Technology · 2
Which web browser, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became the first widely popular graphical browser and helped bring the web to everyday users?
Answer
Mosaic
Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA and released in 1993, was the first browser to display images inline with text and was available on multiple platforms, making it the browser that truly popularized the World Wide Web for general users. Netscape Navigator, released in 1994, was actually built by several of the same team members who left NCSA after Mosaic's success.
💡 Did you know?
Mosaic was so influential that the U.S. Congress credited it with 'transforming the internet from a government tool into a global public network' in a 1994 resolution.
Other options people guess
- Netscape Navigator
- Internet Explorer
- Lynx
Topics
- world-wide-web
- 1990s
- browsers
- internet-history
Know your technology trivia?
Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.
More Technology facts
Technology
Which country launched the first national web index in 1993, allowing citizens to search domestically hosted websites before most countries had any organised web directory?
Finland was the first country in the world to declare broadband internet access a legal right for all citizens, doing so in 2010.
Technology
Which country hosted the first-ever web server outside of Europe, brought online in December 1991 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center?
SLAC's first web server hosted a particle-physics database — meaning the earliest content on the web outside Europe was a catalog of scientific papers, not a homepage.
Technology
What distinctive two-tone color scheme did the original CERN website use when the World Wide Web first opened to the public in 1991?
The first website ever published — CERN's info.cern.ch — had no images at all; every page was pure hyperlinked text, yet it described a system that would eventually carry billions of images daily.
Technology
NASA's Mariner 1 probe, destroyed by a coding error shortly after its 1962 launch, had been aimed at which planet?
A single misplaced hyphen in Mariner 1's guidance code in 1962 caused a $18.5 million Venus probe to explode 293 seconds after launch.
Technology
The PlayStation 2's built-in player for which home video format helped it outsell dedicated players of that same format after its 2000 launch?
The PlayStation 2 became the best-selling console ever partly because it doubled as a DVD player when DVDs were still expensive, outselling dedicated DVD players.
Technology
Which online service company originally developed the GIF format that became entangled in Unisys's 1994 patent enforcement campaign?
GIF creator CompuServe faced Unisys patent lawsuit over the format in 1994, nearly destroying the image standard everyone used on early websites.