Netscape it's rise, fall, and eventual revenge
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- The browser that opened a door to the huge explosion in popularity for the Web, it dominated the early web scene, but after only a few years Microsoft's browser IE had a larger market share. How did this happen, and what did Netscape do in response, and what was the effects of those actions on us today.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay (www.pcbway.com).
0:00 - Introduction
0:39 - The first ones
2:47 - A word from our sponsor
3:05 - The beginning of Netscape
5:45 - Netscape 2
10:04 - IE
13:30 - Win98 Anti Trust case
16:41 - AOL
17:22 - Mozilla Org
19:58 - The End... - Наука та технологія
Oh the nineties... I worked at one of those early internet providers at the time. People asked what it took to get on the internet. Quite a few hung up after we explained that a computer was involved.
Computers from that time were very hard to use unlike the portable devices most of us carry in our pockets
I started an ISP for a short time and people would ask
"oh you're with AOL? "
"No I'm not, I am my own ISP! "
"What's an ISP?"
I'd explain and then they'd say they have their local library ,their telephone &their cable TV, didn't want another bill and hang up before I could say--- "wait it replaces all of them!!"
The few customers I had only used my service to connect to AOL mail without a long distance call, saving them hundreds a month and making me nothing, a break even month , after months of losses .
I mainly used my own service to save on my personal phone bill...
from 94-96I worked for a small PC manufacturer that later grew into a low cost isp which eventually went under after accidentally adding a virus to their dialup software CD and the major investors in china finding out the local owner hadn't invested in the kind of cement they wanted.
Even when IE first came out we called it internet exploder it was so slow and buggy it would explode at the slightest misclick, or maybe that was just WinBlows.
@@evionlast They weren't hard to use at all. Once Windows 95 and plug n play was a thing, computers were easy. You simply installed your software and that was that ... not much different than today other than you needed to get a dial-up provider but they all had scripts that automatically created the DUN file needed to connect.
they should have instead had Ted Stevens' secretary print them out an internet from the series of tubes.
Wonderful video, I remember getting Winsock and Mosaic working for the first time over SLIP. Then shouting to the family "I'm connected to America!"
IIRC, the Internet Explorer anti-trust suits were less about IE being bundled with Windows, and more about Microsoft prohibiting OEMs from pre-loading other browsers with Windows PCs.
The browser being an integral part of Windows was also a big component
And dirty tricks they played on their competitors like Word Perfect and DR-DOS.
For a while, updating IE would disable Netscape and make registry entries that prevented re-installing it.
Man I miss Netscape.
That cool N logo with the shooting star was the best thing since sliced bread back then lol. The IE4 vs Netscape 4 war was epic. A whole desktop upgrade for Windows 95 with IE. It was a fun time.
For those who want some context of the time line when Netscape became big, that was 1994 when there was just 2,738 websites on the internet. In 1993 there were just 130 websites. Let that set in your mind for a moment. Now, when 1995 rolled around, and people did start dialling up for the first time, there were still only 23,500 websites. A massive jump from the previous year but by no means a huge number. Yahoo wasn't even a proper search engine at that point, because, they just put all the websites in a big list like a telephone book split up by categories. Simples.
so, do you think that contributes to why it is so hard to find websites from before 1996? before everything started shutting down in the 2010's i used to dig and dig through old sites and it was pretty conspicuous that 1996 and beyond you could find websites for all sorts of things but almost never find anything older than that. i think i have come across less than 20 pre-1996 websites in my two decades online
@@technopoptart The biggest issue is a lot of the websites simply don't exist anymore. For example, CERN only kept the website up historical reasons. Connecting to the FTP as described on that website, no longer works. The no longer works part will have happened to a lot of websites over the years.
The one site that tried to keep records of sites, internet archive with their Way Back Machine was only founded in May 1996. So sites were lost prior to that, and were ones that weren't indexed and saved after. And would probably account for why you can't find any prior to that.
@@dataterminal ty
I’m pretty sure there were more than 3000 websites just at my university back in 1994.
In 1994 (or 95), I actually bought a book titled The Internet Yellow Pages. I used it for about a year.
I loved Netscape Navigator. And I still miss it.
