Where it failed was protocols, the old binaries know nothing of modern TLS, and the vast majority of the web is now using that even when there's just no need to, so the browser works, most things could still render, but very little works.
I got Netscape 1.12 working on an old Macintosh, and while it can't browse much by default, this[0] HTTP proxy makes the 'net much more accessible. I'm kind of surprised that proxies were supported so early in browsers, does anyone know why?
Also, if you happen to design a website with Netscape 1 compatibility, and you want to replace SVG images with GIFs only for Netscape, you can use the <object> tag like this:
Network Address Translation was invented the same year that Netscape Navigator was originally released, and it took years for it to become the de facto way to get a private local network onto the Internet. In the 90s I installed proxy servers at several small businesses in order to share a dialup connection to other PCs in the network.
> In the 90s I installed proxy servers at several small businesses in order to share a dialup connection to other PCs in the network.
If your customer was cheap and needed more bandwidth you could use EQL[0] to load-balance a PPP connection over multiple POTS/ISDN lines if your ISP supported multiple connections. I set this up for a number of businesses back then when office staff started arguing with each over who was using all the bandwidth from a single 28K modem.
I wrote my first web app on netscapes commerce server in C around 1994. It was an online aptitude test for a distance learning college. I still remember banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why it was producing a 500. Until I realized that Content-type: text/html needed two \n’s after it, not just one.
When they installed a gopher client at our local university Vax system, it was a thrill. So many hours using Veronica search stuff. And I remember kept using gopher during the Mosaic and Netscape 1-2 era.
> At release Netscape Navigator 1.0 competed against NCSA Mosaic. Over Mosaic, Netscape offered the ability to see documents and images as they load, loading both images and text at the same time, support for JPEG graphics, document caching, a friendlier GUI with more configuration options, and hierarchical bookmarks.
This leaves out a huge differentiator -- Netscape supported background images. Every site looked blander in Mosaic (even if it were a lot easier to read). The other features TFA mentions are great but background images were the origin of "This site is best viewed using XXXX".
I was an early employee at Netscape, and worked on the browser, server, and the services platforms. It was a hell of a ride - you felt the world changing under your keyboard. I am glad to see it still brings joy to people to use the product of our work in its original form. I often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance. After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome and related technologies, which were sadly in service of another monopolist - but this one protecting its dominance in pervasive surveillance.
Thank you for replying, your work shaped me into what I came to be. I was a backend developer at the end of the 90’s, sadly not for Netscape Server, it was mostly C++ CGI.
Oh I should sit and watch that. Yes I was there and helped a lot. Jwz was a friend at the time (although I later became too uncool for him). The launch party for Mozilla was awesome.
> often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance
> technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome
IE was pretty innovative, it introduced AJAX (async javascript requests...), web version of Outlook in 1998...
There was also Opera browser, pretty innovative, it introduced tabs, mouse gestures, user styles, no script, basic adblocking... It could run on anything, even phone without MMU.
There were already competing things in these areas already. They were the ultimate standardizations, but the momentum was already there and something would have standardized. It happened that after crushing Netscape no one bothered to develop the alternatives. I’d note that all of these emerged while Netscape was still a viable business delivering those alternatives. I look at the gap after AJAX and notice nothing really comes along until almost a decade later.
I didn’t say no one released rendering engines (note Firefox is Netscape reborn). But these products didn’t do any fundamental additions to HTML, HTTP, or ancillary web and internet technologies. They provided alternatives to IE.
No personal offense intended, but Netscape was crushed by its own technological problems and missing business model as much as anything else. By the time IE4 was out, it was unquestionably the better browser - the Communicator suite was buggy and bloated by comparison, and only fell further behind as Mozilla scrambled to rewrite the whole thing.
Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.
The business model was to license the browser to corporations. And they would have done pretty well except Microsoft gave away the browser for free.
The model of licensing software was pretty typical for the time. I disagree that they didn’t have a sustainable business model. Sure, IE4 was better and Netscape didn’t respond very well, but by 1997 it’s market share and revenues were already significantly eroded.
Microsoft redirected billions of dollars from their OS monopoly into developing a free product bundled into the operating system to bring down a competitor in a different market. It’s not my take, it’s the judgement of the courts.
