NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics.[3][4][5] It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher.[6] Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web.[7] Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window.[8] It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise,[9] and ViolaWWW.
In 1994, SCO released Global Access, a modified version of SCO's Open Desktop Unix, which became the first commercial product to incorporate Mosaic.[20] However, by 1998, the Mosaic user base had almost completely evaporated as users moved to other web browsers.
The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free of charge for all versions (with certain limitations). Additionally, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code (source code for the other versions was available after agreements were signed). Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment.
Mosaic is not the first web browser for Microsoft Windows; this is Thomas R. Bruce's little-known Cello. The Unix version of Mosaic was already famous before the Microsoft Windows, Amiga, and Mac versions were released. Other than displaying images embedded in the text (rather than in a separate window), Mosaic's original feature set is similar to the browsers on which it was modeled, such as ViolaWWW.[8] But Mosaic was the first browser written and supported by a team of full-time programmers, was reliable and easy enough for novices to install, and the inline graphics proved immensely appealing. Mosaic is said to have made the Internet accessible to the ordinary person.
Ultimately, web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s. Web browsers were the first to bring a graphical interface to search tools the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services. A mid-1994 guide lists Mosaic alongside the traditional, text-oriented information search tools of the time, Archie and Veronica, Gopher, and WAIS[33] but Mosaic quickly subsumed and displaced them all. Joseph Hardin, the director of the NCSA group within which Mosaic was developed, said downloads were up to 50,000 a month in mid-1994.[34]
In November 1992, there were twenty-six websites in the world[35] and each one attracted attention. In its release year of 1993, Mosaic had a What's New page, and about one new link was being added per day. This was a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions. Yet it was the availability of Mosaic and Mosaic-derived graphical browsers themselves that drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by August 1995 and millions by 1998.[36] Metcalfe expressed the pivotal role of Mosaic this way:
In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.
VMS Mosaic, a version specifically targeting OpenVMS operating system, is one of the longest-lived efforts to maintain Mosaic. Using the VMS support already built-in in original version (Bjorn S. Nilsson ported Mosaic 1.2 to VMS in the summer of 1993),[45] developers incorporated a substantial part of the HTML engine from mMosaic, another defunct flavor of the browser.[46] As of the most recent version (4.2), released in 2007, VMS Mosaic supported HTML 4.0, OpenSSL, cookies, and various image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF and JPEG 2000 image formats.[47] The browser works on VAX, Alpha, and Itanium platforms.[48]
By simple definition, web browsers connect users with anything and everything that is on the internet. More technically speaking, web browsers are software applications that retrieve and display information from website pages, text, images, videos and overall content.
While Nexus was only used for the NeXTStep OS, the first commercially-available internet browser was Mosaic. Computer programmers Marc Andreessen and Jamie Zawinski developed the NCSA Mosaic web browser in 1993. In fact, the development of Mosaic was funded by the Gore Bill, introduced in 1991 by - you guessed it - Al Gore. It went through a variety of releases, and by 1994, further development of the browser was supported by the National Science Foundation. In 1995, Mosaic was licensed by Microsoft to create Internet Explorer. Shout out to Andreessen and Zawinski, giving the people what they want (electronic mail, chatrooms, DogPile!), when they want it (1993!).
Mosaic incorporated the initial functionalities offered by Nexus and embedded graphics directly in web pages. When they released it, the browser was compatible with Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and Unix X Window System - the most commonly used operating systems at the time. This meant users could see images and use it on their home computers at the same time. The NCSA Mosaic spread like wildfire. This era of internet browsing was powered by 56k modems (a few generations after 9600 baud modems) which meant you might need to wait a few hours for your MP3 songs to load but Prodigy worked fine.
In 1998, Netscape released a more advanced version that allowed the browser source code to be open source, effectively starting the Mozilla project. Since then, web browsers added Javascript modifications and tons of other capabilities to web pages.
The Mosaic browser was the first browser to introduce two features new to the browser world: allowing for pictures to be viewed directly on the page instead of needing to be downloaded and viewed separately, and using hyperlinks that could take a user directly to the new page instead of making a user manually type the address to the new page.
Technically Mosaic browser can still be downloaded and used, however it may not support much of today\u2019s Internet as protocols and website features have become more advanced than Mosaic\u2019s last upgrade in 1997.\n"}},"@type":"Question","name":"Who built Mosaic browser?","acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"Marc Andreessen and Eric Brina at the NCSA in the University of Illinois began developing the Mosaic browser in 1991, releasing the first official Mosaic browser in 1993.\n","@type":"Question","name":"Was Mosaic the first browser?","acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"Mosaic was not the first browser or even the first graphical browser, but it was the most user friendly browser at the time of its release.\n","@type":"Question","name":"How did Mosaic revolutionize web browsing?","acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"The Mosaic browser was the first browser to introduce two features new to the browser world: allowing for pictures to be viewed directly on the page instead of needing to be downloaded and viewed separately, and using hyperlinks that could take a user directly to the new page instead of making a user manually type the address to the new page.\n","@type":"Question","name":"When was Mosaic browser created?","acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"The Mosaic browser was first developed in 1991, and first officially released to the public in 1993.\n","@type":"Question","name":"Where was Mosaic developed?","acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"The Mosaic browser was developed in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.\n"]} History Computer Staff, Author for History-Computer
And Microsoft sold IE with Windows, and made it better than Netscape, and the first browser war raged upon the face of the land. And behold, Netscape was killed, and there was much rejoicing at Microsoft. But Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, and Mozilla built Gecko, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826, and Gecko was the rendering engine, and Gecko was good. And Mozilla became Firefox, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0, and Firefox was very good. And Gecko began to multiply, and other browsers were born that used its code, and they called themselves Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040825 Camino/0.8.1 the one, and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 SeaMonkey/1.0 another, each pretending to be Mozilla, and all of them powered by Gecko.
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.
btw, got here because it was linked from -tricks.com/browser-detection-is-bad/ which was linked from -tricks.com/new-poll-conditional-tags-for-all-browsers/#comment-90341 which was recently published.
This is the internet, my friends, where content continues to exist for as long as possible, and sometimes even longer. Browsers continue to send horrid user agent strings like this because there are still websites that use user agent sniffing (even modern ones that do it) and some of these may never be updated.
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