NCSA Mosaic browser

This page was last updated at: Mar 28, 2026

NCSA Mosaic was a lightweight vintage Desktop web browser, across a variety of operating systems. It was developed for about 4 years before being discontinued. NCSA Mosaic's website doesn't work any more, but there is a saved copy of it on archive.org.

NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet during the 1990s by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics.

It was the first browser to display images inline with the document's text; before this, with other browsers you could read the text and there was an icon for an image; you would have to click the icon to download the image and show it in another application. Mosaic was the first browser that showed the images in the page.

About NCSA Mosaic

Browser URL web.archive.org/web/19980223154120/ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/
Development Status Discontinued
The developers have announced that the browser won't be developed any more
Launched 1993
Discontinued 1997
Operating Systems Unix-like, Windows, OS2, Misc Desktop OS
Device platform Desktop
Rendering Engine Custom
Lightweight Browser NCSA Mosaic omits some mainstream features in order to reduce system resource & memory usage.
Wikipedia Article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic

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