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Web Wizardry

Once upon a time in a land called "Internet", there were few inhabitants and only a handful of places for those few inhabitants to visit. In this strange and mysterious land, most information was shared in a relatively new language called HTML (pronounced h-t-m-l).

Whole libraries of information, called websites, were delivered to your computer faster than any of the big three delivery guys can deliver packages, even now.

There were a few bastions of wizards fluent in HTML located throughout this land and the number of wizards, for a time, was greater than the number of mortal inhabitants.

One of the strongest enclaves of wizards was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These wizards listened to the discontent of the inhabitants around them and decided to assist. The land of Internet prior to the wizards getting involved was a land devoid of pictures - with only text, which proved to be rather boring and monotonous. This group of wizards, who were members of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), made magic and they created Mosaic.

Mosaic was the first true web browser in today's sense of the word. It was built with more capability and more features than had ever been available before. It revolutionized the way information was transmitted and shared across the Internet. Prior to the release of Mosaic, images were not available on a web page; you had to view them in a separate window if you wanted to see them. One of Mosaic's leading innovations made it possible to show the images at the same time as the text for a web page.

Why are we talking about Mosaic, technology almost two decades old, when we are discussing the best browser available today? First, the Mosaic story does not exactly end with the decision in January 1997 to cease any further development and support. Secondly, it is exactly the forward thinking, "How do we make this better" attitude exhibited by the creators of Mosaic that must figure into any criteria used to determine today's best browser.

Other major criteria should be ease of installation and ease of use, extensibility, and overall standards compliance including security.

The ease of installation award goes to two browsers: Internet Explorer on a Windows platform, and Safari on a Macintosh. This is actually a little skewed; both of these browsers are installed with the Operating Systems for their respective machines - there is nothing for you, the consumer to install. However, that

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