Mosaic

History moved on, and so did I! Our company was acquired by Sun Microsystems and I became product manager for our PC UNIX product. Oh yes, before I forget, PCs were everywhere by then and that phenomenon would, in the long run, also contribute to the explosion of the World Wide Web.

One day, in the year 1993, my engineering manager walked into my office, together with Jonathan, his lead programmer. They wanted to show me what he (Jonathan) had done over the weekend. It was a port (take the source code of a program and make it run as a binary on a computer) of a program called Mosaic for our PC UNIX product. I saw him type a few commands but did not quite understand why these guys were so excited. Little did I know that this seemingly innocent little program was going to change our lives forever!

The first browser

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA)at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (this is a long drive through cornfields from Chicago, which I took once) by a team led by Marc Andreesen. It was the first browser to support multiple protocols (hence the name) as well as display an image and text on the same page (surprisingly, this is not a trivial matter on a webpage!) It soon caught attention worldwide and the browser was ported to many platforms, so that more and more people could develop or have access to websites.

In November 1992, there were 26 websites. In the Mosaic browser, there was a What's new section that showed a new website everyday. Three years later, there were 10,000 and another three years later, millions. Today, I do not think it is possible to count them anymore. So how did we get from thousands to millions?

Netscape

Marc Andreesen founded a company, named it after Mosaic, and then later renamed it Netscape Communications Corporation. They basically rewrote the Mosaic browser and optimized it for environments with lower network bandwidth, such as individuals who access the Internet from home through their ISP. The browser was called Netscape Navigator. This was clearly the first commercial browser, making it to the shelves of computer retail stores as part of a bundle, Netscape Communicator.

Netscape was also credited as the first browser to include support for JavaScript. With this scripting language, interactivity could be added to web pages. The World Wide Web could be at anybody's fingertips, as long as you had Netscape. From 1994 to about 1999, Netscape clearly had the biggest market share for browsers.

Over time, Netscape was moved over to Mozilla Corporation, an Open Source organization, and the development of Netscape ended. Today, users can download the Firefox browser from www.mozilla.org.

Internet Explorer

Another derivative of Mosaic, Spyglass Mosaic, made it into the Microsoft codebase and was eventually bundled with Microsoft Windows. We know it today as Internet Explorer. This is how we reach the topic of the so-called browser wars. As I mentioned, Netscape was trying to win over as many customers as possible by getting into the retail market and charge for its browser. Microsoft, on the other hand, decided to bundle Internet Explorer for free in its Windows Operating System (of course you had to pay for Windows).

This led to many lawsuit-like situations as Microsoft was accused of unfair competition by the other browser vendors. This situation has now changed as all browsers are free. Computer users can today choose which browser they want to use. On tablets, choices are limited, but on the other hand, browsers on tablets usually have all the latest features.

A different and potentially more bloody war was going on at the technical level. Despite having a standards body, the W3C, which controlled and introduced new features (both HTML and CSS), not all browsers were adapting those features equally as fast. So the same web pages continued to look different when they were rendered by different browsers. Sad but true to say, the browser that was the most incompatible and unpredictable, Internet Explorer, was, by the turn of the century, also the one used by the majority of the people who would surf the web.

Developers therefore had no choice but to delay the use of new cool features at the expense of spending a considerable amount of extra time making their web pages look the same on a PC used by most visitors as it did on the system where they were created.

Things got far worse before they began to get better, as more developers started using JavaScript to add interaction and animation to the pages, whereas many System Administrators recommended a configuration with JavaScript switched off. Sometimes this resulted in the visitor seeing nothing at all on the page.

But do not despair, we are in 2015 now! In this book, we will take a different approach and always let you use the new features when the browser supports it.