I have strong memories of swapping that out for an animated "smoking camel", as well as the Guiness fish on a bicycle (If we're talking the animated "N" in the top right of communicator..).
I worked at a large corporate bank during the late 90s, and they[1] rolled out a branded version of Netscape with the animated 'N' logo swapped out for rotating 'Golden Keys' which was their logo[2]. I've still got the image files for it somewhere.
---
[1] I say 'they' I mean 'me' - I did application packaging at the time.
Does it still count as a guess if I clicked on your username, visited the website you listed on your profile and read the CV that you have on said website? :p
If you set your http proxy to be "theoldnet.com" port 1997, and (important!) add an exclusion for web.archive.org, then you can browse the entire web from 1997.
You can also change the port number to your preferred year.
This is really fun on retro systems / web browsers.
It's crazy that by that time IPv6 may be too small. Lazy googling suggests there are less than 50 billion devices connected to the internet today. That mean even if devices _just_ double every century IPv6 would be saturated by 130th century.
I wish somebody would update the old Netscape to add XMLHttpRequest support. We could write a gateway to translate the web relevant today to be usable on old computers.
One of the working links on that page refers to Netscape Visual JavaScript.
That sounds interesting ..
Netscape Visual JavaScript helps make it practical and easy to develop sophisticated crossware applications through drag-and-drop components and simple visual programming. You can easily incorporate sophisticated functionality and database connectivity into web pages without writing code. Netscape Visual JavaScript enables you to deliver finished applications to users quickly and easily.
Yeah, I saw that when I was reading some of the columns from Marc Andreessen [0]. I can't find any details on Visual JavaScript; does anyone have an old screenshot or video of the product experience?
Amazon still have copies available of both the Official Netscape Visual JavaScript Developers Guide[1] and Netscape Visual JavaScript For Dummies[2] books.
PSA: copy and paste the link URL (or otherwise make sure you won't send the referrer containing news.ycombinator.com), otherwise it redirects you to a nsfw page.
Check out that jaggy squinched text in those diagrams! Somebody resized a GIF file smaller to save some bandwidth, and so it would fit on a 640x480 screen. 1997 web design at its finest!
Pro Tip: Never name a user interface toolkit after "MFC" with "M" crossed out and "I" written in -- that doesn't make it sound very appetizing, and wrongly sets expectations that you can actually write a viable application with it, given enough pain and suffering. Just as you should never name a component system after "COM" with "XP/" written before it, for the same reason.
And while you're at it, you should never name a company after "Microsoft" with "Micro" crossed out and "Sun" written in, because it makes it look like you define your company in terms of your biggest competitor instead of having your own identity and mission, which is what losers and foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian Trump supporters like Scott McNealy do.
Marimba was much better at naming things, thanks to Kim Polese, who came up with the name "Java" when she was at Sun, then left Sun with several of the finest Java engineers to form the drum-themed Java start-up company, "Marimba". Their product "Castanet" literally cast a net to deliver interactive content over the internet, and their Java-powered HyperCard-like user interface builder "Bongo" actually let you interactively edit Java scripts to handle events, by calling the Java compiler at runtime (which was unheard-of at the time, but normal for IDEs to do now).
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was.
>Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing).
>While I was working at Interval Research Corporation in 1996, after playing around with and reading over the source code and documentation, I wrote up a deep comparison and analysis of Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) versus Marimba Bongo (which was written by Arthur van ...
Clicking the "What's your DOMAIN NAME?" ad returns a MIPS binary? From 'string' output it seems like the the cgi-bin binary handling the redirect and writing a log file to /d/adserv/netgravity/logs/AdServer_log. I wonder how that got indexed.
