Mosaic Netscape: One Small Step for the Web...

In the four years or so since CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, created the World Wide Web, over thirty "browsers" like the one you're using now have been developed, most based on the standard setting NCSA (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Mosaic. Mosaic Netscape, from Mosaic Communications is the newest and easily the best. In the weeks since the release of version 0.9, it has already become the software of choice for serious WWW junkies. 0.9 marks the first "Pubic Release" in the software's development. In a move to appease the voracious appetites of netizens for free software, Mosaic Communications will offer a free version of 1.0 as well.

"The Web" went online at CERN in 1990 (CERN stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire", the labs' earlier French name) as a project to do for the Internet what Apple did for personal computing. That is, give the Net an intuitive, graphical front-end; the kind of interface that a first time user could navigate without training. Familiar buttons, "hyper" links to other places on the net, and built-in graphics, sound and even video (well...almost video.) An interface that dispelled the myth that the internet was a nasty haven for only the most wired of heads.

Their development tool is an easy to use programming language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that is used to define a page of styled text, graphics and links that is completely platform independent. It is the job of a "browser" to interpret the HTML code and make it look pretty. NetScape is one such browser and is available on Unix, Windows and Macintosh Platforms. Since approxiamately 85% of the NetScape's code is identical on all three platforms, NetScape is remarkably consistent across platform lines.

One problem with Web browsers, is that a GUI (Graphical User Interface, or "gooey" in nerdspeak) is big and slow, like a friendly giant. All those graphics take time to load, especially if you're connected to the Internet through an ordinary modem as most of us are and will be for some time. Maybe one day we'll all be connected through our nice fat cable TV lines, but that's a long way off and most of us aren't going to wait.

So what's the answer?

Well, time will solve most of the current problems but the truth is that there really isn't any immediate solution to this "bandwidth dilema," but Mosaic Netscape attempts a partial solution, with the promise of more in future versions.

Published by Mosaic Communications, a seven month old California company, led by Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, Mosaic Netscape was developed with the aim of addressing the needs of bandwidth deprived computer owners like me. Those whose umbilical cord to the net is a 14,400 kbs modem, high speed by modem standards, but a snail when it comes to loading those cool color pictures and happening sounds. Rewritten from scratch by NCSA Mosaic's creator, Marc Andreesson, Netscape is a product that has taken to heart the lessons learned by it's predecessors.

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