Mosaic (web browser)
Encyclopedia
Mosaic is the web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 credited with popularizing the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 port
Porting
In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

 and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window. While often described as the first graphical
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 web browser, Mosaic was preceded by the lesser-known Erwise
Erwise
Erwise was a pioneering web browser, and the first commonly available with a graphical user interface.Released in April 1992, the browser was written for Unix computers running X and used the W3 common access library...

 and ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web...

.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...

 (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997. However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA.

Fifteen years after Mosaic's introduction, the most popular contemporary browsers, Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

, Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

 and Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

, retain many of the characteristics of the original Mosaic graphical user interface (GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

) and interactive experience.

Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...

 was later developed by James H. Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...

 and many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

.

Background

David Thompson tested ViolaWWW and showed the application to Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...

. Andreessen and Eric Bina
Eric Bina
Eric J. Bina is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Bina attended...

 originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unix's X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

 called xmosaic
Funding for the development of Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991
High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991
The High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 is an Act of Congress promulgated in the 102nd United States Congress as on 1991-12-09...

.

Development of Mosaic began in December 1992. Versions 0.1–0.9 were the first developed and released. Version 1.0 was released on April 22, 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. A port of Mosaic
AMosaic
AMosaic is an Amiga port of the Mosaic web browser, developed beginning in 1993, and was the first graphical web browser for the Amiga. AMosaic was based on NCSA's Mosaic, but was not distributed by the University of Illinois or NCSA...

 to the Commodore Amiga was available by October 1993. Ports to Windows and Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 were released already in September. Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both Windows. An Acorn Archimedes
Acorn Archimedes
The Acorn Archimedes was Acorn Computers Ltd's first general purpose home computer to be based on their own ARM architecture.Using a RISC design with a 32-bit CPU, at its launch in June 1987, the Archimedes was stated as running at 4 MIPS, with a claim of 18 MIPS during tests.The name is commonly...

 port was underway in May 1994.

The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free for all versions (with certain limitations). Additionally, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

 (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.

Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...

.

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

. After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...

 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.

Immediate effect

Other browsers existed during this period, notably Erwise, ViolaWWW, MidasWWW, tkWWW
TkWWW
tkWWW was an early web browser/WYSIWYG HTML editor written by Joseph Wang at the MIT as part of the Project Athena and the Globewide Network Academy project. The browser was based on the Tcl language and the tk toolkit extension but did not achieve broad user acceptance or market share although it...

 and Cello
Cello (web browser)
Cello was an early shareware 16-bit multipurpose web browser for Windows 3.1 developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, and thus was among the first free winsock browsers...

. These browsers, however, would not have the same effect as Mosaic on public use of the Internet.

In the October 1994 Issue of Wired, Gary Wolfe notes in the article, "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy
Prodigy (ISP)
Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.Initially subscribers...

, AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, and CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

 are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface":

Importance of Mosaic

Mosaic was the web browser which led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, "while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software ... that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution" (p.xlii). Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped:

... to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly [sic], they ported the software from so-called Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers. (p.xxv).


Mosaic was not the first web browser for Windows; this was Thomas R. Bruce
Thomas R. Bruce
Thomas R. Bruce co-founded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School in 1992 with Peter Martin and currently serves as the Director of the organization. He is the author of Cello, the first Web browser for Microsoft Windows. Cello was released on 8 June 1993.-External links:* at the *...

's little-known Cello
Cello (web browser)
Cello was an early shareware 16-bit multipurpose web browser for Windows 3.1 developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, and thus was among the first free winsock browsers...

. The Unix version of Mosaic was already making it famous before the Windows and Mac versions came out. Other than displaying images embedded in the text rather than in a separate window, Mosaic did not in fact add many features to the browsers on which it was modeled, like ViolaWWW. But Mosaic was the first browser written and supported by a team of full-time programmers, which was reliable and easy enough for novices to install, and the inline graphics proved immensely appealing. Mosaic made the Web accessible to the ordinary person for the first time and had already 53% market share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...

 in 1995.

Reid also refers to Matthew K. Gray's well-respected website, Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet, which indicates a dramatic leap in web use around the time of Mosaic's introduction (p.xxv).

In addition, David Hudson concurs with Reid, noting that:

Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, based on the work of Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

 and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public. The adjective phenomenal, so often overused in this industry, is genuinely applicable to the... 'explosion' in the growth of the web after Mosaic appeared on the scene. Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise (p.42).


Ultimately, web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer application
Killer application
A killer application , in the jargon of marketing teams, has been used to refer to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, or an operating system...

s
of the 1990s because they were the first programs to provide a multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly limited to applications such as FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

, Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 and Gopher). This was also a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

End of Mosaic

Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to lessen upon the release of Andreessen's Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...

 in 1994. This was noted at the time in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML.

By 1998 its user base had almost completely evaporated, being replaced by other web browsers. After NCSA stopped work on Mosaic, development of the NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System source code was continued by several independent groups. These independent development efforts include mMosaic (multicast Mosaic) which ceased development in early 2004, and Mosaic-CK
Mosaic-CK
Mosaic-CK is a GUI web browser for use on Mac OS X, Tenon Power MachTen, Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSes.-Description:Mosaic-CK and VMS Mosaic are the only direct descendants of NCSA Mosaic which are still being actively developed.Mosaic-CK is developed by Cameron Kaiser who has stated...

 and VMS Mosaic
VMS Mosaic
VMS Mosaic is a GUI web browser for use on the OpenVMS operating system.-Description:VMS Mosaic is one of the two remaining direct descendants of NCSA Mosaic which are still being actively developed . VMS Mosaic is supported on VAX, Alpha, and Itanium systems...

 which are both under active development as of July 2010.

Features

Mosaic was based on the libwww
Libwww
libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....

 library and thus supported a wide variety of internet protocols
Communications protocol
A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...

 included in the library: Archie
Archie search engine
Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J...

, FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

, gopher, HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web....

, NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol
The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications...

, telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

, WAIS
Wide area information server
Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client–server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" to search index databases on remote computers...

.

See also

  • Kevin Hughes
    Kevin Hughes (www)
    Kevin Hughes was one of the pioneers of the World Wide Web in the United States, while a student at Honolulu Community College . He is one of only six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994.He developed the...

  • List of web browsers
  • Libwww
    Libwww
    libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....

  • Comparison of web browsers
    Comparison of web browsers
    The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.-Historical web browsers:...

  • History of the World Wide Web
    History of the World Wide Web
    The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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