Marc Andreesen Launches the Mosaic, the First Graphic-Based Web Browser

On March 4, 1993 Marc Andreesen of the Software Development Group, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced on Usenet the creation of the NCSA Mosaic browser 0.10, and the introduction of the image tag. Mosaic was more sophisticated graphically than other available browsers at this date. Like other browsers it was designed to display HTML documents, but it also new formatting tags like center. Most significantly Mosaic incorporated the image tag which allowed the inclusion of images on web pages. Earlier browsers allowed the viewing of pictures, but only as separate files. NCSA Mosaic made it possible for images and text to appear on the same page. It also featured a graphical interface with clickable buttons that let users navigate easily, and controls that let users scroll through text with ease. Another innovative feature was the new form of hyperlink. In earlier browsers hypertext links had reference numbers that the user typed in to navigate to the linked document. The new hyperlinks allowed the user to simply click on a link to retrieve a document. NCSA Mosaic was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher.