The Demo Site

A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Mosaic was the first popular World Wide Web browser to mix image elements with text. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992, released to the public in 1993 for non commercial use, and orphaned in 1997.

Mosaic project alumni and other users established Mosaic Communications Corporation which eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. A different group established Spyglass Inc. with their own version of Mosaic. When Microsoft was not allowed to license the Netscape Navigator, they made a deal with Spyglass for fees partly based on browser sales. Microsoft called their browser Internet Explorer and introduced it as an add on to Windows 95. MS bundled IE with later versions of Windows, thus having no sales revenues on the browser, which caused Spyglass to threaten legal action, resulting in $8 million settlement to Spyglass.

Netscape had initial market dominance, based on user acceptance. IE gained dominance via distribution with Windows. Such competition fostered both proprietary code and the evolution toward similar user interfaces. As of this writing, Netscape has been discontinued, and the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has continued Netscape concepts into the open source FireFox browser and related applications.

The Safari browser was developed by Apple Inc. for distribution with Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta in January 2003 and is now available for Windows. It is claimed to be significantly faster than the alternatives.

The Opera browser ranks behind Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Netscape in popularity. It is now free for personal use. Some of its security concepts and other features have influenced development of the other main browsers.

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