Netscape Turns 10

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks ten years since the first public beta of Netscape Navigator was released. Both CNet News.com and MozillaZine have full coverage, with the former revealing that AOL is planning to release a new version Netscape in the New Year (thankfully separate from the IE-based version of AOL's browser). Even the Netscape portal (which never mentions the Netscape browser) is celebrating the anniversary. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last decade (especially since AOL bought Netscape) and the baton has now passed onto the Netscape alumni-filled Mozilla Foundation, but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser), but twice (by being the first major commercial program to go open source)."

Comments

How can it be 10?

[JazzXP]

Didn't it die when it was 5?

Re:How can it be 10?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Buddhist.

Re:How can it be 10?

[BigBuckHunter]

Was that when the fishcam went offline?

Re:How can it be 10?

[secretsquirel]

Couldn't have, it never even was 5. Somehow it went from 4.* to 6. So I guess now its really like 11 or something.

Re:How can it be 10?

[kaalamaadan]

It's passed on - deceased; stone dead, bleedin' demised, expired and gone to meet its maker, rests in peace, its metabolic process is now 'istory, it's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil and gone on to join the choir invisible, it is a late browser - if it had not been mozillaized, it would have been pushing up the daisies, it's a stiff, bereft of life, dead - it is an ex-browser!

Re:How can it be 10?

[TheRaven64]

Our browser goes to 11.

Re:How can it be 10?

[wed128]

it's...one more loud...

Re:How can it be 10?

[SilentChris]

Anyone ever see the page on Apple's website where they have an X11 logo with the caption "This one goes to 11"? Not a big fan of the company, but I always thought that was kinda cute.

Re:How can it be 10?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

news:// at 11?

Re:How can it be 10?

[marsvin]

You know, that's not a bad Firefox slogan.

cut my teeth on it...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I still use it or Firefox to be among the few to be assimilated

Cool, cool, cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard to believe it's been 10 years. Time flies when your having fun! I don't remember which version of Netscape I used first, but I remeber downloading the code when it became available. That was one cool day for me.

Re:Cool, cool, cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I was kind of surprised to see it's been ten years. It seems longer ago than that.

I guess the IE years haven't been much fun ;)

Re:Cool, cool, cool

[TheRaven64]

I remember the hype surrounding the 2.0 launch. It was going to be 8MB, and considered hugely bloated at this size (considering that at the time, my hard drive was 60MB, and a full install of MS Word took 10MB including clipart). After Netscape 2 was launched, no one was going to care what OS they were using. All software was going to be run through the browser.

Re:Cool, cool, cool

[Slider451]

I know there was better stuff out then, but this is what I first ran Netscape on:

Packard Bell 486 SX-25 6MB RAM (started with 2)
ISA video card, maybe 512K RAM
Maxtor 540MB hard drive (came with 120MB installed)
Soundblaster Pro ISA soundcard (started with mobo speaker)
10-Base2 (coax) network card, added for playing DOOM with roommate (IPX/SPX with Netware Lite).
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on top of DOS 5.

It doesn't sound like much, but it played Wing Commander really well.

Getting a TCP/IP stack to load after dialing into the university ISP was a challenge. But then loading Netscape and seeing the comet go by the big N for the first time... heaven.

Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[Anonymous Coward]

98% advertising, 2 % content
why anyone would visit it by choice is a mystery

Re:Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[skitzoid (moomoo)]

Hi! I'm an AOL user Where can I download it from?

Re:Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[It's People!]

Because it's the default home page for Safari.

Re:Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[iroll]

...which is as baffling as it is true.

Re:Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[iamcf13]

Just like http://www.slashdor.org/ - 8 popups and a salespitch for the domain. There is no real content there so don't bother visiting it.

The old netscape

[thedillybar]

I remember the old Netscape. Really bulky and yet I still ran it over IE. Took what seemed like forever to load with 16(?) MB of RAM.

Props to how far Mozilla has come. I guess the increased computing power helped them a tad :) Salute to our pioneers as well.

Re:The old netscape

[SmilingBoy]

You are lucky! I ran Netscape (3.something? Gold?) on a 486/33 with 4 MB RAM... That was in the beginning of 1998 (when the computer was already 5 years old). I did have a 14,400 modem, and at times the computer would take longer rendering sites than it took for the data to come in. Seriously though, for WWW, this setup was pretty unusable, but it was fine for E-Mail.

Re:The old netscape

[RLiegh]

You are lucky! I ran Netscape (3.something? Gold?) on a 486/33 with 4 MB RAM... That was in the beginning of 1998 (when the computer was already 5 years old). I did have a 14,400 modem, and at times the computer would take longer rendering sites than it took for the data to come in. Seriously though, for WWW, this setup was pretty unusable, but it was fine for E-Mail.

Heh, until I tried Mozilla 0.92 I used to alternate between lynx on linux and netscape three on windows 95...on a 486 (but with 16 megs of ram, which made an amazing amount of difference).

Re:The old netscape

[FrankHaynes]

BAH!

When I was your age I had to paint the web page on cardboard with watercolors using my fingers...uphill--BOTH WAYS!!

Young whippersnappers!

Re:The old netscape

[SmilingBoy]

I had Windows 3.1. I tell you, I used this computer once or twice after being used to Windows 2000 and KDE; and Windows 3.1 is terrible indeed! Just remembering how often I actually did not use Win 3.1 at all, but just did things from DOS directly. The Netscape 3 also took a large part of my (gasp!) 105 MB hard disk...

Re:The old netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yeah I remember using a Pentium 90 (with a 1gb hd space which was the envy of everyone I knew), and bloody Netscape 4 took ages to load. IE 3 would load in a flash but I couldn't bring myself to use it, the browser wars being at their peak and all...

Re:The old netscape

[singularity]

Ehh, If you are talking the same time as IE, you are not thinking old enough. Once Netscape 3.x came out (which, if I remember correctly, was about the time IE was first released), it was pretty bulky.

Back when you were able to get just Netscape Navigator (the stand-alone browser without the HTML editor, mail client, and so on), it was pretty smooth. I remember running 2.2N on my Mac for a long time (up until about Netscape 4.1.7 or so)

Of course, that was some time after Netscape hit the scene. I remember downloading Mosaic for the first time sometime around Christmas break of 1993-1994. Netscape 0.9 was sometime after that.

I liked to tell my students (when I was working in a high school) that there used to be a page called "What is new on the Internet" that would list all new pages to go up.

Netscape started out a good browser, but the 3.x bloat really slowed progress down. That was back when Netscape seemed on top of the world, though. Portal, web server, web browser, mail client, news client, you name it. For the briefest amount of time, before Microsoft woke up, they seemed to control the Internet.

It is interesting to see projects like Firefox finally getting back to the simplicity of the original Netscape browsers.

Re:The old netscape

[metlin]

Dad?

Is that you?

Re:The old netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

> but the 3.x bloat really slowed progress down

Netscape 3 wasn't so bad on my (at that time) ancient Mac IIfx. When Netscape 4.00 came out and took about 5 minutes just to make the window appear, that was the breaking point.

Anyone else remember that java atrocity "Netcaster"? The thing that would crunch your harddrive for about 5 minutes before crashing. That's about exactly when Netscape jumped the shark.

Re:The old netscape

[gmajor]

Started off using Lynx on 2400 baud :-)

A few months later I finally got my hands on a PPP connection and used Netscape 1.1. Still remember the animated shooting star Netscape that would display when a pag was loading.

Back in the day... when Geocities was called "Beverly Hills Internet" and Webcrawler was the alternative to Yahoo.

Curiously, I also remember when Netscape began to offer serious cash bounties (~$1,000) for anyone who discovered security holes in their browser. I wish Microsoft would do that.

Re:The old netscape

[Ingolfke]

I used gopher... which was invented shortly after the wheel.

Re:The old netscape

[halowolf]

I started off with Mosaic then went from Netscape version 1 to verstion 4.7. I remember that god awful animated blue 'N'. The shooting star was a godsend compared to that.

When Netscape 6 was released I dumped it out of dismay and used IE until Mozilla was released. I have not looked back since. :)

Re:The old netscape

[Quattro Vezina]

I remember the old Netscape. Really bulky and yet I still ran it over IE.

Same here. I ran Netscape 3.01 for such a long time...it was really the best browser out there for quite a while after newer versions came out. I hated both Netscape 4.x and IE so much. Well, 4.0x had one redeeming value: I loved the mail/news client. It's a damn shame that 4.5 destroyed it. Or maybe it was the other away around, with 4.5+ having the better one...honestly, it's been so long I barely remember. It was probably 4.0x that was better tho...

Eventually, technology eventually grew enough that I could no longer really use Netscape 3 for anything, and I was forced to switch to IE 5, which I dumped as soon as Opera 6 came out. Actually, before Opera 6 came out, I had been alternating between IE 5 and Opera 5.12, as the latter didn't render a lot of pages well, but Opera 6 was good enough that I no longer had to use IE except for Windows Update.

Of course, nothing lasts forever...Opera 7 sucked, but I switched to Linux not long before it came out. Things came full circle, as I returned to a Netscape descendant, Galeon 1.2.x (never 1.3.x), which I used for a while, then I switched to Firefox, and I'm now alternating between Firefox and Konqueror.

