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Wrong and wrong.

1) People were already doing AJAX-y stuff like make sequential menus (i.e., you pick your state from one menu, then another menu appears with a list of the cities in that state) with JavaScript and regular old CGIs for quite a while before MS put out XMLHttpRequest. All MS did was specify some things. Someone else invented the idea, and another someone else (Google) made it famous.

2) Netscape was made free for "individual, academic and research users" in 1994. http://home.mcom.com/info/newsrelease.html
Spyglass Mosaic--you know, the browser that MSIE was based on--was free for "non-commercial use" even before that. MSIE 1.0 didn't even come out until 1995. Companies tend to pay for things, so while making a browser free for commercial use certainly helped the web some, leaving it as something companies had to pay for wouldn't have held the web back much.

I don't know if your last line is sarcastic or not, but yes, there is tons of evidence that Microsoft did indeed work very hard to hold back the web. That doesn't mean they never did anything that was pro-web but what little they did was more than offset by all the bad they've done.

But let's not pay attention to the Wikipedia, let's check Opera's own browser history page, which appeared on April 1995. I find it hard to reconcile this with Wikipedia's assertion that the company was founded on August 1995, so I will just accept that Opera already existed by April 1995. It still seems to be later than Netscape, and even more than its predecessor Mosaic Communications Corporation whose webpage seems to have been last updated in October 1994.

The SimLife manual was my introduction to evolution. Appropriate for a simulation, it included a lab book with suggested experiments to run and space to record and analyze the results. The main manual was over 200 pages and went into significant detail not just about the game (which was ridiculously complex) but about genetics in general, and also included a bizarre series of cartoons wherein a family gradually mutates themselves. SimEarth was similar with its coverage of Gaia theory, though I never really could get into that game. Relatedly, I've spent more time reading AD&D manuals than playing.

But I'm the kind of person who enjoys reading manuals anyway. Netscape's heartwarming introduction was delightfully cheesy.

You forgot the original name: Mosaic Netsite

Mind, it has roots back to NCSA's web server. Rob McCool initially wrote that, and was allowed to take some of the code with him when Mosaic was founded.

The funny thing is that with this MCOM web page HTML mission creep is already well under way, the page's author trying to lay out hypertext in ways Tim Berners-Lee probably never intended. "You're chopping the word up in the hyperlink into two different fonts just to make the first letter bigger?! How's a webcrawler gonna understand that?! Whattsamattawityou?!" (smackety-smackety-smackety...)

It just dumps out perl:
http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/search_docs/index.html

Way back when, SGI sent out a CD-ROM that contained a product catalog as a collection of HTML files. The CD also included all of the binaries for Mozilla 0.9 listed at http://www.mcom.com/archives/. For several years thereafter (until browsers became a standard part of software distributions) I kept that CD close at hand; whenever I had to work on a particular workstation or PC, I used it to install a browser (and usually then bootstrap a more recent version).

Be sure to use this link to have the "Resolution Controller" switched to L to "reduce download time" and give the server a little breathing room.

As far as the rest, yes, I've been around the block for a few years, enough to remember archie, gopher, and when people started talking about this http thing. There was even something like Mosaic and some other stuff that would use a default home page of home.mcom.com

But nobody is going to download a swath of applications to interact with their photo sites (eg: flickr, shutterfly, etc..).. well, unless they're well done like the ITMS (iTunes Media Store), but that has custom DRM requirements with it.

For better or worse, the browser continues to move into the realm of universal-internet-app, no more FTP, Usenet, etc.. people are just moving it all to file (up|down)load over HTTP and RSS instead of news feeds. Now, I'm happy with the sexyness of stuff like maps.google, and the evolution that has happened, but file transfers have stayed the same (basically).

"How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it."

Just to clarify:

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the acroynm isn't English-language). Tim Berners-Lee "created" the original web browser, WorldWideWeb, while he was working there.

Mosaic was developed at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina were the original creators of Mosaic while they were students working at NCSA. Andreesen later founded Netscape Communications (originally Mosaic Communications) to try and build a company around the success of Mosaic.

"And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong)"

Not so much wrong as incomplete.

The original name for the company was "Mosaic Communications". The domain name they registered for this, http://www.mcom.com/, still takes you to the Netscape website. The name for the product was going to be "Mosaic NetScape". It turned out they couldn't use the Mosaic name (I forget why, prolly a trademark), so they changed the name of the company to "NetScape" and the name of the product to "Navigator".

And for those who don't know: The original "working title" for the program was "Mozilla", a combination of "Mosaic" and "Godzilla". That's where that name comes from.

I'd like to point out Netscape's rather interesting history of GUI browsers. It starts of showing how some of the founders of Mosaic went on to found Mosaic Communications Corporation which was later renamed to Netscape. It then covers Microsoft IE and the decision to start the Mozilla project which is producing the next generation of Netscape browsers as well as others.

To my surprise, I found that the beta version information pages are still availble on home.mcom.com.

Much more fun than playing EA hockey, IMHO.

And then it appeared on Slashdot. Wierd...

No, Netscape Communicator is not based on Mosaic all "hacked to hell."

I find your usage of quotes very interesting, as I sure as hell didn't say that. I said Navigator is based on Mosiac hacked beyond recoginition. And it is. Perhaps you're not aware of the fact that the original name for Netscape Communications was Mosaic Communications. Pull up www.mcom.com sometime and see what happens.

Internet Explorer *is* based on Mosaic.

I'm well aware of IE's origins. I don't know why you think that excludes Netscape from doing the same thing.

Cool handle, BTW.

[...] the rotating mobile-type thing [...]

I guess that had to go when MCOM disappeared -- didn't the logo have a big `M' on one of the panels? I'd have to agree though: apart from the purply colours it was a great spinner. In fact, that must be where the name `spinner' comes from: none of the other logos exactly spin, do they?

wavy lines of reminiscence

Ah, the good old days -- who remembers mcom.com now..? There's a web site somewhere with a large collection of old Netscrapes: I occasionally spark up one of the old ones to check pages look OK. Hey, and that's an interface widget I miss -- what about the button you could press to load images? That's come in very handy when I'm on the dialup.