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Netscape Finally Put Down
Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released. "Nearly 14 years after the once mighty browser made its first desktop appearance as Mosaic Netscape 0.9, its disappearance comes as little surprise. Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years."
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I noticed that the Book of Mozilla is getting another entry when FF3 goes public!:
Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the
fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their
children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.
from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow.
IMO, what really killed Netscape was the nested tables. Without good CSS support, what was the only way to display nice webpages?
Perhaps it was simply shortsight. They didn't have a good code for rendering pages, and it kept bloating, and bloating, and bloating.
IE did one thing right: The display of massively nested tables. I liked IE4. It was slim, nice, and fast. If we follow the story more closely, we'll see that Internet Explorer and Netscape fell in the same trap: Bloat and lack of good development. The only difference is that IE was the default, so it didn't quite die. It was alive, but it kept rotting (getting infected) anyways.
Second System Effect. Basically, you make a first version that is lean, does a few things well, and release that. Then in the second system you add a bunch of "it would be cool if..." things, making the second version huge, bloated, and not as good as the first version.
Vista, as compared to Windows 2000, for a big example.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. The dot com bust came, IIRC, two years later. There was no way they were viable as an independant entity. When NS was at 3.x, they had the advantage of not crashing your entire Windows as IE4 installs did. That was why I preferred NS. However, when I got a chance to work with Netscape's customization kit for ISPs, and compare it to the counterpart Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK, or "Eeek!"), it was no contest. IEAK was easy and fast. NS was horribly slow, and when I dug into it I saw the most awful thing: the app you worked with when customizing was the same app the user saw when installing--with lots of JavaScript if statements to detect whether you were an admin deploying, or a customer installing. Yes. The same code. I'm sure this wasn't the only reason they were slow, but it was the most miserable hack I ever saw, and I didn't want to look any further. As MS sorted the kinks out of IE installs, and integrated it into the OS (thus eliminating the risk of what was essentially an OS upgrade), the last advantage of NS evaporated. Their contemporary 4.x offering, Communicator, was just a lot of bloat nobody really needed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It took awhile for me to come around to using Netscape. Back in the day I preferred using Lynx from a dummy terminal because it was very fast and efficient. At the time the graphics on websites were not very interesting so I didn't feel a need to switch to a graphical browser. Eventually, I started to use Netscape, to surf the web. I can still remember the shooting stars passing by the "N" as my browser perused the ether of the Internet.
It wasn't long after that I became a Netscape bigot. Even after Netscape Communicator came out with its bloated bundled package and IE 4 and 5 started running more efficient I still stood behind Netscape. AOL bought Netscape and things started to slide downhill from there. Remember when AOL was still significant enough to buy out good software companies and rape them? LOL Remember the name AOL-Time Warner? Times have changed. I still continued to use Mozilla up until the Firefox uprising started.
Anyways, sorry to have rambled. Thanks for listing an old man reminisce.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
Back in 1995-97, I was working for a major European media/publishing company. We were one of their (Netscape's) largest customers having bought around 200 Netscape Publishing System Licenses (NPS) for around USD 80k each! - well those were the good ol' days.
... no, not slap, a fist? A hit with a 10-ton-fist in the face... I was so furious that I stood up and said: "You know guys, with this attitude I think you'll be dead as a company at latest within two-to-three years." - and immediately left the meeting.
... I dunno, it was the httpd-server, which was the basis for Apache later on (a-patchy server); we dumped all Netscape software, even including the browser.
The software was very primitive but it was a solid basis for what we needed - in our company I was responsible for the platform so I came up with a solid specification of what we needed and how Netscape should add this to NPS. We had a meeting on a very high level with Netscape management in Mountain View in September 1996(!) to discuss my paper, which I had already discussed in with Netscape Europe and managed to actually get through to Netscape US.
The meeting was a revelation for me. By that time, the term "Intranet" was becoming a hip-term. There we were, three or four people from our company (by that time, I was "Director International Technology Co-operations" - what a title, isn't it?) - and about five or six people from Netscape.
We explained all our needs again and told them, that we would be of course willing to pay for all these enhancements. I specifically had collected input from another ten or fifteen other media companies from Europe to come up with a neat spec for Netscape - i.e. I did all the job, which they should've done in the first place.
After the explanation and discussion of the paper (three hours or so), one top Netscape manager said: "You know, there are only about 20-30 publishers around the world - but hundreds and thousands of companies needing Intranet solutions. So, therefore, we have decided to go for the Intranet market and thus will drop the media/publishing business. I'm sorry, but we can't implement the spec because it's just a too small market!" (not withstanding the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of media companies around the world...)
I was furious - it was like a
My boss came after me and tried to convince me to come back to the meeting (though not wholeheartedly as I could see he was furious as well). So, I actually left the office, the building and waiting outside of the Netscape building in the sun - waiting for my colleagues to come out.
In the end, we left Netscape, went home and I and a small team have implemented what we needed by ourselves and completely dumped Netscape software, including Netscape Web Server (what was it's name), switching to
That was my experience with Netscape... It was not Microsoft, it was not AOL - it was their arrogant, stupid, high-horsed, customers-don't-count attitude that killed them. It was their f***ed-up management!
As I recall, this happened around the same time IE was built solid into Windows 98 and Microsoft's "embrace / extend / extinguish" strategy pumped full blast with "IE Active Channels." Microsoft started MSN as an internet service provider and AOL was a little nervous about Microsoft making Windows rely on MSN. So AOL bought Netscape and kept the browser alive as a bargaining chip. At the time AOL was the #1 internet provider and if AOL made everyone use Netscape, Microsoft's internet strategy would be dead in the water. This threat kept the AOL icon on the desktop of default installs of Windows.
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Hippie Logger Jock
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Mozilla = Mosaic Killer. The original codename for Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was public domain and Netscape Navigator was closed source until JWZ persuaded Netscape to open the code as a way of countering MSIE's burgeoning dominance. Irony eh?
I loved all the Netscape throbbers. On dialup you had to watch a helluva lot of those comets fly by that "N". You could change the throbber easily. I usually went with the "running puppy" one.
Man, that was serious web browsing, lol.
Compare e.g. NT3.51 with NT4.0, especially after all 7 Service Packs are applied to the latter.
Then compare Windows 2000, which was a decent rewrite to integrate the features of NT into a stable codebase, with its follow-ups XP and Vista.
Yeah, I think the history of NT is a fine example of the Second System Effect.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Spyglass Mosaic was based on NCSA Mosaic, but actually did not use any of its code.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
Circumcision is child abuse.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It wouldn't let me see the forms because I was using Firefox (your browser is not what I want to see sort of dialog box). Thanks to slashdotters I know I can change the user agent if I want to but that might be beyond less technical people. And I pointed to that site because it's the only site in recent memory that's told me I have the wrong browser.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”