Me too - I was there in fact - jwz was a friend back in the day. “Monkeybutter” is the password to his loft parties :-) my big contribution to the world of the web was search strings in the URL bar, which prior required a valid URL.
The original rules were any single word was converted to www.<query>.com, I.e., www.google.com unless preceded by a ?, and any string with a white space was a search. YMMV on different browsers.
An interesting story from that chapter of my life came when we were logging. To resolve the dispatch the search string hit our servers. That means we got a log of all search requests. I took a principled stand that we should never log any ip addresses or Netscape cookie trackers with the search requests. Management agreed. Hence we went out of business and got the browser we deserve, Chrome and Edge.
To be fair, it wasn't the lack of search data revenue that wound up bankrupting the company -- that whole data mining industry didn't really exist outside of a couple of players and the USG. What did Netscape in was the browser revenue stream evaporating because of IE getting shipped with Windows, and the huge amount of time and people put into the Enterprise Server project that effectively got destroyed by the birth of Apache, and then double-destroyed by the birth of PHP.
Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.
Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues.
The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.”
That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.
For me the Meteors are the very first thing I remember from when a friend showed me the www and I saw it for the first time. The screen was flashing irregularly when he moved the mouse between the browser window and other windows, because this was a Sun workstation and apparently it used a different color palette for the browser.
When we waited for a slow page to load and I remarked how fascinated I was about the smooth Meteor animation my friend replied dryly: "They'd better spend the cycles for loading the page faster." and we laughed about that.
Not silly, human psychology I think. I remember reading a thing a while back where appearance of response feels faster even when slower. You can try this yourself in your favorite language by having an app with three buttons:
- first button waits 9 seconds and then displays "done"
- second button updates a progress bar once a second for 10 seconds then displays "done"
- third button updates the progress bar once every 100ms for 10 seconds then displays "done"
IE 4 was impressively fast compared to Netscape, and also included the little tick-bump navigation sounds, which I liked at first but they've now been mercifully put down.
It definitely makes a difference, the Facebook team replaced their iOS app startup loader from the facebook style row of lines ||||| to the standard iOS spinner because users perceived Facebook being slow with its loader and perceived iPhone being slow with the iOS spinner
You mean the icon with the clouds moving behind the Windows logo? It had an absurd speed on my laptop, like the clouds moving at warp speed. Can't remember if it was IE 3, but it never looked right to me lol
That brings back serious flashbacks for me. Compiling Mosaic and demoing it to my boss on his windows PC which was running some kind of X server. Just as a comet smashed into Jupiter.
Indeed. It made me remember of one of my first programming projects: a teacher of mine had written a spaceship game for Netscape and I ported it to IE's UI model. There was no standardized DOM and, IIRC, forcing non-compatibility was one of the pillars of Microsoft's strategy.
I would assume frame drawn, but back in the day there was ANI to GIF converters.
So it could have been done in 3D Studio Max, or Maya on SGI or Lightwave on Amiga -> .ANI-> .GIF
This by the way, means there could be a way to extract/archaeology dig after the original project file and make a nice 8K render of it.
I'm imagining some hacked up workflow that includes:
- Something like Autodesk 3D Studio R3/R4 (DOS) or Lightwave 3D (Amiga) for the base animation and the light rendering - that would be hellish to do manually.
- Some custom-built software for palette optimization
- Photoshop on Mac for the compositing (the 'N' doesn't change)
- A bunch of manual work per frame
Not necessarily in that order.
(3d Studio Max was released in 1996, Maya in 1998.)
Edit: on the other hand: Netscape was founded and founded by Jim Clark (of SGI fame), so the 3d stuff was probably done on software running on an SGI machine.
We are discussing how the original animation was (or might have been) created in 1993/1994. Not what tools were used by Netscape users when creating replacements of it 3-5 years later.
It was a bitmap image that consisted of a strip of individual frames. It was common for a while to make them from animated gifs (which were plentiful and popular on the web). http://leighb.com/throbgif.htm
> I started out doing some web searches that turned up several versions. One was promising but far too big: 400×400 px. Worse, after some shoddy resize attempts, the “pixels” had become rectangular.
The actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile. Not a complaint against you in anyway, it just looks absurd. Massive Futurama add on top, some other promoted content below, and about 3% of the screen is the specific image for that page. Obviously because the picture height is only 30px.
