Page "Mosaic (web browser)" Paragraph 21

Ultimately, web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s because they were the first programs to provide a multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services ( formerly limited to applications such as FTP, Usenet and Gopher ).

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