[11] Mosaic lost market share to Netscape Navigator in late 1994,[12] and had only a tiny fraction of users left by 1997, when the project was discontinued.

NCSA Mosaic for Unix (X Window System) version 2.0 was released on November 10, 1993[17] and was notable for adding support for forms, thus enabling the creation of the first dynamic web pages.

Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment.

As of 1993[update], license holders included these:[21] Robert Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped: ... to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet.

Other than displaying images embedded in the text (rather than in a separate window), Mosaic's original feature set is similar to the browsers on which it was modeled, such as ViolaWWW.

[6] But Mosaic was the first browser written and supported by a team of full-time programmers, was reliable and easy enough for novices to install, and the inline graphics proved immensely appealing.

[23]: xlii  Other browsers existed during this period, such as Erwise, ViolaWWW, MidasWWW, and tkWWW, but did not have the same effect as Mosaic on public use of the Internet.

[31] In the October 1994 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolfe notes in the article titled "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete – and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface": When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing.

It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

[23]: xxv David Hudson concurs with Reid: Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, based on the work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known.

Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise.

Web browsers were the first to bring a graphical interface to search tools the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services.

This was a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

Yet it was the availability of Mosaic and Mosaic-derived graphical browsers themselves that drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by August 1995 and millions by 1998.

[36] Metcalfe expressed the pivotal role of Mosaic this way: In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers.

[49] The stated goal of the project is "Lynx with graphics" and runs on Mac OS X, Power MachTen, Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSs.