Mosaic Wars
| “ | There are two ages of the Internet - before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee's Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen's browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In twenty-four months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous | ” |
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—A Brief History of Cyberspace, Mark Pesce, ZDNet, October 15, 1995 |
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Further browsers were released in 1993, including Cello, Arena, Lynx, tkWWW and Mosaic. The most influential of these was Mosaic, a multiplatform browser developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). By October 1994, Mosaic was "well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface", according to Gary Wolfe of Wired.
Several companies licensed Mosaic to create their own commercial browsers, such as AirMosaic and Spyglass Mosaic. One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreessen, founded Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability and was able to display pages as they loaded. By 1995, helped by the fact that it was free for non-commercial use, the browser dominated the emerging World Wide Web.
Other browsers launched during 1994 included IBM Web Explorer, Navipress, SlipKnot, MacWeb, and Browse.
In 1995, Netscape faced new competition from OmniWeb, WebRouser, UdiWWW, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0, but continued to dominate the market.
Read more about this topic: Browser Wars
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