NCSA Mosaic is a Navigateur Web developed starting from end 1992 at the American research center NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputing Applications ), initially for the platforms X Window (X Mosaic), then Macintosh (Mac Mosaic) and finally Windows. It is the navigator who returned the popular World Wide Web.

Development

This navigator was published in 1993 whereas the World Wide Web developed by the CERN counted only 200 sites, 3 years after his launching. The Mosaic project is then directed by Joseph Hardin, the principal developers being Eric Bina (programming) and Marc Andreessen (programming and support). He is the first navigator to have posted the image S (GIF and XBM) in the Web pages, then to support the interactive forms in the pages. It because an exponential increase of the popularity of the World Wide Web. It was so popular that the expression “Mosaic site” was sometimes used instead of “Web site”.

The development of Mosaic is stopped since 1997 while the other navigators continued to evolve/move, so that its number of users practically fell to zero as of 1998.

Netscape

The essence of the team at the origin of Mosaic left NCSA as of 1994 to join Netscape Communications Corporation and to develop Netscape Navigator. In particular, Marc Andreessen is a cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation with Jim Clark. The appearance of Netscape Navigator caused an immediate, fast and final decline of the use of Mosaic. There is however no commercial link nor technique between Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, which was remade from zero. Initially, Netscape Communications Corporation was founded under the name of Mosaic Communications Corporation, but had to change name, not having the right to use “Mosaic”.

Spyglass

As opposed to what imply information “By the way” of Internet Explorer, which still quotes Mosaic, this one either is not directly dependant there. The first versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer in fact were based on Spyglass Mosaic, a navigator developed independently by the company Spyglass. This one had a trade agreement with NCSA enabling him to use the name and the Mosaic code, but forever made use of this last.

See too

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