Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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.
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.
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
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/