Reloading...Netscape Navigator

It was a battle fought mainly on the Windows PC, but the Mac version of Netscape Navigator was an inevitable casualty. So why did this once-loved web browser disappear?

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In the early Nineties, the fledgling World Wide Web was not easy to use. Unreliable, cumbersome and awkward, the earliest tools for navigating your way around the web were anything but user-friendly. When University of Illinois undergraduate Marc Andreessen and university employee Eric Bina attended a demonstration of the then-leading ViolaWWW browser, although impressed, they felt they could do better. They started putting their own browser together for use on Unix computers running X-Windows, and on 23rd January 1993, released Mosaic Version 0.5 to the internet-using public.

The original release of Mosaic made few innovations, but as time went on, a small crew with Andreessen as lead designer added several features we now take for granted such as bookmarks and history files. Andreessen kept a close eye on the newsgroups and user feedback, squashing bugs as soon as they arose and making sure the browser progressed in the way its users wanted. Mosaic was soon the most popular browser on the internet.

After graduating in 1993, Andreessen relocated to California’s silicon valley. He soon met Jim Clark, a technology businessman. With Clark’s money and Andreessen’s know-how, they founded Mosaic Communications Corporation on 4th April, 1994. It was a poor choice of name. The University of Illinois, which owned the ‘Mosaic’ name sued, forcing a change of name to Netscape Communications Corporation, later simply Netscape Communications.