Netscape Navigator - the browser that started it all - turns 20

Netscape Navigator, the browser credited with taking the World Wide Web into the mainstream, was released twenty years ago yesterday, on October 13th 1994. Netscape, the company, was born after tech investor Jim Clark spotted the Mosaic browser developed in part by then-wunderkind Marc Andreessen. At the time of the company's …

[Mark 85]

A sad toast, indeed.

I used it and loved it. For it's time, it was far superior to anything out there, IMO. And if MS hadn't choked it and sent it crawling to AOHell, things might be radically different. Yeah, Firefox is an off-shoot, so to speak and in my world, it's the best browser. Still... one has to wonder what might have been. Here's to you, Netscape.

[Ole Juul]

Cello and Winsock

I've got fond memories of trying Win 3.1 for the first time and figuring out how to install Winsock so I could run a shareware browser called Cello. It was pretty, but I quickly retreated back to DOS when Michal Polák got the Arachne browser up to snuff. For a short time Michal actually, as a single student, competed successfully with Netscape. Fun times.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cello and Winsock

Lynx on a 2400 bit/s modem was my introduction to the webernet -- faster than today's broadband in 1994. Just goes to show you how much energy we waste moving bits of pictures and videos and audio around the net.

[launcap]

Re: Cello and Winsock

>Lynx on a 2400 bit/s modem was my introduction to the webernet

Ahh.. youth! I remember my 1200/75 baud non-autodial modem in the early/mid 80's. Dialling Almac. (yes, yes, I know it wasn't the collection of tubes but it was part of a (sort of) world wide network in FidoNet).

Kids today etc etc etc

[Dan 55]

Re: Cello and Winsock

Netscape on Windows 3.1 was an unbeatable combination, at least until there were too many images on the page, the whole UI failed to redraw properly, and finally Windows displayed GPF dialog after GPF dialog before disappearing up its own fundament.

So, even then, it was still a better user experience than Windows 8.

[G R Goslin]

Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

And Mosaic, before it. It was my first foray into the 'net, with Demons ten quid a month dial-up. There wasn't a lot to see, in those days. But, by 'eck it were nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

A friend of mine in Copenhagen was an early web developer and I got a gig testing one of the early paid websites (I got a free pass). The site was the "Internet Museum of Pornography". For the time, it was well done.

It was embarrassing him being the admin living in Copenhagen, he had to have the company name on the door shield to his (home) office! (allegedly, I never managed to get over there to visit)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

9600 baud modem. BBS, then onto Compuserve and finally unleashed onto the wider web via Netscape. Things were never the same, most of all the phone bills. Might have got into some trouble for those...

"The site was the "Internet Museum of Pornography"

Oh my god I remember this site. Was pretty damn exciting to find that kind of thing, it was all analogue up to that point...

[launcap]

Re: Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

Hmm.. Demon. In the early days anyway - before it got borged and reborged..

One of the reasons I chose Demon was because it had lots of FAQs on getting my Slackware linux install to autodial via my Zoom 14.4K modem on demand. Then had FAQs for doing bonded lines on Home Highway. The had FAQs for securing SMTP servers in the shiny new DSL era.

Stayed with them (and kept my 158.152 address) right up until I had to deal with their new offshored, scripted, "I'm sorry sir but I have to talk you through all the tests you did last time you phoned us just so I can tick the box before calling BT to fix the issue you have had several times before and have a known fix for" spiel. Icon is because of what they became, not what they started as.

IDNet were quite a relief, and have stayed that way.

[Dan 55]

Re: Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

Demon Internet, 14.4K, KA9Q, jumpers for goalposts...

None of those Winmodems in those days.

[no-one in particular]

Re: Ah, Netscape Navigator! I knew it well, Horatio

> Demon Internet, 14.4K, KA9Q

And helping a friend code up sort-of-curses variant of KA9Q, TextWin, to make it a little bit friendlier.

[MacroRodent]

Boxed set

Netscape was the first an only browser I actually bought off the shelf in a computer store. I think it was version 3.0 and the year perhaps 1996. Wish I had kept the packing, it might be a collectible today. It definitely was the best browser at the time. IE was yet a joke compared to it and Mosaic was falling behind.