Re:The old netscape

[tylernt]

All you guys who used to run Netscape on old hardware... hah. I *currently* run Mozilla on my Slackware 10 P133 with 32MB of RAM! Startup is a little slow but once everything except Mozilla swaps out to disk, it's not too bad for googling stuff. Uh, don't try to multitask though.

I also use it on a P90 laptop with 40MB of RAM, and it actually runs faster there. That extra 8MB must make all the difference.

Re:The old netscape

[einhverfr]

I used gopher... which was invented shortly after the wheel.

actually, gophers predate the wheel.

Re:The old netscape

[SolvayGuy]

You were lucky to have cardboard. When I needed to see a web page, I remember waking up at 4AM, walking 15 miles down a gravel road, barefoot, to the nearest telephone pole, climb up to the top, and absorb the data through me tounge, walk the 15 gruling miles back home and spit on some worn cloth.

Re:The old netscape

[NanoGator]

"Dad?

Is that you?"

Asking somebody on Slashdot if they're your father... That raises some interesting questions about your mom.

Re:The old netscape

[metlin]

Why?

She reads Slashdot too? :-p

Re:The old netscape

[bursch-X]

Curiously, I also remember when Netscape began to offer serious cash bounties (~$1,000) for anyone who discovered security holes in their browser. I wish Microsoft would do that.

Microsoft, even with all their money, would be bankrupt in no time if they did that.

Re:The old netscape

[Doctor O]

Come on, now don't you inflate the issue.

Re:The old netscape

[Angostura]

What's new on the Web was hosted as SAIC, I think, required daily reading. Ah yes, I remember when the Cambridge University Trojan Room coffee-pot cam was put on-line, how cool was that?

I'd like to take issue with the original poster's assertion that Netscape was the first major piece of commercial software to go Open... It may have been available for sale, but Netscape would never reveal how many licenses were sold. I don't think you could call it 'major commercial' judged from the commercial revenues.

Re:The old netscape

[fireman sam]

you had gravel?

Re:The old netscape

[benzapp]

You just can't spend the $100 for a new motherboard and 128 megs of ram huh?

Re:The old netscape

[operagost]

I have no pity for Windows 3.1 users when OS/2 was available at the same time - and it ran Windows programs. I could actually write my college papers, then take a break for a little TIE Fighter, then return to the paper - all while I was downloading Fido and Usenet feeds for my offline reader. Pretty sweet in 1994.

Re:The old netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

100 bucks is a lot of cash. If an old computer does the job, there's no need to throw more money at it. It's not like he's playing Doom 3 on it.

Re:The old netscape

[Fade_to_Blah]

It is, he told me so.

Re:The old netscape

[JudgeFurious]

No metlin, that's not your father. I knew your father during the Browser Wars.

A young hacker who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the CEO of Microsoft hunt down and destroy developers working on "other browsers". He betrayed and murdered your father.

Re:The old netscape

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

When I was a lad we didn't have any fancy-pants web pages at all. We had text-based BBS systems, and we liked them! It was a joy to behold the characters streaming in over the high-speed 300 baud modem. Didn't need anything faster since it was too hard to read the text before it scrolled off the screen. Course that's all changed now with you whippersnappers and your graphic modes. Get off my lawn!

Re:The old netscape

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I remember using Netscape 1.0 at university, around 1994-95. Still had to manually connect with Winsock, then connect with Netscape (on a machine running Windows 3.1). What a joy it was when Netscape 2.0 was able to connect directly!

Later, I ran Netscape 3.x on my 486, but switched to IE4 because Netscape 4.x crashed all the time. Switched back to Mozilla at 0.9 something and currently run Firefox.

Re:The old netscape

[bcmm]

No, not funny, mods. Probably true. People profit from finding holes in win32 already, without a bounty.

Re:The old netscape

[mooman]

I liked to tell my students (when I was working in a high school) that there used to be a page called "What is new on the Internet" that would list all new pages to go up.

Sounds like you mean Scott Yanoff's "Special Internet Connections" list. It was a staple back then for newcomers to the net. Here's a snapshot of it from around then:
http://www.civeng.carleton.ca/~nholtz/Yanoff.html

There were a few other places that documented new sites, but I don't recall any that kept a cumulative list like Yanoff's list.

<oldfogey>I was part of NCSA's public best test program for Mosaic prior to Netscape hitting the market. I remember the day I finally had to reluctantly switch over to Netscape when about 1/3 of the sites I visited no longer rendered under Mosaic. The scary part is that I have maintained the same original bookmark file from that time and still use it today in Mozilla. (it's grown to about 287k these days)</oldfogey>

Re:The old netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha!

We used to dream about having gravel roads.

I used to crawl 10 miles on my bleeding knees just to get a gravel road.

Get off my property wastrel!

Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[chrispyman]

I'm serious, why on Earth does AOL even bother with Netscape when they, despite being perfectly able to, not just put Netscape into their flagship AOL software? There's already a million browsers that use the IE rendering engine, so why not do something new for a change!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[keeleysam]

Because M$ pays them A LOT for doing it.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Strictly not true. "M$" paid them a lot for illegally destroying Netscape's marketshare. AOL got the same "right" to integrate IE into their application that anyone on the street has.

The fact was that AOL was not really making any movement to use Mozilla in their client software. Presumably this was because of technical criteria, as they'd invested quite a bit in Mozilla. (speed, memory use vs low-end AOL installed base?)

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Because business people are making technical decisions, even if they don't know what the hell they are doing.

It always ends in disaster.

With Mozilla, you have technical people making technical decisions, and we've ended up with an awsome browser.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Awptimus Prime]

Because by shipping/using IE, AOL becomes one of their "premier partners" or whatever it is called.

A company I once worked for reaped the benefits of choosing to distribute IE over Netscape. While the Netscape people wanted $45 a copy from us per customer, Microsoft agreed to give us their browser for free and entered into an advertising partnership which reaped us millions in revenue. I can only imagine how well this works out for a company of AOL's size. Amazingly, our technical support costs went down. The statistics we gathered of our 700,000 customers showed both Mac and PC systems had less trouble with IE than Netscape. Less calls to suppport equates to saving lots of money for the company.

Then you have to look at what is to gain by an ISP/content provider to spend enormous time and resources developing their own browser in house. It isn't like they would make any money with it. This, I think, has a lot to do with the status of mozilla source. They threw it to the open source community, now it is us to make it better.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Remember that when AOL and MS made this agreement, Mozilla wasn't very good (Slow, bloated, buggy-- but I still used it).

Today we have a very different situation. Firefox rocks my world. My 60 year old father switched a few months ago ON HIS OWN ACCORD. He actually said "Hey Son, you should try out Firefox, it's pretty cool".

The MS/AOL decision might be different if it happened a year from now, when Firefox is even better.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[NutscrapeSucks]

I would say that Mozilla still isn't very good (at least compared to typical Windows apps). Firefox validated the architecture by removing the bloat, highlighting the tech, and being as "IEish" as possible.

Blame Netscape Management for spending many years building a lot of fancy technology only to bury it under a bloated Communicator 4 clone.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Anonymous Coward]

> My 60 year old father switched a few months ago ON HIS OWN ACCORD.

My 62 year old father died about 5 years ago of a massive coronary, you insensitive clod!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[HotshotXV]

You know, as good as Firefox is (and I'm a convert, trust me), I've noticed that 1.0 suffers from a lot of the problems Netscape 4.x did... it seems to be really unstable at times, especially when dealing with a lot of graphics and text. Now, I'm not saying M$ is any better - IE is the worst piece of software known to man - but I hope Firefox doesn't run into the same problems that the pre-mozilla based stuff did.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Anonymous Coward]

h4 ha. he should have us3d firefox, then he wouldn't have malware corrupt his system wtf LOL!!11!!!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, you could integrate Mozilla instead of either Netscape or IE, and get the whole browser for free, rebadge whatever you want, and you won't have to sell your soul to get it.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[NanoGator]

"There's already a million browsers that use the IE rendering engine, so why not do something new for a change!"

You think AOL customers are going to be happy when some pages don't load correctly? The web is not where you want to do something 'new'.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[westlake]

AOL's customer base is for all practical purposes 100% Windows and has shown no interest whatever in a more complex/more sophisticated browser.
What interests AOL is the distribution of AOL branded content, and for that purpose IE serves perfectly well.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Anonymous Coward]

because the people who run AOL all have downs syndrome and they make the internet as slow as they are!!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[IANAAC]

The web is not where you want to do something 'new'.

The web has always been a place to do new things.

And we're still seeing evolution when it comes to content.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[orrinrule]

Because business people are making technical decisions

I would say it is because business people are making business decisions. It seems to be in AOL's best interest to continue to use IE for their main browser. AOL did use Mozilla code in it's Compuserve and Communicator email programs, I don't think they have given up on it.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[RangerRick98]

You think AOL customers are going to be happy when some pages don't load correctly?

Do you think AOL customers aren't already used to that? I used to be stuck on AOL, and the IE-based browser they used in their client software was the WORST thing I have ever used in terms of rendering pages properly and stability.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[toiletmonster]

my dad is 70 and he switched to firefox a year ago. all on his own. not my suggestion. read about it in the newspaper or something.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Awptimus Prime]

But selling your soul == Profit!