Mozilla was based on gecko and related technologies which were being developed for communicator, but when the revenues associated with the browser evaporated, there was no point in investing in it any further. Rather than simply letting it rot we decided that the way to stick a thumb in Microsoft’s eye was to take one step further and not just make it free, but make it open, with an organization to perpetuate open browser technologies. But everything that went into Mozilla was already long in development.
That said, IE 4 was a better product - which goes to show an unlimited war chest, a singular drive, and no commercial necessities can go a long way in developing software. They also had a lot of layout experience internally with office, and made smart key decisions that we had blundered on early due to lack of layout experience. We were mostly an internet protocol company, and our layout experience was fairly simple. That translated into a really key early mistake - when calculating table layout, which were the primary way of organizing visual elements at that time, we assumed tables were infinitely large and as we loaded elements and calculated their size we sized the table to fit them. Microsoft did the opposite and assumed they were zero sized and rendered each element in lay out as its size is known. This allowed a perception of faster loading because you could see the loading as it progressed. Unfortunately the layout engine in early Netscape browsers was so deeply enmeshed in the code that removing it and replacing it with gecko was a multi year effort, and we were being driven my marketing and product to release versions so as to not be seen as falling behind.
Ultimately that was the downfall of Netscape - product had way too much power over engineering, and while we had the best engineering team I’ve ever worked with in my career (including at multiple FAANG, unicorns, Wall Street quant groups, etc), we were constantly hamstrung by product chasing some short term priorities to keep notching differentiating features. Microsoft had a very clear goal - eliminate Netscape’s browser revenue at any cost - and the ability to redirect most of their engineering talent into that goal. Once they released a bundled browser that was technically superior as a web rendering tool for absolutely free (not just free, but mandatory and inseparable from their OS), it was all over for us. All the differentiating features were buggy baggage on a partially completed product vision that had no revenue model - so, the product never finished.
The key is there -was- a business model, and it was successful. But no one can compete against a monopoly price dumping to zero. Given another six months we would have had the new layout and rendering engine in place, and would have had the better browser again. But with no revenue possible, the only option was to fold. But the smarter option was the one we took, and thus set up the precedent for large open source transfers and foundations. And, IE languished and rotted, because why bother investing in something that makes no revenues?
There was no plan to rewrite the browser. It was to replace the rendering and layout engine with Gecko, and the chrome with XUL. Both of these were the foundation of Firefox, so wasn’t such a bad decision after all? Netscape 5 was post revenue decimation and was a bizarre organizational screwup between the Mozilla efforts and the existing rendering engine folks, where the existing engine folks thought they could salvage the renderer. They were not able to, and the gecko efforts were the only viable path forward.
I’ve read Joel’s outsider view from Microsoft’s monopolist vantage and it doesn’t square with reality of what actually occurred. And his discussion of the situation sans the fact Netscape was in disarray after his employer destroyed our business illegally leaves a lot of crucial context out of the discussion.
Fact is even in Mozilla and Netscape 6, and in both efforts for 5, most of the code carried over. The rewrite was primarily focused on integrating or improving the rendering engine (remember 5 was two competing camps trying to get to done first, some bizarre cargo cult management decision based of Microsoft culture).
Ironically the historical truth is Joel’s advocated way of incrementalism was the side that actually lost and couldn’t deliver anything. The rewrite is what you use today in Firefox.
Netscape's failure seems to have been caused by years of incrementally piling new features over the old rotten core without much cleanup / refactoring, which is certainly not what Joel suggests
I’d note also the issue wasn’t Microsoft writing their own browser. They already had. The illegal thing they did was integrate the browser directly into the operating system as a mandatory thing for free as a way to drive a competitor out of business, which succeeded. This isn’t my opinion, this is public record and a legal finding of fact.
Netscape would have improved in response given a normal competitive market. But they didn’t and couldn’t. Instead we started Mozilla, which is probably a better outcome for everyone. My work on creating the Mozilla project is a highlight of my career.
Even as a fan of Microsoft, rephrasing that as "the entirely legal thing they did that drove a competitor out of business" doesn't make me feel better about the outcome.
Isn’t the simple explanation that Navigator sucked and people decided not to go out of their way to download it?
