Today in history: Mosaic web browser first released 17 years ago.


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On April 17th, 1993 version 1.0 of Mosaic, the browser credited with popularising the web, was released. The older ones of us will still remember it. My first contact with the WWW was via Mosaic running on AIX on IBM workstations. In those days you could browse the entire web in less than a day.

The developers of Mosaic later developed Netscape Navigator. Its legacy still lives to this day in Mozilla Firefox.

NCSAMosaic1.0Mac.png

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I miss graphics like that one above. It reminds me of old movie posters. :p

I've never used Mosaic or Netscape Navigator, but I have used products with bits of them in.. Everyone has. :laugh: I thought Internet Explorer originally had code from this browser also?

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I miss graphics like that one above. It reminds me of old movie posters. :p

I've never used Mosaic or Netscape Navigator, but I have used products with bits of them in.. Everyone has. :laugh: I thought Internet Explorer originally had code from this browser also?

Indeed. To quote Wikipedia:

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code.[8] Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. 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 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft[citation needed] to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.

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I remember the day very well, and can't forget the time when Netscape used to be by far the quickest and most compatible browser.

They should be remembered fondly, thankfully the days of application crashing all the time are long gone, but I'll just remember them for the fact that they were such a step up from Hypertext readers, which were everywhere at the time (for offline reading).

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I've never used Mosaic as I'm only 17 years old,

but it looks very nice this program indeed xD

Like to see the 'advanced options' which are now more basic options ^.^

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.. How does Neowin look in it? D:

Probably like crap since IIRC it has no CSS or Javascript support.

Earliest browsers I remember were Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator.

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Probably like crap since IIRC it has no CSS or Javascript support.

Earliest browsers I remember were Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator.

Same here - that, and whatever version of AOL was knocking around in 1996.

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Never, ever used Mosaic. When I first got to use a computer (around 97), pretty much everyone around was using IE so yeah. I wish I could live in those times for 1 day (but not longer than that :p).

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