Spending money to develop something you can't sell == no proft!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

[Anonymous Coward]

The dirty capitalist pigs. They should prefer keeping their soul, over profits.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The First Netscape was revolutionary

[dancingmad]

While the older versions of Netscape is the butt of many a joke, nothing beats the electricity I felt when I first started browsing the web with Netscape. I mean, back then, browsing with Netscape, I knew that the web was going to be something huge (I remember playing silly games on Nintendo's web site). Netscape had a huge hand in creating that and the web as we know it. There were browsers before (not to mention IRC, Gopher, etc.) but Netscape helped bring the WWW and the Internet to the masses.

More power to Netscape's heir, Firefox, which is set to take the web crown back and help perfect the web experience Netscape pioneered.

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

much better than hand-fixed articles from usenet so they'd run through uudecode properly

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days. Nothing like spending 5 minutes fucking around just to look at 1 dirty picture.

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'll trade Gmail invites for anything on my Amazon.com wishlist.

You have GOT to be kidding, spammer. Gmail invites are a fucking dime a dozen these days. Let me guess, you are just discovering orkut.com too?

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[metlin]

Yeah, reminds me of the line from JWZ's website -

When we started this company [Netscape], we were out to change the world. And we did that. Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But we were the ones who actually did it. When you see URLs on grocery bags, on billboards, on the sides of trucks, at the end of movie credits just after the studio logos -- that was us, we did that. We put the Internet in the hands of normal people. We kick-started a new communications medium. We changed the world.

Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses.

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[808140]

You, sir, were obviously not acquainted with Perl.

Yes, early versions of perl were well suited for one thing only (or at least, it was all I used them for). Automatic downloading of porn from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. I would start the thing on my shell account in the early morning, come back in the afternoon and have hundreds of poor quality dirty pictures to look at.

When I heard that some people were putting movies on the internet, I couldn't believe it. Just getting 50 pics took me most of the day to download using zmodem.

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

[TomV]

Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses..

At the time Netscape appeared, I'd used the www by telnet-ing to info.cern.ch (maimum, what was it, 20 users?), and, in my Uni job, by using Mosaic running on a UNIX server via an x-windows client, again, with capacity for very few concurrent users at our site. To be honest, Veronica was a lot more useful at the time. And WAIS was more powerful. With Mosaic, at least the version we were using, the pages rendered from the top downwards, so text below an image waited for the image before rendering. This made the few graphical pages around very hard to use.

Then some people on a BBS i frequented mentioned a Next Big Thing called Netscape, then at version 0.8-something, and it was staggering. First, all the text and links rendered, with empty boxes where the images would go. Only then did it start filling in the pictures. This made navigation much, much faster than with Mosaic.

Plus Netscape at that point fitted on a floppy, and ran from that floppy, so it lived in my shirt pocket and revolutionised my internet use.

Until v3, Netscape was *the* browser. By v4 it had gone horribly wrong.

The old logo

[evildan21]

Call me nostalgic but sometimes I miss the old netscape logo...ya know, the N that would rise and fall as the page loaded. Happy b-day netscape! -d

Re:The old logo

[supersat]

Have it in animated gif form!

Re:The old logo

[Schwarzchild]

"Call me nostalgic but sometimes I miss the old netscape logo...ya know, the N that would rise and fall as the page loaded."

Gee, I miss the old old Netscape logo that was simply the Mozilla monster exhaling flame as the page loaded.

Re:The old logo

[Anonymous Coward]

That logo had to be replaced quickly because some women were "disturbed" by the throbbing 'N'. Netscape held a contest for a new logo and came out with the one where a star zipped across the logo.

I still find it hilarious that some broads thought it was throbbing. And they say us guys have all the dirty thoughts.

First?!?

[bay43270]

...but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser)...

What was wrong with Mosaic?

Re:First?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

What was wrong with gopher??

Re:First?!?

[typhoonius]

NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen, who, of course, created Netscape Communications, so I guess it's all in the family.

Re:First?!?

[Mr. Hankey]

Apparently nothing as far as Microsoft was concerned. IE was originally a customized version of Spry Mosaic, as a part of one of the most monumental fleecings of all time (Altamira notwithstanding.) Microsoft promised to pay a portion of their profits to Spry in return for the browser code, and then gave it (IE) away. Any percent of zero is of course still zero.

To answer your question though, I do remember Netscape having far more rendering features than Mosaic. I seem to recall that background images especially were more interesting in Netscape. A fair amount of the features were non-standard in the same manner as IE's MSHTML extensions though. Many a webmaster would say that we're still recovering from Netscape-specific tags.

Re:First?!?

[mblase]

What was wrong with Mosaic?

It was hard to use with the default preferences, IMO. I don't even remember the specifics, but I first used Mosaic for thirty minutes and gave up on it; I first used Netscape 0.9 and became almost instantly obsessed. Somehow, it was just easier, more intuitive, and more comfortable to use.

Re:First?!?

[grotgrot]

What was wrong with Mosaic?

The single biggest problem with Mosaic was that it wouldn't display any of the page until it had downloaded every single image and worked out what size they were. IIRC it also only used one network connection to do the image downloads. The big thing that made people say "wow" about Netscape was it showing you the page and then filling in the images, reflowing the page as necessary. That resulted in people dropping Mosaic real quick.

Mosaic was also most at home on Unix. That was all fine for people like me who used Sun Workstations at work, but most didn't have that. The Windows and Mac versions lagged the Unix version, and had to have a lot of different code due to OS differences (those were the days of Win16 for example).

IIRC Netscape was also the first browser to implement tables and do a decent job of it. Within a month or less of the first release of Netscape, I didn't know anyone who used Mosaic any more. There were some more releases of Mosaic by uiuc, but most of their browser and server people had gone to Netscape.

Re:First?!?

[Marlor]

Apparently nothing as far as Microsoft was concerned. IE was originally a customized version of Spry Mosaic, as a part of one of the most monumental fleecings of all time (Altamira notwithstanding.) Microsoft promised to pay a portion of their profits to Spry in return for the browser code, and then gave it (IE) away. Any percent of zero is of course still zero.

It was Spyglass Mosaic, rather than Spry Mosaic that licensed their code to Microsoft.

It is a shame that they settled with Microsoft (for $8M) in 1997, becuse MS started claiming that IE was an intrinsic part of Windows soon afterwards, so Spyglass would have had a case that they deserved royalties from all copies of Windows sold.

Re:First?!?

[ayn0r]

...or Arena?

Re:First?!?

[Trejkaz]

Indeed. The name Mozilla is a contraction of "Mosaic killer."

Re:First?!?

[Mr. Hankey]

So it was, that's what I get for relying on my rusty memory. One has to wonder if Microsoft would have gone so far with Mosaic code had they not paid the settlement. Perhaps we'd have a GUI'ed www or lynx instead.

Re:First?!?

[Darren Winsper]

Actually, Netscape didn't reflow the page as needed. Instead, it started simultaneous downloads and would put an appropriate sized box in place once it knew the size of the image.

Try it for yourself, this behaviour was still present in Netscape 4.

Re:First?!?

[Albanach]

You'll still find Mosaic credited if you loook in 'help > about' on Internet Explorer

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Re:First?!?

[isorox]

IIRC, Mosaic still came with compuserve as late as Feb 95, as did Compuserves crappy homepage builder.

Re:First?!?

[kerp11]

yeah but who is stupid enough to agree to a deal like that without looking at the business plan in the first place. come on if you are stupid to do a "freebie" deal then at least make sure the contract gets you SOMETHING if there is no money involved.

i dont know the full extent of the contract or situation, but having dealt with situations like this before - its always worth making sure you think a bit "outside the box" before agreeing to "share profit"

Re:First?!?

[realkiwi]

<body bkground="white.gif">

for example.

I used mosaic on VMS but netscape 0.96b ran on Mac OS 7

Re:First?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not download it, run it for a day and let us know what you think. :)

Re:First?!?

[syd2000]

MMMM...1993. That's when I ran Netscape 0.96b on a Mac IIsi with 8 MB RAM and System 7.1. Blew me away, made me quit Gopher, get out of Mechanical Engineering and pursue web surfing, among other things...

Re:First?!?

[Wordsmith]

Now it's a Spyware Mosaic.

Re:First?!?

[spoonyfork]

NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen

What if Marc didn't actually program Mosaic but instead took the project along with some developers to form Mosaic/Netscape? I'm not knocking Marc's vision but to say Mosaic was created by him is a bit of a misnomer. Poor Eric Bina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_web_browser
http://livinginternet.com/w/wi_mosaic.htm
http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html
Google search for ncsa mosaic history

Re:First?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a monthly fee, plus a royalty. So Spyglass didn't end up totally shafted.

Plus, MS ended up settling with them (for $8M) after some legal threats anyway.

Re:First?!?

[Reziac]

Thanks for the link, I'll be adding more to my stable of browsers :)

I sometimes use Mosaic 0.99, mainly to check how a page degrades for text browsers (it renders close enough for that).

Re:First?!?

[realkiwi]

Ah! another old fogey on /.

=:D

Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape? World Wide Web. Bleah. I remember the good old days when Gopher was king. That was perfect -- none of this graphical mumbo jumbo and "tags". No Septembers that never ended.

Re:Go Gopher!

[RLiegh]

Tell me about it. And 'google'? WTF is a 'google'? Bah! If I can't find it on Jughead or Veronica, it's not worth finding!

Re:Go Gopher!

[Rikus]

There's no reason http can't be used in a similar way.. it just isn't.
I'm always disappointed to see web pages becoming more and more difficult to navigate, all the while growing in byte count for the same amout of actual content.
I've played around with a gopher server, and I would use it for real stuff if I thought anyone would actually use it.

