| Main Index | Element Tree | Element Index | HTML Support History |
| Platforms |
Macintosh: 68K, Power Mac PC: Win95, 3.X, NT [Intel, Mips, PPC, Alpha] Unix: AIX, Alpha, HP-UX, IRIX, MIPS, SunOS |
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| About the Browser |
Mosaic is the oldest of the three reviewed browsers. It is THE popular pioneer in the GUI browser market and one of the main ingredients in the initial overwhelming success of the World Wide Web. It is also the basis for many other popular browsers. It is produced by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which licenses its code under the name of Spyglass. The releases of Mosaic have been characterized by multiple pre-releases over extended periods of time. The 2.0 version time span occurred over almost 2 years; a time span which saw the greatest changes in the browser market thus far. | |
| Version Discrepancies |
There are occasional extreme differences in both timeline and HTML capability between platforms for identical Mosaic release versions. The early Unix versions of Mosaic, for example, were developed well before most of the other platforms, and Unix/VMS version numbers have differed significantly from other platform counterparts. Early work on Mosaic 3.0 was completed only on the Macintosh platform, which added features such as frames. Many of these features did not make it into the later final release of the 3.0 version. | |
| No More Mosaic |
NCSA announced in January, 1997 that it was halting development of the Mosaic browser in order to concentrate on other activities. Coverage of what the historical Mosaic versions supported will remain on these pages, as it provides an important benchmark against which other browsers developed. The final Mosaic release is 3.0 | |
| Version | Released | Features |
| 1.0 | Nov. 1993 | This was the first official release of Mosaic. The HTML 2.0 specification did not exist at this point, and many capabilities found in that specification are noticeably absent in this version of the browser. |
| 2.0A1 | Jan. 1994 | The first Alpha Release of Mosaic 2.0 was the first major browser to support HTML Forms. |
| 2.0A2 | Feb. 1994 | Alpha 2 of Mosaic 2.0. This release added correct usage of the TEXTAREA element. |
| 2.0A3 | Apr. 1994 | Alpha 3 of Mosaic 2.0 added support for the STRONG and EM elements. |
| 2.0A8 | Dec. 1994 | The Alpha 8 release heralded the first major browser to support HTML 3 tables and several HTML 3 Character style elements. |
| 2.0B1 | Mar. 1995 | The first Beta release of Mosaic 2 added support for custom form submission buttons as well as the XMP element. |
| 2.0B4 | Apr. 1995 | The Beta 4 release added alignment attributes to the Heading and P elements. |
| 2.0FB | Jul. 1995 | The last Beta Release of Mosaic 2 added support for many of the Netscape 1.1 extensions to BODY, HR, and CENTER. |
| 2.0 | Oct. 1995 | The final release of Mosaic 2.0 added some belated support for several standard HTML 2.0 elements including many of the virtual character styles, the BASE element and the Image ALT attribute. It also added a new media element called SOUND as well as support for Internet Explorer's BGSound element. |
| 2.1 | Jan. 1996 | An update release to add support for Client-Side Image Maps |
| 3.0B2 | Apr. 1996 | Currently only available for the Macintosh platform, this was meant to be a preview of features that would be appearing in the 3.0 releases for all platforms. |
| 3.0B4 | Sep. 1996 | Still Macintosh only, this version and Beta 3 add no new HTML functionality, just bug fixes. |
| 3.0 | Jan. 1997 | Now available for most platforms, this release backs away from the features found in the earlier Macintosh 3.0 betas. The previous rudimentary frames capability and other improvements are lost in this, the FINAL release of Mosaic from NCSA. The only significant HTML change in this release over 2.0 versions is improvement of table functionality (finally allowing for nested tables.) |