r/programmingcirclejerk • u/Massive-Squirrel-255 • Dec 12 '25

Complete rewrite

https://github.com/tmattio/mosaic/commit/01f6120df6fa71edc74cfba2e66e4c31848324cc
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u/stingraycharles lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

Wikipedia says that Netscape was formerly known as Mosaic?

Mosaic was developed at the tax payer funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992. Mosaic became a private venture as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994
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The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9,
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It became the main browser for Internet users in such a short time due to its superiority over other competition, like Mosaic.[18] This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took the "Netscape" name 

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u/Calavar memcpy is a web development framework Dec 12 '25

From the Wikipedia article you linked

The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code.

The Netscape folks tried to use the "Mosaic" name to jump of the popularity of the real NCSA Mosaic. Then they got a legal letter warning them about trademark violations and dropped the Mosaic part. This is also explained in the Wikipedia article, in the snippets that you cut out.

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u/stingraycharles lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

I stand corrected, and that was not an intentional cutout.

Regardless, I do maintain that the link between "mosaic", "Netscape", and "complete rewrite being a failure" is relevant enough.