Mosaic was the 1993 web browser that helped popularize the World Wide Web by displaying images inline with text.
Developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mosaic was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Its graphical interface made browsing much easier for people who were unfamiliar with command-line tools.
Earlier web browsers could display images, but often opened them separately or handled them less conveniently. Mosaic’s ability to place images alongside text made web pages more visually engaging and helped establish the style of browsing that became familiar to millions.
Mosaic was not the first web browser, and it was not the direct ancestor of every later browser. However, several members of its development team went on to create Netscape Navigator, which became another major early browser.