone age of the internet.
Beginning in 1994, the US National Science Foundation began funding the further development of Mosaic. However, in those years, the future of the scanner was in doubt. Later that year, Mosaic co-creator Marc Andreessen left the NCSA and helped found Mosaic Communications Corporation. This company released its first browser, Mosaic Netscape, in late 1994, but tensions with the NCSA escalated over name and copyright issues. As a result, the browser was renamed Netscape Navigator and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation.Netscape quickly became the browser of choice for most internet users, meaning that Mosaic was downloaded and used less and less. As a result, in January 1997, the NCSA stopped development of the web browser. Meanwhile, it should be noted that Netscape once dominated more than 90 percent of the web browser market. At the same time, Netscape is the company that created the most common programming language, JavaScript.
Mosaic itself, on the other hand, was licensed to Microsoft in 1995. Microsoft created Internet Explorer with this license. And just a few years later – especially after the early 2000s – it lost all market share, lagging behind Internet Explorer and others. One way or another, Mosaic was the most tangible progenitor of the web browsers we currently know. Probably without Mosaic it would have taken us a much longer time to reach the current era.
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