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

GeoCities organized its millions of user homepages into themed 'neighborhoods' based on content type. Which of these was an actual GeoCities neighborhood dedicated to technology and computing topics?

GeoCities divided the web into themed neighborhoods (SiliconValley, Broadway, etc.), making 38 million user homepages feel like a digital city before Yahoo deleted it all in 2009.

Technology

What specific software error caused NASA's Mariner 1 probe to be destroyed just 293 seconds after its 1962 launch?

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.