The Browser Wars: Mosaic, Netscape and the Fight for Your Desktop
Netscape had three-quarters of the browser market four months after launch. Six years later it was gone.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
Before 1993, using the web meant reading text. Pictures opened in separate windows, if your computer could show them at all. Then two students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, built Mosaic. It put images right next to text on the same page, and it ran on Windows, Macs and Unix machines. The Unix version came out in February 1993 and the Windows and Mac versions followed that August. Mosaic was free, it was easy to install, and it turned the web from a research tool into something regular people wanted.
Mosaic Killer
In April 1994, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, started a company with Andreessen and hired most of the Mosaic team. It was first called Mosaic Communications, until the university objected to the name. Its browser shipped on October 13, 1994, as Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Inside the company the browser's codename was Mozilla, short for "Mosaic killer," and a cartoon Godzilla-style lizard became the unofficial mascot.
It worked. Within four months Netscape had about three-quarters of the browser market. On August 9, 1995, the company went public at $28 a share. The stock touched $75 that day and closed at $58.25, valuing a 16-month-old company at $2.9 billion. A lot of people date the dot-com boom from that afternoon.
Microsoft wakes up
Microsoft had been slow to take the web seriously. To catch up, it licensed Mosaic's code and released Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 in the Plus! add-on pack for Windows 95. The early versions weren't very good. The important part was the price. Internet Explorer was free for everyone, including businesses, while Netscape charged companies for licenses.
Both sides shipped new versions fast and added features the other didn't have. Netscape created JavaScript. Netscape had the <blink> tag; Internet Explorer had <marquee>. Web designers put "best viewed in Netscape" or "best viewed in Internet Explorer" buttons on their pages, which tells you how differently the two browsers drew the same page.
The lawn ornament
The fight got personal. When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4 on September 22, 1997, its launch party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot letter "e." The next morning Netscape employees found it on their front lawn with a card signed "Best wishes, the IE team." They knocked it over, put a giant Mozilla dinosaur on top of it, and added a sign: "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18," their idea of the market share score.
The score didn't hold. Microsoft put Internet Explorer inside every copy of Windows, and most people buying their first computer simply used whatever browser was already there. In the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998, an Intel executive testified that a Microsoft executive had talked about cutting off Netscape's "air supply." Microsoft's lawyers called the testimony not credible.
How it ended, and how it didn't
In November 1998, AOL agreed to buy Netscape for $4.2 billion. By 2001 Internet Explorer was used for more than 90% of web browsing. The first browser war was over.
Before it sold, though, Netscape did something that outlived the company. In 1998 it released its browser's source code, and a new community project named after the old codename, Mozilla, picked it up. Years later that project shipped a stripped-down browser called Phoenix, renamed Firebird, then renamed Firefox. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9, 2004, and started the second browser war. The lizard got its revenge after all.