What was the name of the first commercially successful web browser?

Netscape Navigator was the first commercially successful web browser. Developed and sold by Netscape Communications Corporation, it debuted in 1994 and rapidly became the dominant way many people accessed the early World Wide Web.

The browser grew out of work on NCSA Mosaic. Marc Andreessen, one of Mosaic’s lead developers, co-founded Mosaic Communications with Jim Clark. After a naming dispute with the University of Illinois, the company became Netscape Communications and renamed its browser Netscape Navigator.

Navigator made the web easier to use through a polished graphical interface, support for images alongside text, and rapid improvements aimed at ordinary consumers. Netscape offered it free to non-commercial users while selling versions and related products commercially. Its success helped ignite the browser market and the broader Internet boom of the 1990s.

Mosaic was an important predecessor and the first browser to achieve mainstream popularity, but Netscape Navigator is the conventional answer to the question about the first commercially successful browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer became its major rival during the first browser war.