Mosaic

The Mosaic or NCSA Mosaic browser was the first graphical web browser available for viewing web pages on operating systems such as Mac, Windows or other.

This web browser was created in January 1993, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), by Marc Andreessen (who developed part of the code, with the possibility of accessing pages on disk via file:// protocol) and Eric Bina. The first version (v1.0) worked on Unix systems and was released on April 22, 1993, and its success was such that in August 1993 versions for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh were created.

Mosaic became, along with ViolaWWW, one of the classic references of World Wide Web technology; it was the basis for early versions of the Mozilla Application Suite and Spyglass (later acquired by Microsoft and renamed Internet Explorer).

Its operation in various operating systems (at that time Unix, Windows and Macintosh), its ability to access web services via HTTP in its primitive version (HTTP 0.9) as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, a careful graphic aspect (by then), and the possibility of additional access to Gopher, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Usenet News via NNTP, soon catapulted it to popularity on a fledgling Internet.

Mosaic was software copyrighted by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (UI).

The last version for Windows, NCSA Mosaic v3.0, dates from 1996. It was never capable of rendering PNG images, although it was capable of rendering JPEG and GIF images. The language for web documents that it interpreted corresponds to HTML 2.

In January 1997, the development of this browser was officially abandoned to make way for the development of Netscape Navigator, from the Netscape Communications company founded by the same creators of Mosaic.