Um. It stil runs...
Firefox
So do I Sanka, so do I. It's funny too, given the fact that my dad was always such a anti-apple and pro-microsoft guy and software enigneer, so always made sure we had a basic bare bones PC around. But we wound up with a MacIntosh II at the same time. I liked NetScape Navigator way more than I did Internet Explorer at the time. Admittedly, at the time is a pointless statement, since it pretty much got all but abandoned by like... 2002/3 or so for Safari.
Personal experience here. IIRC at some point in the 90s IE had smooth scrolling and Netscape didn't, and to my teenager self that seemed like a killer feature so I switched to IE. And after that the inclusion of IE in the OS made the switch from IE to Netscape was much harder than the opposite because of laziness, so even nerds like me just ended up staying on IE until Firefox came out
Best answer in the thread
I E 5 was awful though, I used to know Javasctipt one liners that would crash it. e.g. ShowModalDialog(1,1,1).
Dude… I did the same thing after the NTL tech had my mum Install Netscape for the same reason too.
Yah, I used IE in Win98 myself, since it came with it. (Don't remember what I used in 95 -- might've been IE there too since we had Plus!) Though I used Netscape on the Macs at school and my grandma's house.
I stuck with my Win98 box rather too long though, due to lack of money for upgrades. But by 2006, IE was crashing every third browser window. So I installed Firefox and never looked back. 🦊 I kept using it on newer XP and Win 7 PCs, and still use it in Linux today.
Internet Explorer was looking pretty sexy compared to Netscape Navigator when 4.0 came out. The smooth scrolling was a significant part of that. Now, I've come back around and use Firefox in Linux, but you've reminded me why I used IE with Windows 98 and 2000.
I remember using IE, and then pretty rapidly switching to Netscape in about 1993 - 1995, at the start of common internet access at home. With 33.6 and then 56k dialup. It was miserable having download speeds of 5 KB/s, you could literally wait for a few minutes watching a web page load. At this point in the UK, dialup was charged per minute as a local rate call. You would go online, do what you needed to do, download files etc, then disconnect and mess with the stuff you had got while offline. When I went to university in 1996, Netscape was there on Windows machines, but much more significantly for me, on a variety of UNIX workstations, mostly Solaris. The biggest change was I went from 56k to a symmetric 100 Mb/s connection that was always on. Suddenly the internet was something you could spend all day on, and you could download...uhh..freely available, Creative Commons licensed content in the public domain quickly and easily.
It's hard to understate how much of a blight on the web of that time things like Flash were. In a world where UA-cam didn't exist yet, horrible sites like Newgrounds were full of flash games and movies. Downloading the latest memes (although they weren't called that yet) and trending videos mostly involved a friend sending you a link to some random FTP or web server where you could directly download videos in Realvideo, or some other horribly low resolution format.
One thing this video missed was that after open sourcing itself, Mozilla didn't just spontaneously spit out Firefox fully formed. It worked with the existing Netscape source base for a while, before deciding that it was unmanageable and at this point Mozilla decided to completely rewrite the browser, using none of the existing source code from Netscape. They released the "Mozilla browser", which was not Firefox. This had all the bloat of things likeUSEnet and email clients, and a separate calendar. Eventually the email client was split off into a separate open source project, Thunderbird (which I still use) and the browser was really stripped down to just being a web browser and became Firefox.
Something not mentioned in the video was retail cost. Netscape Navigator at it's peak would cost you ~$50 if you walked into a Babbage's or Electronics Boutique and bought it off the shelf. It was not free. And this was a time when downloading large pieces of software was not much of a thing. AOL, Compuserve, et al would often bundle a free version if you used their services, but otherwise you either paid for it or dealt with an endless trial version if you could manage the bandwidth to download. IE was essentially free for Windows users. In a round-a-bout way Microsoft made browsers a free piece of software when open-source and free software was not the norm. Cost was a big part of why Netscape died. Their early business model was selling software. Microsoft gave away similar software for free. Hard to compete.