Navigator did suck and was crash prone and could bring down the entire operating system on weaker operating systems like the Mac.
We have two instances where people did in fact choose to go out of their way to download better browsers then the default - first Firefox and then Chrome.
It's been so long, I think people may have forgotten just how unstable Netscape actually was. 4.x was also incredibly bloated for the time. At one company, I remember a guy rebooting his Mac daily because NS would crash it. In the late 90's, I also briefly worked at another company with tons of ex-Netscape people. Even they preferred IE.
Netscape did have a nice http server. NSAPI was, as I recall, the earliest version of something like FastCGI, where your backend processes were separate from the web server, but didn't have to fork/exec/exit for every request.
I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also had the pleasure of having to duplicate), with Netscape, Eudora, and Trumpet Winsock so they could dial-in.
Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users.
No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user.
Submitted title was "29 years ago today I went online. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was the tool I loved" - that would be fine as a comment in the thread, but not as a submission title. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) and also you'll have a lot more room to share your story!
Netscape 2.x/3.x on System 7.5 is where I was introduced to the internet. Their splash screens and animated loading icon added a certain air of awe to what was already an impressive experience as a kid… kudos to whoever was in charge of the design of those graphics.
Every time I see the splash screen, the color scheme and the icon, it bring me to a sort of serenity state. I guess the subconscious is transfered to carefree and wonderous childhood.
I’m the op, and 29 years ago today I went online. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was the tool I loved back then, it’s great to still see it around as a piece in the museum.
Thankfully, there are still ways to run it nowadays, but virtually no websites keep working with it. Still brings back good memories.
It gave me something to do while loading a page over slow-ass dialup. The worst were pages had the same color for the text and background and relied on a slow loading background image to provide the contrast to read anything.
33 years ago, I went online and sent an email to ARJ’s author Robert K. Jung over a BITNET-Internet gateway on a 3270 terminal connected to an IBM 4341. Robert was very friendly, and had replied to all my emails. ARJ was a very promising and feature rich compression software until PKZIP 2.x came out and basically devoured the archiver market.
54 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadIt worked!
Until it didn't.
Where it failed was protocols, the old binaries know nothing of modern TLS, and the vast majority of the web is now using that even when there's just no need to, so the browser works, most things could still render, but very little works.
Also, if you happen to design a website with Netscape 1 compatibility, and you want to replace SVG images with GIFs only for Netscape, you can use the <object> tag like this:
[0]: https://github.com/rdmark/macproxyIf your customer was cheap and needed more bandwidth you could use EQL[0] to load-balance a PPP connection over multiple POTS/ISDN lines if your ISP supported multiple connections. I set this up for a number of businesses back then when office staff started arguing with each over who was using all the bandwidth from a single 28K modem.
[0]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/eql.txt
Nice one. Haven't heard this phrase for quite some time now, but essentially, this is what remote/virtual/e-learning is all about today.
This leaves out a huge differentiator -- Netscape supported background images. Every site looked blander in Mosaic (even if it were a lot easier to read). The other features TFA mentions are great but background images were the origin of "This site is best viewed using XXXX".
Have you been around during this time period (birth hour of Mozilla)? https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
> technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome
IE was pretty innovative, it introduced AJAX (async javascript requests...), web version of Outlook in 1998...
There was also Opera browser, pretty innovative, it introduced tabs, mouse gestures, user styles, no script, basic adblocking... It could run on anything, even phone without MMU.
No innovation came pre-Chrome?
Like KHTML (or WebKit) … or Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?
Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.
The model of licensing software was pretty typical for the time. I disagree that they didn’t have a sustainable business model. Sure, IE4 was better and Netscape didn’t respond very well, but by 1997 it’s market share and revenues were already significantly eroded.
IE was a better product on Windows and Macs
Mozilla was based on gecko and related technologies which were being developed for communicator, but when the revenues associated with the browser evaporated, there was no point in investing in it any further. Rather than simply letting it rot we decided that the way to stick a thumb in Microsoft’s eye was to take one step further and not just make it free, but make it open, with an organization to perpetuate open browser technologies. But everything that went into Mozilla was already long in development.
