A university program becomes a phenomenon
By 1992, the World Wide Web existed and a handful of browsers were available, but using it often required technical skill and an expensive computer. Mosaic changed that. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mainly by Marc Andreessen, then an undergraduate working at the center, and Eric Bina, a staff programmer. Early versions appeared in early 1993 for Unix systems running the X Window System. Versions for Windows and the Macintosh followed during the same year, and these were responsible for most of its spread.
Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, since ViolaWWW and Erwise had preceded it. What set it apart was a combination of features: it installed easily, it displayed images in the page itself, it had a simple toolbar and it worked on the computers that ordinary people owned. It also had solid support from the NCSA team, who responded to user feedback quickly. Press coverage in 1993 and 1994 introduced many people to the web through screenshots of Mosaic.
Netscape
Andreessen graduated in December 1993 and moved to California. There he met Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, and in 1994 they established a company, first called Mosaic Communications Corporation and later renamed Netscape Communications, because the University of Illinois held rights to the Mosaic name. Several members of the original NCSA team joined them. They wrote a new browser from scratch rather than reusing the university’s code.
The first public beta appeared in late 1994, and the release called Netscape Navigator 1.0 came in December 1994. It was quick for its time, and it added features such as progressive display of images while they were loading. Netscape also extended HTML with new tags, not all of which were part of an agreed standard, which later drew criticism. Navigator’s security feature for online payments, called SSL, was designed for the purchase of goods over the web and later became the basis of the encryption used for secure connections.
Netscape allowed free use for educational and non-commercial purposes and charged businesses, though in practice many people used it without paying. The company made money mainly from selling server software and other products. Its share of the browser market was very large by 1995.
The share offering
In August 1995, Netscape sold shares to the public. The price rose sharply on the first day, and the event drew wide press attention. Many observers regard it as a marker of the start of the dot-com boom, in which investors put large sums into internet companies. Some of those companies later failed, and the period shows how quickly expectations ran ahead of income.
Microsoft and the browser wars
NCSA had licensed the Mosaic code to Spyglass, a firm which in turn licensed it to other companies, including Microsoft. In 1995, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, based in part on Spyglass’s version, as part of an add-on package for Windows 95. Newer releases improved quickly, and Microsoft made the browser free and included it with its operating system.
Between about 1996 and 1999, Netscape and Microsoft raced to add features, in what is often called the first browser war. Netscape’s market share dropped as Internet Explorer became the default on most new PCs. The United States government brought an antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998, in which the bundling of the browser was an issue. The courts reached mixed conclusions over a long process, and Netscape was by then in decline. Observers still disagree about how much each factor mattered: Microsoft’s distribution advantage, the quality of the products, or Netscape’s own technical and management choices.
Aftermath
America Online bought Netscape, with the deal announced in 1998 and completed in 1999. Before that, in 1998, Netscape released the source code of its browser, and a community project called Mozilla was set up to continue it. After a long rewrite, that work produced a new browser called Firefox in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer dominated for several years, and then new competitors appeared: Apple’s Safari in 2003, and Google’s Chrome in 2008.
JavaScript, created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995 for Navigator, has been one of the longest-lasting products of this period. Together with HTML and cascading style sheets, it turned browsers into platforms that could run applications, and it is used on almost all websites today.
What it meant
Mosaic and Navigator turned the internet from something for specialists into a mass medium within roughly two years. Mosaic made the web attractive and Netscape made it a business. At the same time, the browser wars showed some familiar problems: competing versions of standards, pages that worked in only one program and the power that comes from controlling the way people reach the web. Smartphones later brought the same questions back for a new generation of browsers.