Interesting that they would have used old-school CGI in 1997. Netscape invented NSAPI, which was basically FastCGI before that existed. It had been around 2-3 years prior to 1997.
no idea to what extent, if at all, it is true. I can imagine there being a grain of truth in there but that implementing this correctly is much more difficult and nuanced than it might seem at first glance - most "digital designers"[1] probably don't get the budget/freedom to properly tackle accessibility in their commercial projects, I can also imagine that the majority of digital designers are 'young' and have close to 20/20 vision making it that much harder for them to truly put themselves in the shoes (eyes?) of people with lesser than perfect vision[2].
as someone with only a laymans' understanding of all this stuff I'm probably guilty of talking out of my **; I welcome someone with real graphic design credentials putting me straight :D
[1] "digital designer", a person working in/with visual design, who started employment, or was born, after the release of the first iPhone ;-) (alternatively someone working in the design industry who never had the privilege of buying a copy of "The Face" for the simple fact they we not born in 1985)
[2] a category I begrudgingly have to admit to being part of more and more ;-/
What about not setting color of text (especially when it's dark text on light backgroud - the "default") at all and leave it to the user? There is a setting in web browser exactly for this: https://user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net/uploads/i...
Related tragedy: font-weight: 300 used on webpages. In combination with low contrast (the most absurd thing I have seen was #999 on white) it's completely unreadable. I have actually written a bookmarklet to fix it: https://paste.debian.net/1207934/
I also have (partially outdated) custom stylesheet that fixes that for websites I {used to,} visit often: https://jenda.hrach.eu/w/blackweb
That icon was called a "throbber". The name came from the original icon used back when the browser was called Mosaic NetScape (and the early Netscape Navigator days): a simple blocky purple N with a 90s pixel bevel effect on it. When animated the bevel would alternate between "sticking out" and "going in" to the plane of the screen, causing the N to appear to "throb". The name stuck, and all browser icons that animated to indicate network activity came to be called "throbbers".
I liked throbbers because they signalled "ok, I'm going to the network to fetch what you asked for" as opposed to the hourglass cursor which indicated ordinary computer activity. It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience. They seemed not to understand that the network was fundamentally different, and in many ways more dangerous, than the local PC because it is almost always, as we say today, someone else's computer; and that the end user should be made aware of and encouraged to respect that difference.
I think the nostalgia for the feeling of navigating cyberspace is part of what inspires art movements like vaporwave, with its incorporation of 90s GUI elements in its aesthetic. In the 90s, there was always this ambient feeling of "this boxy beige Macintosh isn't a sleek Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, but it's an acceptable interim substitute until you get a cyberdeck which could be any day now". We were sort of roleplaying at being a part of sort of a beta version of Gibson's tragically hip cyberfuture, not realizing that we were ultimately being sold the shitty parts of that future without any of the cool parts. It's kind of like the joke about Bill Gates in hell: the cool stuff was just the demo.
> It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience.
One weird side effect of this was that Internet Explorer and Explorer itself were integrated. At a time, you could set your desktop wallpaper to an HTML page. There were even "HTML apps" introduced around the same time* which I believe is still being somewhat continued today for Windows 10 widget development
Yes, local directory windows and such were rendered with the IE engine in Windows 98 as I recall. Files and directories became "hyperlinks" and Microsoft made a big stink about how they could be navigated with one click instead of a double click, "just like the web". "Push" was the fad; instead of visiting Web sites, in Soviet Russia websites would come to you. That motivated Active Desktop.
I thought it was stupid and potentially dangerous because it misled users to treat the web and local resources equally, and put the same amount of trust in each. Of course nowadays, not treating local resources with the same amount of distrust we give the web is a major security fail, and that's why we must notarize and sandbox everything.
Honestly I sort of miss the late-90s web/desktop integration features of Windows. There were so many different ways to hack on it. You could make an Explorer folder be a web page, of course, but it went way beyond that because there was so much magic and so little safety. You could program the browser in any language installed in your Windows Scripting Host, including VB and JS but also Perl and TCL and whatever else you wanted to use. You could invoke any Windows facility using its magic {UUID}, so you could embed the Control Panel in a web page. It was all fully integrated with the Windows database features, so depending on what databases you had installed you could achieve a lot. Access was common, if you had Office Professional, but anything you could describe to ODBC would work.
I couldn't have put it better myself. I always felt like the netscape throbbers[0] really captured the mysteriousness and wonder of what it felt like to navigate the early web.
jwz's favorite throbber (also my favorite) captured this feeling particularly well since it is literally an animated compass[1].