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Bah! If I can't find it on Jughead or Veronica, it's not worth finding!

Your memory is either fucked, or you are just pretending to have been "in the scene". ARCHIE and Veronica, not Jughead, moron. And if you weren't on the 'net back in the BITNET days, you are a fucking newbie so shut the hole in your head, bitch.

Re:Go Gopher!

[RLiegh]

Your memory is either fucked, or you are just pretending to have been "in the scene". ARCHIE and Veronica, not Jughead, moron. And if you weren't on the 'net back in the BITNET days, you are a fucking newbie so shut the hole in your head, bitch.

Le sigh

Just on the very off chance you were correct about my memory, I did a very quick google search and, lo and behold:

JUGHEAD

Jughead is a version of Veronica that has been designed to search gopher menus at a restricted set of gopher holes (e.g., only documents located on the home gopher or only a collection of gopher servers at a particular University). Jughead has many selective uses on gopher, but unlike Veronica, you won't find his name on a Gopher root menu. He is what Ed Krol likes to call "the searcher you never see." He's usually there, however; just look for a search option labeled something like this:

Search all the Gopher menus at this site

That's Jughead, Archie's good buddy, (or, if you prefer, Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display -- another "stretch"). You'll see Jughead implemented all over gopherspace, because he allows quick and effective searching of specific sites.

Now, tell me again, who wasn't where my flame-spewing pal?

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, my apologies. Jughead appears to have existed. But I was too old skewl to learn about new tech like Jughead. BITNET and uucp are the domain from whence I come.

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody that is old enough to have been on the 'net in those days would talk in the same fashion that you do. Your ruse is easily uncovered!

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

You deserve all the flames you get for saying gay shit like "le sigh."

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, hanging out on the Unix-to-Unix-Copy-Program was lots of fun. (hint: it still is called USENET...)

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? September just ended a whole fortnight ago. Did you miss the memo or something?

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this get to 5, Insightful? Gopher died when they started dicking around with the license - the WWW is free. The "September that never ended" is a reference to USENET, not the WWW. This guy clearly doesn't know what he is talking about.

Re:Go Gopher!

[jaavaaguru]

No Septembers that never ended.

Huh? it's October today. In fact it's been October for the last 13.5 days in the UK. September ended a while ago.

Re:Go Gopher!

[TyrionEagle]

Gopher?!?!

Archie and FTP! Now that was the Internet!

Re:Go Gopher!

[tepples]

Huh? it's October today. In fact it's been October for the last 13.5 days in the UK

It appears you never read about the joke.

Re:Go Gopher!

[tepples]

Gopher? He's not in the book (WHOOOOOAAAAAAAAA... Ugh!)

One-year-olds and their video habits.

Re:Go Gopher!

[danheretic]

You strange people. I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'll just post on my BBS and see if the dozen "home computer" users in my area know anything about this.

Re:Go Gopher!

[Anonymous Coward]

Archie...Bah! Nothing rules like WAIS!

Library of Congress still uses a version of it...so it is good enough for me.

for nostagic purposes...

[trance29]

is there an netscape archive of all the netscape versions released? it would be interesting to run the old version for memory sakes...

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[JazzXP]

I've often even wanted that for testing purposes. It's amazing how many people still use NS 4.7

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[aftk2]

Check it out.

A lot more than just Netscape in there. Very, very fascinating.

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[nbvb]

http://sillydog.org/narchive/full123.php

http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive/index.ht ml

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[Anonymous Coward]

it would be interesting to run the old version for memory sakes...

I believe you meant memory leaks.

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[Izago909]

Netscape 0.9x thru 3.04 and 3.04 Gold thru Current

For the Mac nuts out there. Be gentle, it an Earthlink account.

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[zogger]

I still run a quadra (mac 7.5) and a 280c powerbook (7.0) that have netscape 2 on them*. But I have since added iCab, which is a much better browser on those old 68k machines. I also have a couple of IIcis I think they are, but been so long since I booted them I forget what's on them now, but I know they surfed when I was using them. I even used to get decent real audio on the quadra back when that app was fairly new, nowadays though no one streams any real audio 2 I think it was. And IRC and FTP and gopher always worked fine.

*once in awhile, they are old machines I gave to my GF after I cleaned them up and tweaked them a scosh. The quadra with 64 megs ram is quite a decent surfer really as long as the pages aren't too javaised or scripted to timbuktu. I even ran it as a server for a while using quid pro quo server software. The 280c PB I use as a "storm" computer when the power goes out, all I have for it is a car batt adapter so I run it off an old truck battery with it's built in 19.2 modem. it works fine for that purpose the few times a year I have to.

I *like* hanging on to my nostalgia, I still have my 512k and it still boots! The floppy based OS still works! Well, last time I tried it, I admit it's about 9 months now since the last time.

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worth mentioning that in addition to the sites already listed in replies, you can install as many versions of Netscape as you want without interfering with other programs, as long as you install them in separate directories. And to some extent, you can run several versions simultaneously. The same cannot be said about Explorer...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

[FunkyRat]

perhaps we could all encapsulate our websites with the tag?

Re:To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

[Masami Eiri]

I just have to say, you made me laugh too damn much. Blink tag, sheesh... what were they thinking?

Re:To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

[dcam]

I first read your comment as suggesting we encapsulate our websites with the tag. I was trying to get a mental image of what that might look like.

Re:To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there is one valid use of the Blink tag..

Schroedinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.

Netscape Gold

[4cop2c]

Remind me those good old days with Netscape Gold... I just hang with it till it drops...

I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[genericacct]

Is Netscape evil or saintly? I can't keep it straight. They broke W3C standards and are owned by AOL, but Mozilla doesn't suck anymore.

If only Slashdot could tell me what to think.

Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[RLiegh]

"Mozilla rools, Netscape drools"; remember that simple maxim and you'll never go wrong!

Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[Anonymous Coward]

The used to be evil, but then they released there source code. AOL is always evil. Mozilla is never evil.

Netscape is owned by AOL, but is not as evil as they are (though they are more evil then they used to be).

Just use Mozilla or Firefox and ignore Netscape.

Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[ctr2sprt]

This one's easy. When Moz went open source, it became distinct from Netscape/AOL. So it's safe to like it. NS should be regarded with the same sort of vague sadness as a good idea ruined by incompetence. Most Slashdotters choose to blame AOL for NS's demise, even though this makes no sense. The safer course there is just to blame MS. It has some actual basis in reality and, to paraphrase the old saw about buying from IBM, nobody ever got modded down for talking shit about MS.

We look forward to your return to the Collective.

Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[NutscrapeSucks]

When Moz went open source, it became distinct from Netscape/AOL

Mozilla went Open Source in 1999(?), but has only been independant from AOL for the last year or so.

Before then Mozilla.org wasn't really a "org" but more of a front for Netscape -- there wasn't much if any "open" decision-making going on and the product direction was almost entirely determined by Netscape employees. You may also note that Mozilla has been gaining in popularity over the last year.

Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[Darren Winsper]

Mozilla's source code was released in March 1998 (Or around that time). Before then, mozilla.org existed for a short length of time (i.e. a couple of months).

the old days

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh the old days.
I remember running the .9X betas on my SS2 running 4.1.3U1. The best part was having to modify libc to support DNS lookups, as sun out of the box supported yp (nis) and hosts.

obligatory: In my day we didnt need no stinking nsswitch.conf.

-- C

Re:the old days

[Anonymous Coward]

And if Solaris wasn't a deprecated piece of trash, you still wouldn't need nsswitch.conf!

In many ways (except for lack of features), SunOS was infinately better.

DevEdge is offline

[Codeala]

Just in time for DevEdge to be shutdown too...

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article =5 381

Whats up with that?

Found the original program

[tao_of_biology]

For those who haven't seen it, or those who want to relive it, I found Netscape 0.9 beta (from 10-27-1994) here.

I haven't actually tried running running it, but the links seems to be working.

I wonder if slashdot is renderable under Netscape 0.9...

Re:Found the original program

[Anonymous Coward]

379kb? Is that possible?

Re:Found the original program

[rueger]

I wonder if slashdot is renderable under Netscape 0.9...

Not even close!

Re:Found the original program

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Holy fuck, I remember trying to download that fucker over my 2400bps modem.

It was faster to walk to the library, download it over the T-1, save it to floppy, walk back to my dorm and install it.

Re:Found the original program

[number]

Might want to link to a few mirrors.

Re:Found the original program

[mixmasterjake]

I just tried it. Ah, the memories. I remember downloading this along with trumpet winsock - it was like a new world!

I just gave it a quick trial and here's some interesting results:

slashdot.org - doesn't work (promps for a file download)

netscape.com - loads, then immediately crashes the browser

microsoft.com - loads fine, but looks plain !!

Re:Found the original program

[BladeMelbourne]

You should check out Dillo - great for old boxes that dont have the grunt for Mozilla. The binary is about 350KB. It is still being developed... the latest release was in July 2004.

http://www.dillo.org/

Re:Found the original program

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if slashdot is renderable under Netscape 0.9...

It's not even renderable under Firefox. The text often overlaps the menu.

But maybe it is not Slashdot's fault, I get this problem on Froogle as well.

Re:Found the original program

[NanoGator]

"microsoft.com - loads fine"

Set your faces to stun!