Mobile imgur is really bad. It doesn't allow hotlinking, has a lot of annoying ads and other content, sometimes automatic quality degradation, and at one point they even hijacked the back button. We should just use something like abload.de or similar.
You're still going to get redirected from the image to a javascript-heavy page. Better to get people to stop using imgur - if them showing they don't care about preservation by deleting all images not associated with an account recently wasn't reason enough.
You do mention it, but to draw it out for those who might not notice the naming: this is a later, fancier, more colorful version from Netscape _Communicator_ (‘Netscape 4’), which had a more golden hued, more ‘detailed’ UI.
The article discusses the animation from Netscape _Navigator_, probably version 3 (‘Netscape 3’).
There used to be themes like that but over time they became broken due to changes to the Firefox UI architecture changes. I would pay for a good userchrome.css that still worked to to implement a classic Netscape theme on modern firefox!
I would love to have a web tool that lets you replace the "N" with a different letter so you can make your own avatar with the first letter of your name.
I used to have a lot of fun making replacement Netscape "throbbers" (as they were called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber ). I made a color changing dragon, the USS Enterprise flying by, Xena animations, etc. Good times.
I got a call from an ISDN salesman desperate to makes sales. The place I worked didn't want an ISDN line but I sure did. My place in Brooklyn barely had phone service but I got I think 2 64kbit channels and a 9.6kbit a channel for an around $100. The a channel couldn't be used but the b channels each represented a single phone number. Digital TeleMedia was the one ISP in NYC trying to offer static IPs over ISDN lines. We used Ascend Pipeline 50s and I was using MailShare from Glenn Anderson and Chuck Shotton's Webster.
See that Glenns project died just a couple of years ago which is sad if I had Known it existed I would bought a license. I just checked and I'm happy to report Chuck Shotton is sill at MacHTTP.
Ah the Netscape navigator icon. Warm memories. It was a beautiful and relaxing colors for the Netscape site and the browser.
I knew I had an internet connection if the meteors were moving, if not, well call at another time.
So Vivaldi as a Chromium-based browser also has personas/user accounts/whatever you want to call it, that shows your icon on the top right. It doesn't need to be an online account, and it allows you to choose a custom icon, even from disk (my Chromium install offers 24 icons but no "load image" picker). And... the custom icon can be an animated GIF!
So this is what the top right corner of my Vivaldi install looks like right now, but in real life it's animated: https://i.imgur.com/pqvhlsz.png
Fun nostalgia but weird post? Detailing a "quest" to find an "original" GIF? Like, how do we know what sizes were around at the time? Finding the largest "original" version of a graphic and that's it?
The small sizes are what was around at the time, leave it at that. And obviously there's a billion copies of it and the 80x25 banners and what not everywhere. Nostalgia abounds!
Ironic that someone can write a blog and spend all this time reproducing a small portion of something that thousands of us have seen. Islands of information.
Or there's just so much chaff. I've done similar searches, and the number of results akin to the 400x400 one she got just seem to blanket the results. Bad resizes, bad crops, JPEG'ing, people photographing a screen, etc. … when you're looking for the OG.
And this particular animation is practically a treasure, now, as it was burned into the collective consciousness of the time. That is should be hard to find says a lot about search engines, the Internet, or both…
Well, now that that site is back up: is it all of them? The one from the OP doesn't seem to be there. (It doesn't seem like the OP's is Netscape 4, either; according to [1], it seems like the one OP was after is from Netscape 1. Or as the author says, " the original Netscape Navigator", emphasis mine.)
(And [1]'s image has been altered: there's a white border, the last few frames appear to be missing, the palette isn't quite right — vs. the palette in the OPs is just spot-on and screams the era. Seems to only drive home some of the points in the OP.)
The internet era when it felt like anyone could sit down and read a 6" thick book from Borders Bookstore to learn to write HTML and go for it and create a career.
In fact, that's what I did - and I used a program located within Netscape to get started.
Oh this and the communicator throbber bring back such memories. I would wait some amount of time and then hit stop. This would render the page if you hit it just right, fail to load if you didn't have the data yet, and hit an error page if you waited too long and hit a timeout.
What a terrible way to live: 14.4 kilobits per second.