I actually got really into the history of browser throbbers back when I was in college — I ended up archiving all I could find from the mozilla ftp and internet archive[2].
While I used to maintain an SeaMonkey (Mozilla Suite) xpfe complete theme with a properly animated throbber, I actually still use the jwz throbber through my unfinished xpfe userChrome.css in Firefox to this day.
Sadly, there are no css dynamic css classes above the #PanelUI-menu-button element in chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml, so it's not possible to properly animate it without javascript; for now, it animates when you hover over it.
I use the Firescape Navigator[0] add-on that adds the Netscape throbber to my Firefox toolbar. It reminds me of when I was still using Netscape daily and had just started switching to Firefox.
I remember being mad when they went to 'Communicator'. Like: no! I want to use a web browser, not a pile of other garbage bolted on, and I already have an email program, and what the hell is this?
I liked Composer though. It wrote readable, reasonably compliant (for the time) HTML. It was an invaluable learning tool for me, writing WYSIWYG in one window and seeing the source in another...
In 1996 I got online for the first time with dial up, it creeped my mother out "why do people talk to each other over the computer why can't they use the phone?" lol
Is it just me, but my mind immediately relaxed and I started to have good feeling vibe after seeing the Netscape logo and all this simple blue background and text...
I guess I just came back to my childhood and the simple sense of wonder and exploration. Nowdays the internet is mostly stress inducing FOMO feeling of another tech article, new languages/framework, bad news everywhere...
82 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadLife was great when we could mod everything!
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[1] I say 'they' I mean 'me' - I did application packaging at the time.
[2] Upvotes for those who guess the bank! :D
Does it still count as a guess if I clicked on your username, visited the website you listed on your profile and read the CV that you have on said website? :p
You can also change the port number to your preferred year.
This is really fun on retro systems / web browsers.
Detailed instructions: https://theoldnet.com/docs/httpproxy/index.html
There's also Browservice: https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
It is lo-fi, not trying to mimic the orginal page, unlike those that do the giant image trick.
Just paste your URL to the end of this URL to use it: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=
EDIT: example using a random MDN page: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://developer.mozilla.org...
You can kinda tell when an idea grows directly from a core joke, pun or other clever play.
In the 656th century we will be behind 50 layers of NAT.
https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png
That sounds interesting ..
Netscape Visual JavaScript helps make it practical and easy to develop sophisticated crossware applications through drag-and-drop components and simple visual programming. You can easily incorporate sophisticated functionality and database connectivity into web pages without writing code. Netscape Visual JavaScript enables you to deliver finished applications to users quickly and easily.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210706/http://home.netsc...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210940/http://home.netsc...
https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs....
Image via https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs....
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Netscape-Visual-JavaScript...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Dummies-...
and here's the netscape homepage but with the old netscape "mosaic communications" domain: https://web.archive.org/web/19980109011204/http://home.mcom....
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/help-me-keep-home-mcom-com-...
https://web.archive.org/web/19961116025218/http://developer....
Check out that jaggy squinched text in those diagrams! Somebody resized a GIF file smaller to save some bandwidth, and so it would fit on a 640x480 screen. 1997 web design at its finest!
Pro Tip: Never name a user interface toolkit after "MFC" with "M" crossed out and "I" written in -- that doesn't make it sound very appetizing, and wrongly sets expectations that you can actually write a viable application with it, given enough pain and suffering. Just as you should never name a component system after "COM" with "XP/" written before it, for the same reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830
And while you're at it, you should never name a company after "Microsoft" with "Micro" crossed out and "Sun" written in, because it makes it look like you define your company in terms of your biggest competitor instead of having your own identity and mission, which is what losers and foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian Trump supporters like Scott McNealy do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundrai...
Marimba was much better at naming things, thanks to Kim Polese, who came up with the name "Java" when she was at Sun, then left Sun with several of the finest Java engineers to form the drum-themed Java start-up company, "Marimba". Their product "Castanet" literally cast a net to deliver interactive content over the internet, and their Java-powered HyperCard-like user interface builder "Bongo" actually let you interactively edit Java scripts to handle events, by calling the Java compiler at runtime (which was unheard-of at the time, but normal for IDEs to do now).
https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/
I wrote a comparison of Bongo and IFC about a year before that Netscape page was captured in 1997.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was.
>Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing).
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>While I was working at Interval Research Corporation in 1996, after playing around with and reading over the source code and documentation, I wrote up a deep comparison and analysis of Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) versus Marimba Bongo (which was written by Arthur van ...
Edit: There's an online disassembler here that can grok the downloaded file: https://onlinedisassembler.com/
These days we're just browsing glossy magazines.
https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure...
no idea to what extent, if at all, it is true. I can imagine there being a grain of truth in there but that implementing this correctly is much more difficult and nuanced than it might seem at first glance - most "digital designers"[1] probably don't get the budget/freedom to properly tackle accessibility in their commercial projects, I can also imagine that the majority of digital designers are 'young' and have close to 20/20 vision making it that much harder for them to truly put themselves in the shoes (eyes?) of people with lesser than perfect vision[2].
as someone with only a laymans' understanding of all this stuff I'm probably guilty of talking out of my **; I welcome someone with real graphic design credentials putting me straight :D
[1] "digital designer", a person working in/with visual design, who started employment, or was born, after the release of the first iPhone ;-) (alternatively someone working in the design industry who never had the privilege of buying a copy of "The Face" for the simple fact they we not born in 1985)
[2] a category I begrudgingly have to admit to being part of more and more ;-/
I also have (partially outdated) custom stylesheet that fixes that for websites I {used to,} visit often: https://jenda.hrach.eu/w/blackweb
I liked throbbers because they signalled "ok, I'm going to the network to fetch what you asked for" as opposed to the hourglass cursor which indicated ordinary computer activity. It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience. They seemed not to understand that the network was fundamentally different, and in many ways more dangerous, than the local PC because it is almost always, as we say today, someone else's computer; and that the end user should be made aware of and encouraged to respect that difference.
I think the nostalgia for the feeling of navigating cyberspace is part of what inspires art movements like vaporwave, with its incorporation of 90s GUI elements in its aesthetic. In the 90s, there was always this ambient feeling of "this boxy beige Macintosh isn't a sleek Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, but it's an acceptable interim substitute until you get a cyberdeck which could be any day now". We were sort of roleplaying at being a part of sort of a beta version of Gibson's tragically hip cyberfuture, not realizing that we were ultimately being sold the shitty parts of that future without any of the cool parts. It's kind of like the joke about Bill Gates in hell: the cool stuff was just the demo.
One weird side effect of this was that Internet Explorer and Explorer itself were integrated. At a time, you could set your desktop wallpaper to an HTML page. There were even "HTML apps" introduced around the same time* which I believe is still being somewhat continued today for Windows 10 widget development
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
I thought it was stupid and potentially dangerous because it misled users to treat the web and local resources equally, and put the same amount of trust in each. Of course nowadays, not treating local resources with the same amount of distrust we give the web is a major security fail, and that's why we must notarize and sandbox everything.
jwz's favorite throbber (also my favorite) captured this feeling particularly well since it is literally an animated compass[1].
I actually got really into the history of browser throbbers back when I was in college — I ended up archiving all I could find from the mozilla ftp and internet archive[2].
[0]: https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html
[1]: https://www.jwz.org/compass2.gif / https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-compass-anim.gif
[2]: http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/browsers/throbber...
While I used to maintain an SeaMonkey (Mozilla Suite) xpfe complete theme with a properly animated throbber, I actually still use the jwz throbber through my unfinished xpfe userChrome.css in Firefox to this day.
Sadly, there are no css dynamic css classes above the #PanelUI-menu-button element in chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml, so it's not possible to properly animate it without javascript; for now, it animates when you hover over it.
https://i.imgur.com/vmzlwNU.jpg
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firescape_nav...
In the end, it's Google everywhere. My how times have changed.
I still use it as a reference anytime someone recommends making the same fatal software product mistake that Netscape did.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...