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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)."
Check it out.
A lot more than just Netscape in there. Very, very fascinating.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
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.
- HOORAY!
One of the big advantages Netscape had over Mosaic was multithreaded page downloads.
Screenshots: 1 2 3
Mirror: nscape09.zip
Ah, the good ol' days..
Because it's the default home page for Safari.
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.
GPL: Free as in will
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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:
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.
Indeed. The name Mozilla is a contraction of "Mosaic killer."
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
...two things introduced by Nutscrape. These were a huge boost for the Web, particularly commercial applications like online shopping.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
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.
Looks good in Firebird 0.8...
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Firebird 0.8? No such thing.