First Graphical Web Browser
Mosaic was the first popular Web browser, and greatly helped distribute use and knowledge of the web across the world.
On April 22, 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois published a piece of computer code configured to get information from assorted public networks. Little did they realize that their pet project, a modest application named Mosaic, would essentially change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had swapped hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely embraced and introduced the masses on the Internet.
In 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson worked at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the University of Illinois. When they learned about Tim Berners-Lee's work, they downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and then showed the web to NCSA's Software Design Group by linking to the web server at CERN over the Internet. The group was very impressed. Two students from the group, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, started work on a browser version for X-Windows on Unix computers. His release message was forwarded to the newsgroups by Berners-Lee six days later, sowing subsequent redistribution and wider awareness. Bina supplied skilled coding support. Andreessen furnished superior customer support, monitoring the newsgroups endlessly to ensure that they knew about and could repair any bugs and make sought after enhancements. A version of Mosaic for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a couple of months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support.
One of the NCSA's missions is to help scientific research by developing noncommercial software, giving Hardin and Thompson a ready-made vehicle to set up a funded project to develop Mosaic as a free, publicly accessible browser, managed by Hardin, and with Andreessen as the software principal. Mosaic built on Berners-Lee's server, and provided support for graphics, sound, and video clips. An early edition introduced forms support, enabling numerous effective new functions and applications. Innovations with use of bookmarks and history files were added. Mosaic rapidly became the most popular web browser, helping accelerate the growth in web use even more.
Especially significant was the inclusion of the "image" tag which permitted images to be included on web pages. Earlier browsers allowed for the viewing of pictures, but only as separate files. Mosaic made it feasible for images and text to appear on the same page. Mosaic also featured a graphical interface with clickable buttons that allow users navigate easily and controls that let users scroll through text with ease. Another groundbreaking feature was the hyper-link. In earlier browsers hypertext links had reference numbers that the user typed in to navigate to the linked document. Hyper-links permitted the user to just click on a link to call up a document.
By December 1993, Mosaic's growth was so outstanding that it made the front page of the New York Times business section. The article concluded that Mosaic was possibly "an application program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch". Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, supported upon the work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is typically acknowledged as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic was the first web browser to win over the Net masses by making it freely available to the public. The explosion in the growth of the High Speed Internet after Mosaic appeared on the scene was phenomenal. Beginning with close to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) looming around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously brief periods of time were no real surprise.
Ultimately, these early Web Browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s because they were the first programs to supply a multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning riches of distributed information services (formerly limited to applications such as FTP, Usenet and Gopher). This was also a period when access to the Internet was increasing rapidly outside its former domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.
Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser started to diminish upon the release of Andreessen's Netscape Navigator in 1994. By 1998 its user base had nearly completely evaporated.