Re:Found the original program

[onion2k]

But http://www.bbc.co.uk is actually just about usable..

10 years, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps its time I updated.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you will about Netscape but they gave us JavaScript.

Netscape 5

[Anonymous Coward]

but twice (by being the first major commercial program to go open source)."

Yeah, but wasn't that second attempt mostly abandoned because the Netscape code sucked? This is why there was a closed source Netscape 4, an Open Source Netscape 6 (Based on Mozilla), and there never was a 'Netscape 5'.

link?

[mschoolbus]

Anyone have a link to download the first public beta?

Use that for a week, maybe i'd be thankful for what I have ;-)

Re:link?

[Bambi Dee]

maybe

The Giant Pulsing "N"

[rueger]

God I loved it! For me that was the Internet!

Re:The Giant Pulsing "N"

[Anonymous Coward]

What a coincidence. "Giant" and "Pulsing" are two words that come to mind when I think of the internet

Re:The Giant Pulsing "N"

[Zork the Almighty]

Because nothing else would load over your slow modem ?

Re:The Giant Pulsing "N"

[sscanf]

It looked to me (and my co-workers at the time) like a giant, breathing N. I still rememer the first time I saw it. What a gas. It was soon replaced by the shadowy/spacey N (which I like better, but it would be fun to see that breathing N again).

It was in that browser/Solaris that I experienced the first big US terror incident: Oaklahoma City. I think I was on Opera/Linux for 9/11.

You know what this means!

[Anonymous Coward]

Next year is the 10th anniversary of the first telling of this joke:

Q: What were Jerry Garcia's last words?
A: "Netscape opened at WHAT?"

Feel the Original: Dejavu Emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

For the youngins, you can use a Netscape emulator (and Mosaic and early IE) to feel what it was like. It's fun to see what sites do and see if they even load.

I'm probably /.'ing it with this, but it does say "Sorry, due to heavy load on the server, browsing is quite slow. On the positive side, it makes the experience even more authentic.."

I especially love "You probably forgot the "http://" part. Remember: the old browsers did not provide that service... Give it another try!" when you enter a URL without the http:// component.

Re:Feel the Original: Dejavu Emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the website has always said that they were experiencing high loads. I visit the site every now and then (for the past year or so) and it's always had that up.

speed...

[interactive_civilian]

Well, for my own personal anecdote, Netscape seemed much faster than Mosaic.

When I started browsing the internet in the Hershey Medical Center computer lab back in my high school days (my mother worked there, so I went in and used the computers), I was using Mosaic on Macintosh Quadra 700s and eventually PowerMac 6100s...

Although I can no longer remember the details I do remember Netscape being better than Mosaic, and it was because of speed and perhaps interface IIRC.

Can anyone back me up on this or am I delusional (or both)?

Re:speed...

[Alien Being]

One of the big advantages Netscape had over Mosaic was multithreaded page downloads.

Evil company...

[FiReaNGeL]

AOL completely killed any glimpse of hope Netscape had to win the 'browser war'... imagine if Firefox came with AIM, ads that pop up everywhere, installed 2-3 advertising gimmicks, put links everywhere about itself... and didn't have any features over IE. I completely stopped using Netscape, which was by far my favorite browser at the time, when they released the AOL version (6 I think?).

Netscape is dead, long live Netscape! (in Firefox's form!)

If only . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

by being the first major commercial program to go open source

Now if only an industry leading piece of software would go open source, rather than a runner up/has been/never was, I would find that something worth celebrating, and I would certainly enjoy seeing how mankind devises a new way of containing and farming pigs.

Re:Hello

[NutscrapeSucks]

I will give them that -- JavaScript is an excellent scripting language with a cool prototype-based object system. It's a shame that the opensource world embraced things like Perl (outside of its domains) and PHP (anywhere) when there's been an distributable JavaScript implementaiton for years.

(Although JS was based on a Sun language called ... Self).

On the other hand, Netscape also gave us window.open() and netscape.com was the first site to use advertising popups.

Re:sigh..

[BladeMelbourne]

4.8 hung around too long?

We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Eloquence]

Firefox is gaining some momentum - maybe enough to make web developers take note. The Mozilla project also has two other great Firefox-like (small single-purpose applications) initiatives, Sunbird and Thunderbird.

The important thing right now is that we use this momentum, and that we continue to innovate. Here's some issues I believe are important:

• SVG support. It's incomplete - but I think it is unwise not to have at least some level of SVG support in mainline Firefox 1.0 builds. "Build it, and they will come": both web and Mozilla developers. SVG is really a key technology for next-generation web design based on open standards. As an example, Wikipedia has a nice extension called EasyTimeline for rendering graphical timelines. These are currently ugly, non-zoomable PNGs -- SVG would be perfect here, as it would allow timelines with a changing level of detail as you zoom in. Much of the stuff that is currently being done with Flash can be done with SVG.
• Leverage XUL. Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed: easy, powerful, instantly deployable web applications. In my opinion, XUL should get a lot more exposure within Firefox - both the product and the website. Make a promise to XUL developers: If you use XUL to write open source applications, and it meets our quality standards, we will add it to the default Firefox bookmarks, and promote it on our website.
• New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice, and some other cool navigation tools ("skip to next website from another domain than the current one" etc.). There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.
• Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

Now, if you really want a glimpse of the future, imagine, if you will, that a HTML textarea worked like SubEthaEdit and allowed you to invite other users to edit with your collaboratively, in real-time, a wiki page or weblog entry. But even this really just scratches the surface. The point is, the browser is an immensely important platform. With Firefox, we now have the chance to give an incredible amount of real power to end users. It's not "just a browser" - it's one of the key components of future information and collaboration devices.

Congratulations to the Mozilla project for getting us where we are right now. We still have a long way to go. I hope in 10 years, open source technology will be used by virtually everyone to access the rapidly growing digital commons.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[WankersRevenge]

Firefox is gaining some momentum - maybe enough to make web developers take note

Just to let you know ... I work in the internet division of a major sports network. Let me just say, that in my department all developers and engineers are not only aware of Firefox, but use it primarily as their browser of choice.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Brandybuck]

Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed

Except that it only works on Mozilla browsers. I don't care how open source Mozilla is, these kinds of applications only perpetuate the idea that one must standardize on a particular browser. This application-is-the-standard mindset must go.

Right now my work is deploying IE web apps as fast as they possibly can. It's not annoying that I have to switch over to IE to use these, it's annoying that I have to switch over from my currently open browser to begin with, regardless of brand or openness.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.

Dude, you need to cut down on the pr0n, don't you think?

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[fbg111]

New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents

Why does everyone continue to overlook Opera on this issue? It has a very clean and efficient system for managing tons of simultaneously open docs. You set Opera preferences to hide all tabs, then scroll through them with Ctrl-Tab. It's perfectly natural for folks accustomed to tabbing through apps with Alt-Tab, except it pops up a verticle, scrollable list of open docs, rather than a horizontal list of confusingly un-named app icons. So many people proclaim that Mozilla does tabbed browsing "the right way", but frankly I think Opera's is much better.

Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

To keep Firefox lean, combine this with your second point and make the editing controls a XUL app, and bookmark it. Or encourage sites like wikis to provide their own XUL apps clearly accessible on their front pages. I'm not certain the "average user" is someone who uses text editors to update wikis, anyway.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[TrancePhreak]

"...At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice..."

The browser I use (Avant) allows you to have a vertical tab bar. I'm not really fond of the idea, but if you have that many tabs open I could see why you want it.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Tim C]

Leverage XUL.

Two counter points:

1) Using any browser-specific tech is, imho, a bad idea. I don't care if it's IE-specific or Mozilla-specific, you're annoying and possibly locking-out users of other browsers. Perhaps you don't care, but I want the sites I work on to be usable by as many people as possible

2) Eeeewwwww, you said leverage!!! ;-)

Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean.

No I'm not. I'm thinking "keep it well designed and componentized (at the code level if not the "user-level") to make development and maintainability easier and help keep bugs to a minimum". I'm also thinking "at the same time, don't shy-away from including useful features just because they'll increase resource requirements". Modern PCs have more resources than the average user will ever need, might as well make use of them sensibly.

Oh, and slightly off-topic, but as you mentioned it, I finally got round to downloading and installing Thunderbird again. Something I don't understand at all - mail import for Outlook, Oulook Express, Communicator 4 and Eudora, but not Mozilla? Ah well, maybe next version...

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[rainman_bc]

Ditto here. easier to code in FF and then port the app for IE, rather than the other way around.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to stop MS from implementing XUL in IE if it wants. The standard is open too, not just the source.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[jonwil]

The right answer is to use something that is browser neutral in the first place.

I know some people dont like it but web apps (including most of the sort of things currently written with various browser-specific stuff like ActiveX) are one of the things JAVA is very good at.
There are some reasons JAVA isnt there for application software yet but for web stuff, its great. (well great compared to all alternatives anyway).

And, despite what some here like to say, it is Open. Anyone can come along and write a JAVA VM if they want.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[tootlemonde]

But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

The probem here is illustrated by the fact that there are practically no text editors in the space between Notepad and Word. Once you get past a basic set of editing features, users' requirements become both highly sophisticated and highly specialized. In fact, users' deem even sophisticated word processors insufficient. They want their word processor to be part of an integrated office suite where each component is loaded with features.

