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Netscape Turns 10

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the almost-a-teenager dept.

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)."

8 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Netscape portal is like a domain squatters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful


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

  2. The old netscape by thedillybar · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. The First Netscape was revolutionary by dancingmad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)
  5. First?!? by bay43270 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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?

  6. Go Gopher! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape? by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
  8. Re:Mozilla was not the first. by SvendTofte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.