Notes on Mosaic

Mosaic is the second web browser. Microsoft released the first versions of it on January 31, 1995. It’s the fifth-most popular web browser in terms of market share and is used by over 100 million people worldwide. Its name comes from its interactive layout, which was referred to as “Mosaicing” in 1992 and “super picture technology” in 1993 by its developers at America Online (AOL). An API (Application Programming Interface) was released in 1997 to allow third-party developers to write programs that could run independently of the Mosaic web browser. Approximately 10,000 such programs have been written, mostly games. 

Licensing

Mosaic was released under the Netscape license. The Netscape license allows the source code to be distributed freely, along with applications and other products that use it. This allows companies to develop their versions and applications based on the software. Mosaic has been used by several notable software companies, such as AOL, Microsoft, Apple Computer (with the help of Steve Jobs and other team members), and Yahoo!. Mosaic has been released on several platforms, including Windows 95 and Mac OS. The original version was written in C++, but later versions have been released for Java-based mobile phones.

History

The team that developed Mosaic’s source code formed Netscape Communications Corporation in 1994 to develop Mosaic while it was still a part of AOL. In 1997, after AOL decided to spin off its Internet services, Netscape became a separate company by itself.

Features

Mosaic has many features and can perform a wide range of functions. Mosaic supports all the popular web standards, such as HTML and CSS, JavaScript, Java applets, and ActiveX. Other features include a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor and the ability to convey your message through URLs. It was originally released at the end of 1993 with a faster initial loading time than Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 4.0. Mosaic 1.0 was extended and improved in the following years.

The final version of Mosaic 3.0, released on February 28, 1998, received mostly good reviews from the public and technical press reviews. Nonetheless, AOL announced that they would stop supporting Mosaic on March 23, 2000, to focus its resources solely on Internet Explorer as a replacement for Netscape Navigator, which was just re-released in November of 1999 several major changes and improvements over the original product.

Installing

The latest versions of Mosaic can be downloaded from the Mozilla forum. The software is available in ten languages. Six browser versions are available (normal, compact, compact with menus, compact with menus and toolbars, compact with menus and pop-up windows, and small).

Old Versions

Mosaic 3.0 was released in 1998 but was withdrawn less than two years later by AOL on March 23, 2000. This caused demand for Mosaic software to increase significantly due to decisions. Several websites have begun hosting old versions of Mosaic for users to download, such as software.com.

Design Principles

The software was designed and programmed by an international team of volunteers, many of whom were professional programmers working for companies such as Silicon Graphics (SGI) or Netscape Communications. Mosaic’s design includes such features as bookmarks, a “Back” button to navigate backwards through web pages to return to a previous page, and support for inline images and embedded video clips. Mosaic supports various web page formats, including HTML, Mosaic’s proprietary format, and Microsoft’s Navigator/MSHTML/MSIE’s native format. (The latter was later renamed Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Mosaic is the second web browser to support addon extensions, with the first being Netscape Navigator.

Mosaic is the second web browser to support tabbed browsing, with the first being the Mozilla Application Suite. The authors of Mosaic donated their source code and website to MIT in 1994, where it was later released as Netscape Navigator.

Mosaic is the second web browser to support inline multimedia, with the first being Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Mosaic is the second web browser to support cascading style sheets, used for placing text or images in a separate section of the page by using CSS. The first was Archie, which was developed in 1992. 

Better graphical interface 

The ability to directly click through the address bar (previous versions open the browser window, which can be useful when working with bookmarks).

The world’s first popular browser 

Mosaic was the first widely used browser.

Conclusion

In addition to being the first graphical browser, second web browser, and the world’s first popular browser, Mosaic was also the first browser to support (X11). It was the first web browser to contain any level of CSS support. It was also the first to use HTML 2.0 and still has several features that can only be found in this early version of HTML 3.2. Until then, browsers were limited to 100 KB in size on a web page, so even today, you could argue that Mosaic launched the modern web