Variations of this problem affect all of the enhancements you suggest. A few of the required features is not sufficient to get people to use them for real-world problems. The argument that "it's better than nothing" doesn't seem to fly.

The solution at one time was Java applets. When they were introduced back in the days of 486s, they were bloated and slow and haven't been seen much since. However, now with lots of bandwidth, fast processors and cheap RAM, the times are propitious for their return. However, there's no sign anywhere of a resurgence of applets.

Other possible approaches include specialized plug-ins, enhancing Javascript, adding whole programming languages like Tcl or Perl or browsers designed for one specialized task like content management. The problem here is that none of them offer the range of programmings options that Java does or have the base of programmers. Thus they have all the problems of Java applets without offering a better solution.

Applets seem like the most general solution but as long as they remain ahead of their time, specialized built-in enhancements to the browser are likely to remain underpowered and ignored by the users.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Baloney -- XUL apps break with minor Mozilla revs -- it's not a standard, it's a moving implementation.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[afree87]

WMV breaks with new revisions, but VLC implemented it anyway.

Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Brandybuck]

XUL is not a standard. It may be open but you need more than that to be a standard. HTML is a standard, CSS is a standard, ECMAscript is a standard, and even Java is a standard. XUL is not.

Nice link!

[interactive_civilian]

Man, that link has everything. I might try to take CyberDog for a spin again for the first time in many years.

/nostalgia

bridge out

[Doc Ruby]

There has been little water under Netscape's bridge since AOL bought it. (Insert Troll joke here.) When it was upsetting paradigms with its flawed, yet inspiring new paradigm, the water was flowing, pushing many a mill. But the water has been more and more stagnant for at least the past 4 or 5 years. Where's Jim Clark's desperate need for the next big thing when we need it? His new boat can't be that big, that it's somehow big enough.

Netscape Navigator 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

If memory serves, that release introduced the world to Java (browser integrated), JavaScript, plugins, frames, SSL, and cookies, all about a year and a half after the founding of the company.

Now *that* was a major feature release.

Re:Netscape Navigator 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, cookies worked in the 1.x series, but other than that, Navigator 2.0 was definitely the most revolutionary browser ever made. Oh yeah, it also introduced changing font colors in the middle of a page. Many of the things we see in today's sites are founded on the principles of Navigator 2.0.

Re:Yeah but...

[ZX81]

Works fine here...no problems and the rss feeds show up fine in Sage...

Screenshots and a Mirror

[Adam9]

Screenshots: 1 2 3

Mirror: nscape09.zip

Ah, the good ol' days..

Re:Screenshots and a Mirror

[BladeMelbourne]

.

http://users.tpg.com.au/meglet/nS09b.jpg

When I'm not using Linux, I use Windows 3.11
It's the most stable version of Windows I have ever used. And I have tried most versions...

;-)

Re:Screenshots and a Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have stability problems with Windows, you obviously are either very stupid, or even stupider.

The funny thing is

[BCW2]

When I go online in Windows at home (rare) I still use Netscape, even upgraded it to 7.1, because I'm a cantankerous old fart. At work or in Linux I always use Firefox, never liked IE, never thought Gates had the right to tell me what had to be on a box he didn't pay for, running on an electric bill he didn't pay. That feeling hasn't changed. The average user couldn't find a way to start it on my machine (XP). Hell, I used Lotus Smart suite for 8 years, just to avoid office, at less than half the price. Now? OO, no matter which OS is running, WinXP/RH9/Suse 9.1.

Re:The funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

never thought Gates had the right to tell me what had to be on a box he didn't pay for

You paid for it (presumably). He doesn't dictate what goes on with your machine: you do when you buy software.

Re:The funny thing is

[tepples]

He doesn't dictate what goes on with your machine: you do when you buy software.

Gates dictates what computer makers are allowed to sell, starting from the first day that OEMs were banned from selling Windows/Linux dual-boot machines.

Re:The funny thing is

[BCW2]

Thats why I build my own now. The white box store I work at will install whatever you ask for.

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

[goneutt]

I had to look, just out of curiosity. I have a heavily mod'd host file that keeps 90% of ad-servers off my browser, and the google blocker was sounding like a bag of microwave popcorn. I clicked on one news link and there was a sliver of article and more pops, plus those dammned overlays that keep making me ask why I havn't uninstalled the macromedia plugins.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

You want Firefox to become OmniWeb.

netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[Mustang Matt]

Is it bad that the netscape page:
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/storymain.jsp?num ber=1 doesn't render correctly in the latest firefox?

Re:netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't even render correctly in Netscape 7.2. :P

Re:netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[rainman_bc]

Now that's pretty ironic eh...

Re:netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[The Wicked Priest]

Looks good in Firebird 0.8...

Re:netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[PoprocksCk]

Firebird 0.8? No such thing.

Re:netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

[The Wicked Priest]

Quite right, I should've said Firebird 0.7. I guess I was further behind than I thought.

New "My Yahoo" page says Netscape recommended

[jangobongo]

Since the "My Yahoo" page has upgraded to use RSS, I am trying the beta version on a Mac OS 9.2.2 (sorry, I'm behind the times, I guess) with IE 5.1. My experience with the new "My Yahoo" page is that it has been very buggy. I would switch back to the old version if I could just figure out how.

Now, today, I started receiving the error message: "You are currently using Netscape UNKNOWN. For the best experience using Yahoo!, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version of Netscape. Get the latest version now." So it would seem that in order to use the new page properly they are requiring the latest Netscape.

now it's news

[vm]

I posted this to Slashdot 12 hours ago and it was rejected. But now that every other site on the planet is carrying it, suddenly it's an important story. So much for independent thinking.
What a bunch of knuckleheads!

Re:now it's news

[ggvaidya]

That's just the way the Slashdot system works, buddy - centralised control for a better experience for all. If you're interested in a more free-as-in-freedom-for-all experience, try the alternatives. [/shameless plug]

aging process

[scottking]

for ten years old, it sure looks 30... good thing it has a firey grandson to carry on the legacy.

Colors? You insensitive clod!

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was your age I had to paint the web page on cardboard with watercolors

I had to paint the web page on cardboard in watermonochrome - and orange at that.

looking back..

[apostrophesemicolon]

I remember when I first time browse the Internet..
It was in 1995, using the Netscape Navigator I typed my first URL: www.yahoo.com. For some reason the front page of Y! was grey instead of white..
you could probably imagine how excited I was when i saw that light beaming across the N logo..
I thought to my self, what a wonderful world wide web... (okay that was exaggerated, but it was on the same level)!!
Happy Bday Mister Navigator!

Re:looking back..

[nmk]

Yeah, I remember the first time I used the Internet as well. I remember thinking, just one more line and I'll be able to see her nipple.

Great memories of efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, how could I forget the good ol' days of regularly surfing with over 100 Netscape Communicator windows up simultaneously on a Pentium Pro with just 32 megs of RAM. No other browser could even come close. Talk about great efficiency of the browser. Or perhaps it was a testament of the memory management of Windows NT. I actually started using Netscape in the 1.x / early 2.x era, but the 3.x and 4.x series were the best ever.

Let us not forget CERN and NCSA Mosaic

[davidwr]

Let us not forget CERN's early work with the www client and wwwd server. In particular, the work of Tim Berners-Lee. That link includes some web history.

Let us not also forget NCSA Mosaic, which became a "killer app" in the early/mid 1990s, before being spun off as SpyGlass.

My memory is faulty, but I believe more than half of the NCSA team left the project and formed NetScape. Can anyone correct this?

The web as we know it also owes a debt to previous research in hypertext systems dating back decades, as well as existing document-markup systems.

To those who keep Mozilla alive today:
I salute you, but do take too much pride in yourselves:
Never forget that you stand on the shoulders of giants.

Re:Let us not forget CERN and NCSA Mosaic

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget Omniweb, either, which was a quality browser for the NeXTSTEP platform well before Netscape appeared.

Better yet, Omni are still going strong - Omniweb 5.1 (OS X) is one hell of a good browser.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 shark jump reference Usually they're lame, but this one almost made me choke on a pretzel, pass out, and hit my head on the coffee table... (I kid)

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 shark jump reference Usually they're lame, but this one almost made me choke on a pretzel, pass out, and hit my head on the coffee table... (I kid)

Mr. President, is that you?

never mentions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the Netscape portal (which never mentions the Netscape browser) is celebrating the anniversary.

a href="/redir.adp?_dci_url=http%3a%2f%2fchannels%2e netscape%2ecom%2fns%2fbrowsers%2fdefault%2ejsp&_wp s_s=sbl%5flll1%5fu1%5f1">Download Netscape 7.2/FONT

Next release

[Anonymous Coward]

They can use this as an excuse to call the next release Netscape Navigator 10.

Re:Next release

[Bull999999]

They can use this as an excuse to call the next release Netscape Navigator 10.

Or they can go with Netscape Navigator X or 2004.

Re:Next release

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with Netscape XP, or NotIE?

Netscape Dorm

[Mr Fodder]

Don't forget this little jem: NSCP Dorm (Netscape Dorm). Jamie Zawinski kept a diary of sorts about Netscape starting up. Some off-topic but almost always interesting nonetheless.

Re:Netscape Dorm

[HyperCash]

That has got to be one of the best things of read on the web in a while. Thanks for the link.

--HC

Happy birthday Netscape!

