Mosaic is the original web browser. I still like its funky look and feel. Somehow, it just feels more friendly than modern browsers.

Development of Mosaic stopped in 1996 (official date was January 7th 1997). I have updated Mosaic so it will compile on a modern Linux system. I also added support for the gopher info tag.

So why bother? If you are going to run a ten year old protocol, you might as well use a ten year old browser. Mosaic makes a perfectly adequate gopher browser.

While you can use Mosaic to browse the web, most pages will not display properly. Remember, in 1996 HTML 2.0 was very new. HTTP/1.0 was only introduced in 1996. Gopher was in it heyday.

Want to try it out?

I have tested the tarball against RedHat 7.3/8.0, Slackware 8.1, and Debian 2.2. You must have OpenMotif installed to compile Mosaic since it is a Motif application. If you use lesstif, you will have problems with the URL bar. Bonus points if you remember Motif. Extra bonus points if you even programmed using Motif.

1. Get the source tarball via ftp or http.
2. Untar the file.
3. cd Mosaic-src
4. make linux
   Do not run configure, it will not compile.
5. mkdir $HOME/.mosaic
6. src/Mosaic

Update: You may need this patch graciously provided by Alan Wylie to compile against newer versions of libpng.

Note: You will get a link warning the use of `tmpnam' is dangerous, better use `mkstemp'. Unfortunately, a real name ending in .html is needed to pass to an editor. mkstemp will not work for this.

If you want to install it:
cp src/Mosaic /usr/local/bin

Rant

Anyone else find it strange that the NCSA has:

1. Changed all the Mosaic web pages.
2. Made them almost unviewable in Mosaic?

I mean, why bother? Why not just leave the pages alone? Why take the time to add headers and footers but leave the content alone? The page has had the following new for over 6 years now:

And yet they took the time to "unMosaic" it.

Update: Well, it looks like NCSA took down the Mosaic pages.

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