What Ever Happened to Netscape?
What Ever Happened to Netscape?
It was a magical time, hearing the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the Internet. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while...
Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. The nascent browser was originally named Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose triumphantly from the ashes of its dead predecessor (in this case, from the "ashes" of Netscape Navigator, after it was sidelined by Microsoft Internet Explorer in the "First Browser War").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
On January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that its Netscape Communicator browser software would be free, and that its source code would also be free. One day later, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape registered mozilla.org. The project took its name, "Mozilla", from the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser—a portmanteau of "Mosaic and Godzilla", and used to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the free software version of Netscape's internet software, Netscape Communicator. Zawinski said he arrived at the name "Mozilla" at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordinating the new community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla
Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.
See also the documentary.
I could’ve sworn that the browser was also called just Mozilla at one point, or was that just always the suite it was part of?
I loved Netscape as a kid. I would stare at the little Netscape icon with the shooting stars while waiting for pages to load... Funny how little things like that seemed so magical back then ✨🖥️💖
They were magical.
The third of Arthur C Clarke's three laws:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
They became a poster child for why you should never “start over from scratch” even if your current codebase is awful. Because when you do that your competitors keep going, then they have years on your now stale product. Netscape lost all on their own…
Also: selling a browser? Man, the 90’s where wild.
That's rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.
Netscape lost because Microsoft used it's dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.
The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn't bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.
So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.
Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it's own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.
Chrome was also shoved down user's throats by being bundled with all kinds of software. When you downloaded programs from places like SourceForge, Softonic and similar, your download (when you installed it) had "Install Chrome Browser" already checked. If you forgot to uncheck the box, you ended up having to uninstall Chrome. It was the most annoying thing ever.
The monopoly position helped for sure but I think it’s glossed over that at one point Internet Explorer was simply the best web browser on the market. It’s was only after years of mismanagement by Microsoft that it gained the reputation it has now. But there was a point in the late 90s early 2000s where Netscape was a super buggy mess and Internet Explorer was the best browser on the market.
That was true for Chrome as well, when that first hit the market it was a light and amazing browser. There were a lot of technology savvy early adopters for Chrome.
I was being a bit facetious, thanks for the corrections and insight. Cheers!
When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn't bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.
They were also, eventually, much too late to matter, convicted of being a monopoly as a result of the IE money grab.
Didn't the refactored netscape eventually evolve into Firefox though? Not disputing the poster child status or the fact that it's a terrible business decision, but the project did not really go stale I think?
Now that splash screen, with its pixelated gradient of the 256 color palette brings back some nostalgic memories.
It's funny because we can see pixelated stuff today mostly in shitty jpeg artifacts, but those follow the jpeg algorithm for how to best conserve file size within their compression scheme, so they look different. This splash screen seemingly has every pixel meticulously chosen so that it's in the right place, and working with only the limits of the color space.
Dithering, it's a lost art. It always reminds me of Monkey Island.
Best game. You post like a dairy farmer!
Edit: got the lead up wrong.
Even better, that splash screen was only 16 colors.
Saved a lot of memory. Even though we had upgraded to 24mb in our Mac Performa at the time.
In the Windows 3.1 days I made my own icons. Yes, a single pixel out of place or wrongly colored would throw it all off.
Oh shit.... core memory unlocked. I forgot I used to do this. I forgot there was a time you would do this otherwise everything just had the same icon.
I was there, 3000 years ago
It became Firefox
Yeah I thought everyone knew this. Netscape became Mozilla Browser, which became Firefox.
TIL!
That's a bit reductive
It was always my understanding that much of the core of Communicator eventually became early Firefox, but I've never really fact-checked that, just kind of read it here and there anecdotally on forums.
And Thunderbird for the email portion. Yes, web and email were in the same application.
And with GMail and Chrome, it is still.
4-in-1 🙃
Earth is riddled with empires who thought they would last forever.
Netscape got a serious case of Windows' forceful and illegal monopolisation of Internet Explorer.
Isn’t Netscape just Mozilla at this point? At least tech wise
Yes, but no.
The source code for Netscape Navigator was open-sourced and has become Mozilla Firefox. The company Netscape is now a mostly defunct brand while Mozilla is a non-profit, public benefit company in service to the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla community.
Holy shit someone still operates this?!
And here I was about to say that it had simply become Mozilla Firefox.
I guess I pruned my knowledge (read: forgot) at some point because I know I went from using Netscape to the Mozilla Application Suite as my browser of choice, and then ultimately onto Firefox when that died. (Firefox and Thunderbird were well established and Seamonkey was still in its infancy, otherwise I probably would have switched to that instead.)
Looking at the facts, the AOL buy-out is what must have got me to switch to MAS.
Aah the joys of 256 color video cards.
If you could afford one! CGA/EGA were the best we had for a while. VGA/256 color was the stuff dreams were made of (and boy were we excited to finally get a computer that had it!!!)
Holy shit I forgot about netscape
I used to download the source tarball for each new version and build it on the SGI Indy.
