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Threaded page loading. Mosaic needed to download all text and graphics before displaying any part of a web page. This was painfully slow over modems. Netscape's huge innovation was to partially render pages while resources (mainly images) were downloading, giving the appearance of a faster web.

Marc Andreessen, headed out west. Brought most of the Urbana-Champaign (key) Mosaic Brain Share with him (or recruited people like Eric Bina to work on the project). Jim Clark sunk a ton of dough into the project - and they worked hard at making it successful. Mosaic was then Licensed to Microsoft (and some other companies, but Microsoft made the most of it) and became the heart of IE.

There was no "Mosaic" left to be Mosaic after that.

I assume because there were few PC's at first, and then a PC explosion happened with Windows 95, and Netscape signed a deal with most of the new ones to include their browser (which made their share grow much faster than Mosaic's).

Then Microsoft introduced Windows 98 with IE in it, and killed that Netscape market.