I have no idea what you are talking about. The internet was literally born out of "open source" sharing of code and it continued that way until they decided to commercialize the internet with the www. Also, prior to public access with the start of ISPs the public gained access to free software and code through BBS services
Further, Netscape was made free for non-commercial users, it wasn't a "trial version" despite their attempt to do so when they changed their terms to be free for educational and non-profit. It was always the full commercial version available online and on disk (from ISPs and books/magazines) and did not expire or give "pay us" popups like actual trial software. It is also worth noting that Mosaic was also free for non-commercial use
I got my first PC in early 1998 (Win95) and it had IE, but (somehow) I was conscious of what was called "the browser wars" and I wanted to try Netscape. I vividly recall visiting their site and being greeted with "You're winning the browswer wars!" where they announced that Netscape was now free. From that, I got the impression that prior to that it was not free. $50 rings a bell. Maybe I'd seen it in stores.
@@stephenhosking7384 That's correct. It was based off Mosiac, which was also sold in stores (Mosiac in a Box). Netscape was free for academic and non-profit use initially. My earliest memory of the free version was the one they gave my wife in college. Most people who wanted it had to go to a store and buy the floppies. Eventually it was open-sourced, but only after MS gave their browser away for free (with their OS, of course). The entire browser war narrative makes no sense if Netscape was free. Open source just wasn't the thing people think it was in the 90's. People that invested their time and money into building software sold it to make money. Distribution and publishing was difficult and expensive.
@@huberthumphry280agree, my personal experience was that I never paid for Netscape, and don’t remember ever having to work hard to avoid paying for it. Initially got online in July 1994, using CompuServe. Then got access to the web without restrictions after a few months. Netscape was given away free by magazines, ISPs etc… However I don’t know to what extent my personal experience is the same as most other people’s experience
@@huberthumphry280 Shareware and pirated software is not free software. In 80s and the early 90s everybody and their mother tried to monetize their weekend programming projects by asking you to send them $15 in an envelope for a game that barely worked. Most software back then didn't have a free (and open-source) alternative like it does now and most commercial software was worse than today's weekend project by some rando on Github.
One aspect missing from this video. A huge portion of Netscape's revenue came from the web server software. They had the idea of "give the browser away for free (including allowing corporations to use the browser in the free "evaluation" mode indefinitely), thus popularize the web, so as to make lots of Netscape web server sales. Apache is the one that killed off that revenue stream, once they began giving web server software for free. So, it wasn't just Microsoft that dealt Netscape a blow, Apache did as well.
Also, Microsoft gave IIS away for free, as part of NT.
I worked in the Netscape server group. This isn't really right. First, bare web server product was never a big revenue source. That came from email server, app server, etc. But overall there wasn't much revenue ever from servers. But second, Apache was never a competitor on the radar. IIS was, however. Remember that in those days the "PC-as-a-server" we have today did not exist. Servers were Sun, HP, IBM, dec machines that were very expensive. Apache on a cheap Intel-based server didn't become mainstream until later, after the server group was sold to Sun. So yes, eventually "web server" became Apache on an Intel Linux box (later nginx), which costs nothing, but that's a general pattern that applies to all server software. There's no market today for bare server software. Money is only made from running such software to provide some added value service.
_"Cleaning a thousand malware toolbars off of somebody's Windows machine when you should just reformat"_
That is IE.
_spits on IE's grave_
I remember those days, good times! Don't know how many times I have reinstalled windows for people.
This is the reason I switched to Firefox 0.9. Too many family members clicking on the wrong things and getting tool bars attached to IE that were difficult to remove.
Dude! You just unearthed some bad memories! You let a family member or some person who knows little about computers to browse internet using your computer and you come back to find tonnes of stubborn dodgy toolbars on IE!
For a while I had a zipped up copy of win98se burnt to cd.
A straight fresh install, if somebody needed their windows de-malwaring I'd just replace the windows folder, either with or without a full format.
Fantastic work. I went to University in 1995 and Netscape Navigator was my first Web browser. The "loading" animation was just magical!
I remember being hypnotized by the IE4 loading animation in the corner. made going online feel like an adventure
I loved that loading animation! I wish the would bring it back!
I remember sitting in on a meeting, somewhere around 1996/97 where the discussion of the company web browser was the topic at hand.
