Mosaic browser

Mosaic was the first graphical interface to the World Wide Web. It was developed for computers running the Unix operating system and later became available for personal computers running the Mac and Windows operating systems.

Mosaic browser was launched in April 1993 and tens thousands of copies were downloaded from NCSA within the first few weeks.

Mosaic was designed to be a Web browser, an application that could load information from a variety of sources (server file directories, text and images for example) into a common interface.

Mosaic not only displays picture and text files internally, it also incorporates a hypertext interface. This means that a Mosaic home page can contain links to other internet sites and information.

The exponential growth of the web was underway in earnests from about fifty websites at the end of 1992, there were more than ten thousand sites by the end of 1994. The Mosaic browser was an important factor in fueling this growth.

By 1995, Microsoft had licensed Mosaic as the basis for its own early browser Internet Explorer, but by that point Netscape Navigator dominated the browser market.
Mosaic browser