[Neil Barnes]

The days of my (almost) youth...

Win3.1 and Trumpet Winsock over a 14.4kb/s dialup.

At the time I recall writing 486 assembly code to fade between 16-colour full-screen images by creating new palettes on the fly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The days of my (almost) youth...

Blimey.....Trumpet Winsock. I never thought I'd hear those two words in the same sentence again. Holy shite I'm old. Where did I leave my slippers?

[Fair Dinkum]

Re: The days of my (almost) youth...

Well, my first modem wass a 300 baud coupler, so who is the old fart?

And no toast from me.. "Mozilla" stands for Mosaic Killer, Andreesen co-developped Mosaic at NCSA and took the source with him when he left.

Source he didn't own.

[big_D]

Mosaic

I started with Mosaic. I used Netscape a bit, but never really got into it, I don't know why, but it always looked cool on my friend's UNIX workstation with 20" display, but on my lowly Windows PC it felt clunky. The Mosaic version I used was the Compu$erve tailored version.

I switched from Mosaic to IE, then to Phoenix, sorry, Firebird, erm.. Firefox, when the Alpha came out.

But most of the time I used NavCIS, an offline reader, to download the days messages in a few seconds, then go through them, write replies and bulk upload them when finished.

Sometime in the late 90s I also started OLRing news groups.

[Michael Nidd]

Re: Mosaic

The main innovation over mosaic (that I remember) was that Netscape could display the text without waiting for all of the graphics to load. That made it massively more responsive. It seems like a simple idea (multiple simultaneous sockets and revise the layout as new objects are received) but that's why most people I know switched to Netscape. The main complaint was the unilateral extensions to HTML.

[Fair Dinkum]

Re: Mosaic

Yes, it is a simple idea. It also killed the transatlantic Tcp/IP connections for a couple of weeks, it was saturated with "open" packets.

[Denarius]

ah the fond recollections

fast dialup modems at 14.4 then 56 KB/sec, beating the 3G crap and choked networks of today. Still have a ~ 20 inch HPUX box somewhere with Mosaic and Netscape. Being that old, it will probably power up immediately. The sense of adventure reaching out across the Net and discovering that most sites were as dull as any other. Sigh. El Reg is probably the only news site I have used for over a decade. And in the drawer, a Netscape biro in working condition. Meanwhile, lurking in my Win32 archives for when I need pain (never, just packratting), Win3.1 with Cello and for intense suffering, indicating what would happen, Mosaic 2. Its ability to crash heralded the incoming Internut Exploder we all love to loathe.

[Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face]

Only 20 years ago. Feels like yesterday.

[Anonymous Coward]

jumpers for goalposts

The browser made life so much easier. No more using the ftp mailer. Netscape started off well, even threw out an Email client I seem to remember, Thunderbird ? But Netscape then became bloaty and then IE (which was originally based on NCSA mosaic) came out, then I switched to Mozilla firefox, then that became bloaty and now currently reside with Chrome.

[Dcope]

Memories

I still miss watching the meteor shower animation while waiting for a Gif to load, /feeling old.

[Irongut]

Ah Netscape 0.9b, I have fond memories of it first on Unix at Uni and then at home on Windows with a Trumpet winsock at 14,400.

[asphytxtc]

Happy birthday netscape!

I fondly remember hopping around the net on NN back in the days.. I shall raise a beer in its honor.

Posted from NN 9 - which still runs remarkably well actually! Can't believe it's still maintained in Arch AUR ^.^

[RAMChYLD]

Ah, Netscape

It was my first window into the Internet. Sure, there's Internet Explorer, but I didn't like it then due to it's incompatibility with a lot of websites back then (and I still don't like it now because it's a magnet for exploits). Back then I had a 33.6k modem. But since Win95 already exists back then, all I needed to do was use Dial-Up Networking. Good times..

Even today I still use Netscape Navigator's great grandson, Mozilla SeaMonkey. Actually, I'm using it to post this reply.

Cheers, Netscape! I raise a beer for the memories!

