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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)."
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.
is there an netscape archive of all the netscape versions released? it would be interesting to run the old version for memory sakes...
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.
ahh the old days. .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.
I remember running the
obligatory: In my day we didnt need no stinking nsswitch.conf.
-- C
Just in time for DevEdge to be shutdown too...
e =5 381
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?articl
Whats up with that?
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
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...
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
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.
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!)
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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:
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.
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.
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.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen, who, of course, created Netscape Communications, so I guess it's all in the family.
> 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.
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.
Is it bad that the netscape page:m ber=1 doesn't render correctly in the latest firefox?
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/storymain.jsp?nu
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
.
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...
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.
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.
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.
http://apple.netscape.com/apple.adp
Apparently Apple will be switching to this page:
http://www.apple.com/startpage/
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.
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...!
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.
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
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.
Mosaic changed the world and introduced us to the WWW. Netscape, Mozilla, and IE just improved on what had already been launched.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."