Fifteen years ago Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), developed the first popular web browser “Mosaic“. The funding for this work came from the “High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991“, an act created by one Senator Al Gore. President George Bush Snr. predicted that the bill would help

unlock the secrets of DNA, to forecast severe weather events, and to discover new superconducting materials

Mosaic was the first browser to allow inline images, running cross platform on UNIX, Macintosh and Windows (and ported to many others), radically changing what was possible with the then infant ‘World Wide Web’.

In 1992 the Internet was a very different place. “The Internet” was primarily in use by academia. The term “Surfing The Internet” was coined by Jean Armour Polly in her seminal document , where the ‘World Wide Web’ was granted just one short paragraph, competing for space with Gopher, WAIS and ARCHIE to name but a few.

Marc Andreessen left the NCSA, and together with Jim Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, and started “Mosaic Communications Corporation” to work on what would become “Netscape Navigator”. The company renamed to Netscape Commuinications shortly after.

Netscape Navigator was hugely successful. The ‘World Wide Web’ rapidly gained popularity and Microsoft suddenly realised they had dropped the ball. In 1995 in a game of catch up, Microsoft began bundling “Internet Explorer” with Windows 95 and the browser wars began.

For many years there was really only one web browser. That browser, Netscape Navigator, using code directly from NCSA Mosaic, once held 90% market share, and was leagues ahead of its competition.

Netscape announced last month the end of life for the browser which started it all. This will affect hardly anyone these days. I personally haven’t used Netscape for years, preferring it’s child Mozilla a few years ago, and these days its grandchild “Firefox“. Indeed AOL, who have owned Netscape since buying it for $4.2 billion in 1998, have advised current users of the browser to move over to Firefox.

While Netscape’s end of life is in many ways irrelevant in 2008, the contribution it made to forming the Internet we know and love today cannot be underestimated. I for one am sorry to see it go.

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in the history of the browser wars, I would recommend the book World War 3.0, whilst anyone who’s interested in the history of the net from ARCHIE to Google should check-out The Search.

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