When I get home I shall fire up my retrogaming box (which has Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Netscape 4.08 installed) and try to use it for a while. Yes, it has an gigabit ethernet card with proper NDIS3 drivers with the Microsoft Win16 TCP/IP stack and can in fact access the internet. Why did you ask?

[PhilipN]

Here we are, Planet Earth!

You forgot Netscape crowing "YES, THIS IS THE MOZILLA" (i.e. corruption of Mosaic Killer) on first release. Almost equivalent to the monolith amongst the apemen in Kubrick's 2001.

From memory this is the first use of "-illa" which of course is now ubuig...... uqui... ubitqu.... everywhere.

[Jay 2]

I feel old now!

Wow, so it is 20 years. I recall downloading 0.9 and running it on various NT and Win 3.11 boxes. I've pretty much stuck with Netscape/Firefox since then (though there was a large period of IE in the early 2000s, and some stuff now is much better on Chrome).

So thanks to Netscape for opening up the WWW!

[Alan Bourke]

It powered my first ever tinterweb experience

in an internet cafe in Kyoto, 1995. Happy birthday old timer.

[BoldMan]

I first encountered Netscape on Macs for a job with a defence contractor in New Malden back in 1996. They had their own "intranet" as they were not allowed to be connected to the outside world. I was doing tech support on Macs at the time but nobody really knew anything about this new fangled HTML stuff so I took it upon myself to learn and 18 years later I'm still doing it...

[John O'Grady]

What could have been...

I'll add a memory. Originally, Microsoft had an agreement with AOL to allow early versions of IE to be the only browser that worked through the AOL client. I remember finding some instructions on a BBS (I think I dialed in and used z-modem, but it's been a while) and hacking the AOL configuration somehow to let Netscape work.

As for what could of been, well. It's taken 20 years to get to the place that MS was deathly afraid of - applications that run on browsers instead of being tied to the Windows OS. If they had not spent so much time trying to kill all the other browsers that popped up, we could have probably been here a decade ago.

Don't get me wrong - Netscape had it's problems, both technical and managerial. If the roles had been reversed, however, I think that Netscape would have continued development after defeating IE. Instead, Netscape died, MS declared victory and killed the IE development team, leaving only one dev working on IE patches for almost five years, thereby killing all web development for a time.

Fail icon for MS literally failing humanity by slowing down development of one of the most important human inventions of all time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape was good

It still lives on as Firefox, which I am currently using.

[Andy The Hat]

Seem too many Demonoids here ... what's the official collective noun for us oldies? A turnpike? A rapture? A choir? A geek-fest ...? :-)

[MyffyW]

One Thursday evening in January 1996 I remember installing the PIPEX disk I'd got free with a Compaq LTE. It must have been about 8pm. After installing an IP stack, Netscape (from the three 1.44" floppy disks) and a couple of boing-boing sounds from the modem I was away. And before I knew it the clock said 3am... Internet time dilation had reached my corner of the world.

[Oldfogey]

Point and Click?

"the massive wave of hype about Windows 95 bringing point-and-click computing to the masses ". Indeed, and I thought Windows 3.? was point and click? Hype indeed.

All this was just before I retired, we were still building IP stacks by hand on each machine, because the slightest factor different on "identical" machines could cause chaos.

All talking to a Novell server (V4??), and, right at the end, through Netscape to the very primitive Web - and still using dialup to bulletin boards that hadn't converted.

Supposedly computer literate kids today would have no idea where to start.

[p13]

Memories ...

I still run it from time to time on irix machines, since it comes preloaded.

Good stuff.

Although trying to get it to render modern sites ends in hilarious failure.

[Tweets]

From version 0.99a I was hooked! I STILL have CD's and manuals from the early days... and two massive 16oz mugs with rubber cups/bottoms that I use regularly!

The Internet was so innocent back then, and since I celebrate 20 years of working in the Internet industry in just 10 days... I raise a glass to Netscape; ahhh sweet memory.

And for the former Demon users...

I was the Tech Support manager for CityScape Internet, whom Demon eventually brought... Then I moved to tech support for PIPEX Dial! So, I DO remember trying to run an ISP on a 64kb leased line... and I DO remember the early days when winsock.dll was preinstalled/recompiled, or even overwritten by some badly written software!

Ahhh... those days.