[hai.uchida]

I remember when you were [BUFFERING... BUFFERING...] Oh, wait. That's Real. Sorry, wrong joke.

Re:Yeah but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, I'm posting this from FireFox. That being said, I still like IE better. And I'd like to ask you how this is flamebait? It's just my personal opinion. So leave it alone.

Memories

[Emperor Tiberius]

Ah, the memories. I still remember installing Netscape 2.0 on floppy disk many, many years ago. I think I still have the box somewhere. It's funny how NS has changed over the years, going from commercial to open source, back to a commercial form of browser. It's also interesting how the "wheel" logo seems to have disappeared.

Safari startpage URL for non Safari users

[Sophrosyne]

http://apple.netscape.com/apple.adp
Apparently Apple will be switching to this page:
http://www.apple.com/startpage/

Mozilla was not the first.

[jbn-o]

GCC was free software and commercial software well before the Netscape browser was written. GCC predates the open source movement by many years and served as a means for some consultancies to have so much business they had waiting lists (according to Brad Kuhn when he visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and gave a talk on the free software movement). GCC qualifies as open source software, but since it was initially written by RMS (the founder of the free software movement) for the GNU project, I think it's fair to say it is a free software program.

Re:Mozilla was not the first.

[SvendTofte]

GCC is not commercial. Netscape was owned by a commercial entity, which released the source. That was, AFAIK the first time that ever happened with a big profile product.

GCC may have provided other people with a living, but that doesn't make it "commercial", in the same sense Netscape was commercially owned.

Re:Mozilla was not the first.

[jbn-o]

I think that's slicing a hair awfully thin. Both were commercially exploited, one was proprietary.

Re:Mozilla was not the first.

[(void*)]

I don't understand what you mean by GCC is not
commercial. It fetched money, didn't it? And the
FSF engaged in COMMERCE didn't it, even though
it was non-profit organization?

Re:Mozilla was not the first.

[SvendTofte]

It comes down to semantics. Are all programs commercially exploitable, even if we give them away for free? Sure, to some degree. But that's not the point. Apart from small, in the public unheard of stuff, there had never been a OSS "convert", like Netscape. Everyone know (knew?) Netscape, and while maybe far from everyone knew it went OSS, and all that jazz, it did go OSS, and that was the first time ever.

RMS didn't write GCC, to make money. It's not against the his philosophy, and all that. But he basicly wanted the software to be free. That's hardly the same things that went through Netscapes board of directors, or whoever got the idea to go OSS (I have it in a book somewhere, but hey, I'm lazy). That's the difference. I'm sure even RMS can see this.

And FSF has never, to my knowlegde, engaged in actual commerce? Various copyright holders, and others, may have. But I don't think the FSF has. But I may be wrong.

Indeed.

[Trejkaz]

Yeah... the masses of idiots. :-/

Third contribution of it

[Anonymous Coward]

"but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser), but twice (by being the first major commercial program to go open source)."

And a third time by bringing porn to the masses so they didn't need to hit usenet for it.

Netscape / Mozilla

[Exter-C]

Netscape and mozilla are and have always been good browsers. Stability issues and java often plagued netscape 4.x but overall it was more secure and had less serious issues than IE.

I have NEVER been an IE user always using any alternative.. its good to know that there are more options now to use..

Re:Netscape / Mozilla

[Hassman]

What are you talking about? Netscape rocked when it first came out, but was then soon surpassed by IE. Netxcape 4.x was terrible. It crashed ALL the time, style sheets sucked with it. Writing web pages for it was horrendous. Often one would have to write two completely different pages, 1 for IE and 1 for Netscape...and from what I remember it was MUCH easier to write for IE.

Anyway, IE blows now as it is laden with security issues. So now Mozilla is top dog.

What will overtake Mozilla in the future?

Re:Netscape / Mozilla

[Exter-C]

Netscape 4.x wasnt AS unstable if you did a full uninstall then reinstall the new version. IE is easy to write pages for because it doesnt always conform to standards..

Konqueror (if thats how you spell it) works better on more things than Mozilla. BUT the feel is tacky.

SSL and JavaScript

[upside]

...two things introduced by Nutscrape. These were a huge boost for the Web, particularly commercial applications like online shopping.

Re:SSL and JavaScript

[drinkypoo]

Javascript is one of the most underutilized things around. The only practical use I've seen is generating pages to discourage downloading. Anyone know how I can run javascript and save the resulting source? I converted some to perl last week so I could download a whole page of porn clips, that was kind of annoying.

Netscape Mosaic v 0.93 Beta/Scrnshots/Easter Eggs

[jeremie]

http://jeremie.com/misc/moz/ is a page I put together some time ago that has a slightly newer rev of the original with some screenshots and as much as I could dig out of the executable as far as easter eggs, the about:authors is pretty cool IMO :)

Man, I spent so much time in awe in front of that thing, last time that happened was OSX... the net really needs something cool again.

Best Netscape innovation

[lothar97]

I remember beta testing Netscape 0.9. At the time, my college only had Mosaic, easiest to use on Unix terminals. Netscape brought better browsers to the Mac and PC, and also had a really novel innovation: the stop button. I remember how much it used to suck going to a website (using Mosaic), and having to wait for a massive page to load. With Netscape, I could click the stop button, and move about my business. That's what changed the web...!

Re:Best Netscape innovation

[QZS4]

Mosaic did indeed have a "stop"-button. When you clicked on the logo (which was animated when loading), the load would stop. I definately remember the frustration when I started to use Netscape, wanted to stop the page load, clicked the logo, and instead got directed to the Netscape home page... But, of course, when you stopped the load in Mosaic, nothing would be rendered in the window. In Netscape, the loaded part would be displayed, which was a huge plus.

That said, I used Mosaic for a long time after Netscape was out, since Mosaic was (is still?) the only browser available for the DECStation 5000/20's running Ultrix we had then...

Re:Best Netscape innovation

[lothar97]

I guess I missed that features. I think putting an actual stop button makes more sense than clicking on the logo- which I think logically should take you to the website of the logo.

only 10?

[cara]

When I first read that title, I thought Only 10?? Seems like Netscape has been around longer than that. The Internet has become so integrated into our lives that it seems like it's always been there.

But if I think hard... yeah, 10 years ago would be when I was in college, I guess I do remember the time before Netscape. We were using Mosaic back then, and before that everything was text-based.

Avant Browser

[16K Ram Pack]

Why use Avant over Firefox? You are getting all the issues with IE and none of the things like XUL.

Re:Avant Browser

[TrancePhreak]

Speed, compatability, ease customization, no need for plugins, stability, etc etc

Netscape Portal

[lavar78]

That's outstanding news! On another note, the Netscape portal made a key contribution of its own. Remember, it was the first major site to use RSS. I used "My Netscape" for a long time just for that reason.

Re:Netscape Portal

[Anonymous Coward]

On another note, the Netscape portal made a key contribution of its own. Remember, it was the first major site to use RSS.

That'll be because Netscape invented RSS.

It didn't actually die...

[Anonymous Coward]

They just changed its name to "NutScrape" =)

whoopee

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, 10th Birthday celebrations over, now die Netscape.

Not meaning to spoil the party, but ...

[Post]

Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has come a long way, but IMHO Opera got there faster.

Not meaning to rant, but the permanent high-fiving of the Firefox crowd is getting on my nerves a bit. Every two months or so for the last years, I took Mozilla/Firefox version for a test drive, while at the same time using Opera as my main browser. Now - after ten years of development and admittedly some enormous achievements - I find that Firefox is a decent, though underpowered tool compared to the Opera browser. It has a great renderer, but there's more to a browser than that.

I know Opera isn't that popular with the /. crowd as it is closed-source, commercial software, but it had so many features before Mozilla & IE that make my life easier that the price seems ridiculous compared to the time it saved me: Mouse gestures, SDI/MDI browsing, customizable searches, customizable UI (menus, key combinations, mouse gestures - you name it), a very efficient cookie/password manager, the ability to re-open a session (set of pages) at any time, tools to filter links on a page, "predictive" browsing (Fast Forward), spational navigation (use Shift + Cursor Keys to reach links accorcing to their position), the ability to combine several user stylesheets on the fly, a 20% to 800% zoom feature including images and other objects on a page ... I could go on.

To me, the Mozilla/Firefox seems like a grass-roots effort to build a car - a Beetle, for example. After putting an emormous amount of manpower in it, the team got it right: a working, reliable product for the masses, and it's *free*. Opera in comparison is a very slick machine built by a small, dedicated company - more like a Ferrari. And in comparison to what my hardware and other software packages I'm using cost me, the price of $39 seems even more ridiculous.

I do not want to spoil the party. It is a good thing that Mozilla/Firefox exists. But as a tool for daily work, I prefer something with a little more power under the hood.

Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[Blitzenn]

Gosh, these Netscape fanatics are wacked. Netscape is dead and I hope it finally stays that way. Mozilla rocks and Netscape has nothing on this product. History even dictates the diverging paths which is probably why Netscape flopped. Browser stats support this too, so don't get your underwear in a bunch trying to flame the assertation. Just because some joe from the Netscape building got a job over at Mozilla, doesn't mean that Netscape played any part in Mozilla's success. Give it up. Stop trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I for one am sick of hearing it.

