Mosaic (web Browser) - Importance of Mosaic

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, they ported the software from so-called Unix 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's little-known Cello. 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 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 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 applications of the 1990s because they were the first programs to provide a multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly limited to applications such as FTP, Usenet 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.

"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. In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex. In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape..."

— Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.