![]() Two individuals in particular – Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina – led the effort to create a more user-friendly graphical browser.Īndreessen was well prepared to tackle this problem. In 1992, a team at the University of Illinois‘ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) took up this challenge. Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, and the Quest for a Better Browser For example, here‘s a sample of the complex commands in ViolaWWW: CALL URLĬlearly a more intuitive browser was needed if the web were to ever move beyond a handful of physicists and computer scientists. Other early browsers like ViolaWWW and MidasWWW offered incremental improvements, but still required strong technical skills. The web may have held promise, but it needed to become far more accessible before it could fulfill that potential. Forget about videos or audio – multimedia web integration was years away.Īs you can imagine, this made "browsing" limited, slow, and frustrating. Even following a link required manually typing in long URLs instead of clicking or tapping. It had no graphics beyond underlined hypertext links. The first web browser called WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion), created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, worked but was painful to use. It‘s hard to imagine today, but here‘s what exploring the early internet was like without Mosaic. Using the Early Web: A Lesson in Frustration So join me on a journey through the development, explosive growth, and lasting impact of Mosaic – the browser that opened up the web. Its story exemplifies the democratic promise of technology to make life better for all. But Mosaic changed everything in 1993 by providing the first accessible graphical web browser, bringing the internet into the homes of millions of people worldwide. In the early 1990s, using the internet required an understanding of complicated technical protocols and cryptic text-based interfaces. That said there are (presumably) still a few archive-y places on the web you can point the browser at somewhat successfully parse, while some text-based modern website will render too, albeit inelegantly, including ohso.io.Before we dive into the history of NCSA‘s Mosaic browser, let‘s set the stage for why this software was so revolutionary. You’ll find that it struggles to load most modern web sites you ask of it, especially with the prevalence of HTTPS everywhere. Alternatively, launch it from the command line by running mosaic on its ownīut 28 years on from its first release, is Mosaic browser still useful? Once installed you can launch the Mosaic browser from your system’s app menu or launcher. You can install Mosaic browser on any Linux distribution that supports Snapd, the engine behind Snap applications by running this command: sudo snap install mosaic Trivia: most of Mosaic’s developers went on to create Netscape Navigator, a predecessor to Mozilla Firefox, the browser that most people who read this very sentence will likely be using! Install Mosaic Browser on Ubuntu ![]() It’s this alone that makes the 28 years old Mosaic browser the piece of historic software it is. ![]() Websites went from being mere a contents pages to vibrant magazine-style pages. Overnight the internet got more attractive, more versatile, and more engaging. It allowed media to be rendered as part of the web page. Any linked images, music or media would open in a new browser window and not appear as part of the web page. See, when Mosaic arrived most websites were heavily text based. It also supported a swathe of (then major) operating systems like AmigaOS, UNIX, Mac OS Classic and, importantly, Windows 3.1.Ĭompared to other alternatives of the day Mosaic boasted a (comparatively) user friendly interface, some neat features, and support for a swathe of internet protocols beyond www, including FTP, telnet, and NNTP.īut what makes this browser most notable is how it helped to birth the web as we know it: with pictures! Although it wasn’t the first graphical web browser per se it was, as ZDNet note, the first popular one.
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