Netscape Communications Corporation was the company that turned the early World Wide Web into a mass-market product. It grew out of the Mosaic browser, which Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications between 1992 and 1993. In April 1994, Andreessen and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark co-founded the company that would become Netscape, with the goal of replacing Mosaic as the world’s most popular browser.
Netscape built an enhanced next-generation browser from scratch, Netscape Navigator, and began widely distributing it in October 1994. By early 1995 Navigator had achieved its goal and was rapidly displacing Mosaic. The company history is documented in detail in “JavaScript: The First 20 Years,” co-written by JavaScript’s creator Brendan Eich, who joined Netscape in April 1995.
Netscape was also where JavaScript was born. Eich created the language at Netscape in 1995, and Netscape and Sun Microsystems jointly announced it as JavaScript that December. Navigator’s built-in support for the language made client-side scripting a standard part of the web.
In the late 1990s Netscape became the central figure in the first browser war, as Microsoft bundled its competing Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. The United States government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, whose 1999 Findings of Fact describe Microsoft’s campaign to foreclose Netscape’s browser from the market, grew directly out of that fight.