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)."

Comments

How can it be 10?

[JazzXP]

Didn't it die when it was 5?

Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

[Anonymous Coward]

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

First?!?

[bay43270]

...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?

Re:First?!?

[Mr. Hankey]

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.

I forget if we're supposed to hate them

[genericacct]

Is Netscape evil or saintly? I can't keep it straight. They broke W3C standards and are owned by AOL, but Mozilla doesn't suck anymore.

If only Slashdot could tell me what to think.

10 years, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps its time I updated.

Re:for nostagic purposes...

[aftk2]

Check it out.

A lot more than just Netscape in there. Very, very fascinating.

Feel the Original: Dejavu Emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

We need to keep re-inventing the browser

[Eloquence]

Firefox is gaining some momentum - maybe enough to make web developers take note. The Mozilla project also has two other great Firefox-like (small single-purpose applications) initiatives, Sunbird and Thunderbird.

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:

• SVG support. It's incomplete - but I think it is unwise not to have at least some level of SVG support in mainline Firefox 1.0 builds. "Build it, and they will come": both web and Mozilla developers. SVG is really a key technology for next-generation web design based on open standards. As an example, Wikipedia has a nice extension called EasyTimeline for rendering graphical timelines. These are currently ugly, non-zoomable PNGs -- SVG would be perfect here, as it would allow timelines with a changing level of detail as you zoom in. Much of the stuff that is currently being done with Flash can be done with SVG.
• Leverage XUL. Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed: easy, powerful, instantly deployable web applications. In my opinion, XUL should get a lot more exposure within Firefox - both the product and the website. Make a promise to XUL developers: If you use XUL to write open source applications, and it meets our quality standards, we will add it to the default Firefox bookmarks, and promote it on our website.
• New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice, and some other cool navigation tools ("skip to next website from another domain than the current one" etc.). There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.
• Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

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.

Screenshots and a Mirror

[Adam9]

Screenshots: 1 2 3

Mirror: nscape09.zip

Ah, the good ol' days..

Re:The old netscape

[singularity]

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.

Re:To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there is one valid use of the Blink tag..

Schroedinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.

Netscape Dorm

[Mr Fodder]

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.

Re:The old netscape

[NanoGator]

"Dad?

Is that you?"

Asking somebody on Slashdot if they're your father... That raises some interesting questions about your mom.