That said, IE 4 was a better product - which goes to show an unlimited war chest, a singular drive, and no commercial necessities can go a long way in developing software. They also had a lot of layout experience internally with office, and made smart key decisions that we had blundered on early due to lack of layout experience. We were mostly an internet protocol company, and our layout experience was fairly simple. That translated into a really key early mistake - when calculating table layout, which were the primary way of organizing visual elements at that time, we assumed tables were infinitely large and as we loaded elements and calculated their size we sized the table to fit them. Microsoft did the opposite and assumed they were zero sized and rendered each element in lay out as its size is known. This allowed a perception of faster loading because you could see the loading as it progressed. Unfortunately the layout engine in early Netscape browsers was so deeply enmeshed in the code that removing it and replacing it with gecko was a multi year effort, and we were being driven my marketing and product to release versions so as to not be seen as falling behind.
Ultimately that was the downfall of Netscape - product had way too much power over engineering, and while we had the best engineering team I’ve ever worked with in my career (including at multiple FAANG, unicorns, Wall Street quant groups, etc), we were constantly hamstrung by product chasing some short term priorities to keep notching differentiating features. Microsoft had a very clear goal - eliminate Netscape’s browser revenue at any cost - and the ability to redirect most of their engineering talent into that goal. Once they released a bundled browser that was technically superior as a web rendering tool for absolutely free (not just free, but mandatory and inseparable from their OS), it was all over for us. All the differentiating features were buggy baggage on a partially completed product vision that had no revenue model - so, the product never finished.
The key is there -was- a business model, and it was successful. But no one can compete against a monopoly price dumping to zero. Given another six months we would have had the new layout and rendering engine in place, and would have had the better browser again. But with no revenue possible, the only option was to fold. But the smarter option was the one we took, and thus set up the precedent for large open source transfers and foundations. And, IE languished and rotted, because why bother investing in something that makes no revenues?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
The operating system vendor creating thier own browser was always going to happen
Neither Apple, Google or Microsoft were ever going to let themselves be beholden to a third party for anything as essential as the browser
I’ve read Joel’s outsider view from Microsoft’s monopolist vantage and it doesn’t square with reality of what actually occurred. And his discussion of the situation sans the fact Netscape was in disarray after his employer destroyed our business illegally leaves a lot of crucial context out of the discussion.
Fact is even in Mozilla and Netscape 6, and in both efforts for 5, most of the code carried over. The rewrite was primarily focused on integrating or improving the rendering engine (remember 5 was two competing camps trying to get to done first, some bizarre cargo cult management decision based of Microsoft culture).
Ironically the historical truth is Joel’s advocated way of incrementalism was the side that actually lost and couldn’t deliver anything. The rewrite is what you use today in Firefox.
From a business standpoint or even market share, can you really say that Firefox is a success?
It only survives because its largest competitor is also its biggest funder.
We also have an existence proof that if the competitor is better - ie Chrome - people will go out of their way to download an alternative.
You see that people download Chrome on both Macs and especially Windows.
Netscape would have improved in response given a normal competitive market. But they didn’t and couldn’t. Instead we started Mozilla, which is probably a better outcome for everyone. My work on creating the Mozilla project is a highlight of my career.
There was never a time since MS bundled the browser with the Windows that they were forced not to do so.
There was also never a browser choice mandate in the US.
Navigator did suck and was crash prone and could bring down the entire operating system on weaker operating systems like the Mac.
We have two instances where people did in fact choose to go out of their way to download better browsers then the default - first Firefox and then Chrome.
Of course the Mac came in dead last because a Navigator crash would cause the entire operating system to crash
You mean Mozilla Firefox.
Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users.
No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user.
Netscape made the business possible.
https://files.catbox.moe/xe1d3f.png
(you need to mount the virtual floppy disk image)
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) and also you'll have a lot more room to share your story!
Thankfully, there are still ways to run it nowadays, but virtually no websites keep working with it. Still brings back good memories.
I modified my Vivaldi install to add the animated N (downloaded from http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an... ), as I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36993118 . After writing that comment I modified it further so that the persona icon isn't circular, but square, by modifying the Vivaldi UI through CSS: https://gabevilela.vivaldi.net/2020/12/26/guide-customizing-...