It's a GIF, so unless the source artwork is still around, probably not. Aggressive dithering was very much an early web thing due to the early color limitations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors).
126 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadAn interesting story from that chapter of my life came when we were logging. To resolve the dispatch the search string hit our servers. That means we got a log of all search requests. I took a principled stand that we should never log any ip addresses or Netscape cookie trackers with the search requests. Management agreed. Hence we went out of business and got the browser we deserve, Chrome and Edge.
Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.
The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.”
That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.
When we waited for a slow page to load and I remarked how fascinated I was about the smooth Meteor animation my friend replied dryly: "They'd better spend the cycles for loading the page faster." and we laughed about that.
It was a fun time, good memories!
I always wondered if MS intentionally made it faster due to perception.
Having a sense of fluidity makes it like the machine is well programmed and organized, while a slow gif animation will feel like something is wrong.
- first button waits 9 seconds and then displays "done"
- second button updates a progress bar once a second for 10 seconds then displays "done"
- third button updates the progress bar once every 100ms for 10 seconds then displays "done"
See which one feels fastest
EDIT: It was IE 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic_Browser_Scree...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/NCSA_Mos...
The pure web without all the bells and whistles :)
Then Netscape developed javascript (first Mocha/LiveScript) and here we are now.
This by the way, means there could be a way to extract/archaeology dig after the original project file and make a nice 8K render of it.
- Something like Autodesk 3D Studio R3/R4 (DOS) or Lightwave 3D (Amiga) for the base animation and the light rendering - that would be hellish to do manually.
- Some custom-built software for palette optimization
- Photoshop on Mac for the compositing (the 'N' doesn't change)
- A bunch of manual work per frame
Not necessarily in that order.
(3d Studio Max was released in 1996, Maya in 1998.)
Edit: on the other hand: Netscape was founded and founded by Jim Clark (of SGI fame), so the 3d stuff was probably done on software running on an SGI machine.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543
Previous HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526
http://artfcity.com/2014/11/07/gif-of-the-day-netscape-navig...
> I started out doing some web searches that turned up several versions. One was promising but far too big: 400×400 px. Worse, after some shoddy resize attempts, the “pixels” had become rectangular.
However, they're just 32x32 frames, not the glorious 60x60 from the article:
https://i.imgur.com/sXcEEDU.png
It's only 13K. I wonder how many HN comments it would take to post the image as BASE64 USENET-style.
Here's the animation of just the loop (frame 1 excluded) https://i.ibb.co/DMDBR7L/Netscape-Communicator-Meteor-Loop.g...
May I introduce you to reshacker.exe: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/
Spent a lot of time as a teen using it to change windows graphics. (E.g. the image shown when loading windows or shutting down the PC). Fun times
Also MinGW's windres might be able to do it (it can add and copy resources from .exe files at least).
The article discusses the animation from Netscape _Navigator_, probably version 3 (‘Netscape 3’).
Navigator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+navigator&t=h_&iar=images...
Communicator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+communicator&t=h_&iar=ima...
Not aware of the interview being posted anywhere online.
Really beautiful bit of branding, dripping with soul and artfulness.
https://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/557401/pictures-visual-h...
Within five years you could get a 1Mbit cable connection for basically $100CAD/mo.
ISDN had a brief but glorious reign!
See that Glenns project died just a couple of years ago which is sad if I had Known it existed I would bought a license. I just checked and I'm happy to report Chuck Shotton is sill at MacHTTP.
So this is what the top right corner of my Vivaldi install looks like right now, but in real life it's animated: https://i.imgur.com/pqvhlsz.png
The small sizes are what was around at the time, leave it at that. And obviously there's a billion copies of it and the 80x25 banners and what not everywhere. Nostalgia abounds!
And this particular animation is practically a treasure, now, as it was burned into the collective consciousness of the time. That is should be hard to find says a lot about search engines, the Internet, or both…
The blog post survives, though…
(And [1]'s image has been altered: there's a white border, the last few frames appear to be missing, the palette isn't quite right — vs. the palette in the OPs is just spot-on and screams the era. Seems to only drive home some of the points in the OP.)
[1]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/netscape-browser
In fact, that's what I did - and I used a program located within Netscape to get started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
Imagine buying a physical copy of a web browser these days.
What a terrible way to live: 14.4 kilobits per second.
(Is there a story behind this?)