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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.
One can occasionally see things which are just as magical in our time.
It’s just that - the Web is like Coruscant, what was magical is the lower levels, abandoned, decaying, full of predators and infections and barely supported ; people live on the middle levels, which are full of usual life with all kinds of stuff, and upper levels, which are heaven, but for few.
These things still happen. Just mostly not in the Web.
We have forgotten, but most of the magic is created by separate human beings, and it was a very rare situation where corporations would help it, in the 90s.
But then talking like that is a pretty tired cyberpunk trope. We’ll see something good. Humanity finds new pits and stinky places, as the time goes, but these are not the only kind of things it finds.
The third of Arthur C Clarke’s three laws:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I was there, 3000 years ago
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, Netscape 4.0 was simply slower than IE 4.0. Back then, when a browser was a program that would actually push the limits of the hardware, that was a big deal.
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.
Lemme guess, one was super buggy and the other the best browser on websites using non-standard functionality of the latter.
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.
Opera was a paid browser till it started going bad.
Never paid for it though, and started using it when it was free, so can’t complain.
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?
Netscape got a serious case of Windows’ forceful and illegal monopolisation of Internet Explorer.
Earth is riddled with empires who thought they would last forever.
Holy shit someone still operates this?!
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.
Can you still use or get Netscape?
The closest you can get is the Seamonkey browser, which forked off the old Mozilla Application Suite that Netscape 6/7 was based on. The last version of Netscape 9 was just a rebranded Firefox 2.x.
