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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)."
98% advertising, 2 % content
why anyone would visit it by choice is a mystery
Props to how far Mozilla has come. I guess the increased computing power helped them a tad :) Salute to our pioneers as well.
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!
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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.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
...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?
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.
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.
Digital Citizen
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).
Nothing to stop MS from implementing XUL in IE if it wants. The standard is open too, not just the source.
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has come a long way, but IMHO Opera got there faster.
/. 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.
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
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.
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.
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.