Re:Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[KillaKen187]

You apparently don't know your history. Netscape founded Mozilla. Netscape released it's code to Mozilla and got them started. Today, Mozilla is now a foundation that accepts donations and Netscape no longer owns Mozilla, but they still should take the credit. Mozilla wouldn't be were it is today without netscape. Educate yourself read the wikipedia and shut the fcsk up.

Re:Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[Blitzenn]

Ok then, with that logic I guess we can give Microsoft all of the credit for Netscape then. Netscape never would have made any mark at all if it hadn't been for Microsoft challenging them, (and winning btw).

I honestly hope that as little of the Netscape as possible rubbed off on the Mozilla people. For Netscape was a horrible product by any reasoning. If Microsoft didn't have so much push, Netscape would have died as soon as it got out of the gate. People masicated themselves with the Netscape product just to avoid using IE. So You should be thanking MS. Your soapbox wouldn't exist without them.

Re:Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[Blitzenn]

Secondly, I said nothing wrong and you are the one misconstruing history. The mozzila code was was constructed after the Netscape (communicator) code was determined to be 'unsalvagable' by Netscapes own people. So what are you shaking a finger at dude? The base core from Netscape had to be trashed. The project team working on Mozilla, a different group of people, (same company mind you), ran with a whole different ground up construction, trashing that CRAP that was built under published Netscape browser.

Now granted the mozilla core was slated to become the next release of the netscape browser early on, but what the Wiki doesn;t tell you, is that Netscape marketing chopped it and didn't want to use it. So who flubbed there? Good riddence Netscape people. You screwwed up the first source, you deep sixxed the only good code to come out of the company and forced those people out. You made your bed now lay in it.

Re:Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[KillaKen187]

Well... all i am saying is that Netscape is still hanging in there and thanks to the Mozilla project and others like Opera, the world is a better place.

No more will I settle for a mediocre browsing expierence. When M$ came out with IE Netscape stepped right into the fire and took them head on. They didn't back down because Bill Gates wanted to throw money and weight around. As a result, others are winning in the browser market. I look at it this way, Netscape was king for years even with M$ breathing down its neck.

Now look at IE... I wouldn't want to double-click that blue E for anything. It's like the rich step-child that knows it isn't better than their poor step-brothers. No amount of money will make people feel better about IE. Real geeks (like myself) know that IE sucks and browsers like Mozilla, Opera, and Safari are magnatudes better. That is all due to the bravery of Netscape.

So stand up for your elders and praise Netscape. They deserve the credit for fighing and continuing to fight. They are still a company that the common user can recognize as a viable alternative to IE. I can't begin to tell you how many people I talk to about Mozilla and they say "What's that?" but if I say "It's like Netscape but better", they instantly realize what I am saying. Face it, Mozilla is walking in the footsteps of a giant and that has to be recognized.

Re:Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

[Blitzenn]

You are a moron. You talk but can't hear what you are saying. How about "it's like Internet Explorer but better" Now that would be a fair comparison and even more people would recognize the product. I don't disagree that mozilla makes the web experience better, and definately better than IE makes it. But Netscape lost. They lost because something better came out at the time and it was IE. IE clobbered Netscape in almost every area and venue. GRanted IE is now losing to Mozilla and rightfully so. AS John Dovorak said, It looks like MS has lost interest in keeping their browser current. I have to agree. It's starting to suck wind as compared to others. NO inovation. But you can't possiblly give Netscape credit for Mozilla. Mozzila exists DESPITE Netscape. Netscape tried to deep six the mozzilla core. Where the heck are you compiling anything different? You threw the Wiki at me, now read it yourself! Netscape died because they passed on a better core application, Mozilla and they are dead because of it. Let go of it dude, you are to old to hang on to that security blanket any longer.

Full coverage..

[cmaxx]

..of something getting 1 day older?

Must be a slow news day.

Isn't there some sort of pseudo-democracy thing we could be scrutinizing instead?

JavaScript, Perl & PHP

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript is used on the client side, whereas Perl, PHP and friends are used at the server side.

Apples and oranges.

Fishtank?

[Ribald]

Remember the Netscape fishtank?
I remember how cool I thought that was, back when I first started using Netscape (v. 2.02, I believe). Just a static image of the fishtank in their lobby that would be updated every 60 sec. or so, and not much to get excited about these days.

But it was a big change from what Gopher offered.

--Ribald
(I miss Gopher, too.)

Re:Fishtank?

[ch-chuck]

They also had a sign in the office that anybody could put text on from a browser, with a camera showing what was on it at the moment. I used to post signs telling them to hurry up with Netscape with Java for Linux!

Just nitpicking...

[bpowell423]

The Netscape portal has at least three links that will take you to the netscape browser. Under the Tools section, there's "Browser Central" and "Netscape 7.2", and in the links in the bottom bar, there's "Download Latest Netscape Browser". Yes, they could advertise it a little more strongly, but it is there.

All together now...

[angst7]

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear wholly owned subsidiary of AOL/Time Warner Incorporated . . .
Happy birthday to you

HoTMetaL dates back to '95 or earlier

[davidwr]

Softquad's HotMeTaL began life as an editor and downloader/offline browser, similar to Zylox's Offline Commander. It was designed for people with slow modems, and for educational and other users who needed preview- or local-caching abilities. It won a PC Magazine Editor's Choice award in the mid-1990s.

It looks like old SoftQuad web site is now Xmetal.com.

GNU Press

[tepples]

And FSF has never, to my knowlegde, engaged in actual commerce?

Your knowledge could use extending. Read more about books and CDs sold by FSF.

Re:GNU Press

[SvendTofte]

Ah ... cd's and t-shirts. The true hallmark of a great corporation ;)

First major commercial product to go OSS?

[Junks Jerzey]

This isn't true, or at least it depends how you look at it. Netscape had already lost relevance when they decided to open source the browser. It was a last ditch move. So it isn't quite the same as a huge, very relevant application like Flash or Photoshop going open source. And with that in mind, realize that the source code to major commercial products had been made available prior to this point, though purists will argue that the licensing terms aren't as purse as true OSS.

The source code to the hugely popular Wolfenstein 3D was released earlier than Netscape, for example. Going back further, you could get a printed code listing of the Atari 8-bit computer operating system from Atari for about the price of a book. For the same computer you could also buy a $12 book containing the *annotated* source code to Atari DOS. Both the Atari OS and Atari DOS were major commercial products at the time.

I'm sure there are other examples.

Mosaic

[shokk]

Mosaic changed the world and introduced us to the WWW. Netscape, Mozilla, and IE just improved on what had already been launched.

Re:Mosaic

[stonecypher]

This is true in a more literal sense than you might have intended: both IE and pre-Mozilla Netscape were based on the Mosaic codebase, as to which both of their info boxes attest.

Re:Mosaic

[shokk]

That's exactly how I intended it.

Netscape Communcator

[CBDSteve]

They've come a long way.

For at least ten years now, they've managed to spell the name of their product right on their homepage...

(or does no-one else remember this?)

Re:Yeah but...

[gront]

Bout 2% of the time I click on any of the stories or topics all the text is shifted a whole screen off to the right, or they run into the border on the left. Hitting reload/refresh doesn't help, you have to back out a step and come back into the page.

Happens at my home and my work computer, with every version of Firefox i've used.

Netscape superior to Mosaic???

[Crass Spektakel]

I used early Mosaic and Netscape and to be honest I didn't see much difference back then. This changed with Netscape 3, but until then it was a long way.

Unbeliever!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't it die when it was 5?

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Yea, we knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Doug Englebart had a markup language back in '68, along with a host of at the time radical but turned into common use ideas:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.htm l

And yea, about half the NCSA team left Illinois for Cali. Aleks Totic, who worked on the NCSA and Netscape Mac browsers, has a little blurb on his old netscape.com homepage:

http://www.totic.org/nscp/

It wasn't just the markup stuff we were got lucky with, it also was that the Internet as a network existed. That took lots of tax dollars and years to get to the point where it was in '94. Dropping a snazzy interface on HTTP and HTML over TCP/IP that was pretty simple, but without the backbone it would have been a moo point.

And really, Jim Clark was hot and bothered on interactive TV back before Andreeson came along. Marc had to really push the idea that all the groundwork for the web had been laid: HTTP, TCP/IP, HTML, dial-up access, mae west/east, personal computers with modems, etc.

Re:Yeah but...

[matlhDam]

You can force a reflow with Ctrl+Minus to reduce the font size, then Ctrl-0 to reset it to normal.

Oh, how we hated it!

[cgreuter]

We used to love to hate it, back in the early days of the Web.

It was awful. It was even less stable than Mosaic. It was slow, ugly and a memory hog that brought our multi-user Unix boxes to their knees, something which sucked mightily if you were trying to compile your assignments.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

HTML used to be a content-based markup language. It was there to tell the browser what the text meant and deciding how it looked was the job of the browser.

But Netscape went and added all of these formatting features to make the desktop publishing people more comfortable. In the process, they completely screwed things up for non-graphical browsers or, since the extensions were proprietary, pretty much any other browser as well.

And because Netscape was there just as people were getting onto the Web, it became synonymous with the Internet in the minds of the general public so everybody had it and most web designers used the Netscape-specific tags. It got to the point where all the non-Netscape user could see was the little blurb telling you you should switch to Netscape. They were well on the way to locking the entire Web into their proprietary standards.

Then, Microsoft noticed the Internet and showed everybody how it's done.

The End.

On the other hand, Firefox is pretty good.