I know… my heart skipped a beat too when I was asked to attend.
The (predetermined) answer was that Internet Explorer was going to be the company standard because Netscape now wanted money.
The dirty look I got from the Microsoft sycophant when I reminded him 3/4 of the company ran on Macintosh… if only I could have converted that to electric power. North America would only now be needing a recharge. 😂
(Edited the first sentence for clarity)
Was Netscape substantially, objectively better than IE at the time, especially in terms of what the company needed to get from giving its employees access to the internet?
Because if not, it would have been stupid of the company to pay, when it can get a just-as-good alternative for free.
@@ZiggyMercury Did you miss the part where 3/4 of his company ran on incompatible hardware?
@@ZiggyMercury IE was pure rubbish at the beginning and for a few years, as far as I can remember
@@ZiggyMercury Browsing on a MAC using IE was awful in those days. Netscape was the right choice. MAC browsing didn't really get decent until Apple did Safari.
Hilarious. Back in the day when management were tech experts.
Worth mentioning why Netscape 4.0 wasn't that good at CSS: Netscape had introduced its own approach to style sheets based on JavaScript (yes, as in fully integrated), but lost regarding standards to MS's competing CSS proposal. So CSS became just a translation layer to what was already shipped in Netscape Communicator.
Also worth a mention: the e-mail client that came with Netscape browsers, which was one of the best of its time.
(But there were also minor issues, e.g, while frame sizes could be specified in pixels - which is what every developer did -, Netscape browsers converted this to integer percentages internally. Hence, it was nearly impossible to line up frames pixel perfect to what was visually a seamless page and web design had to somehow hide this cleverly. Notably, this had been not an issue with IE. Also, the code base of the layout engine was beginning to show its age. This was handling static page rendering sufficiently elegantly, but it the general document-based approach had issues with reflowing layouts - like it's done on a general basis nowadays. Effectively, each part that was subject to change had to be technically a window of its own, either as a frame or as a DHTML- layer. This is where Gecko came in as a new start on the layout engine, which became the community project, which became Firefox.)
My first browser was Lynx used on a UNIX account at University. However, pretty soon it stopped working on any site that required frames. I also remember purchasing CDs over telnet as early as 1992. Imagine that insecure mess
I remember using an early search engine over telnet, that let use search for a file across all the ftp servers it indexed. The Web was just about a thing at this point.
Lynx was my first browser too. I used it on my Commodore 64 via a terminal program (Novaterm).
Lynx was the first for me and I thought it's awefull since it was text only in the terminal. So I've looked for alternatives and found Mosaics first and then Netscape. I've just started working for Uni and installed Netscape on our Win3.1 and later 95 machines.
CHRIST, that would be UNTHINKABLE these days lol
@kevinbarry71 I think I remember doing that too, wasn't it called cdnow or something like that?
Used Netscape 4.x during the late 90-s - on Windows, Linux and Solaris. Thanks for the video!
You have become my favorite 'tech' channel on YT. Your knowledge and irreverent humor is top-notch and your choice of topics is right up my alley. Thanks!
During the Netscape Communicator 4.x days, I was working for Montreal-based CS&T. We were the OEM provider for Netscape Calendar (as well as HP OpenTime and our own branding CS&T CorporateTime). Those were interesting days. Netscape had provided their UI toolkit for the floating palettes UI they were fond of at that time.
They had learnt a page or two of Microsoft's legal cookbook as our contract with them gave them access to "our technology", forcing us to branch off another company (Lexacom) for a while.
Anyhow. The big winner was Oracle which bought the whole thing when we had regrouped under a single banner, Steltor. I still work for Oracle at this day. Not something I could have planned.
Thanks for a lovely wander down memory lane. I remember Netscape very fondly as my previous experience of the Internet was based on using a Lynx text only web browser and trying to get sensible results out of AltaVista. Graphics on web pages ... what sheer extravagance, that will never catch on especially over my 9.6k modem. 😀👍
I still use lynx occasionally ssh'd into a remote machine to test stuff.
Our corporate web page, which has code dating back to 1999, still defaults to a text-optimized layout for Lynx (and BlackBerry) browsers.
Netscape itself still lives as the Sea Monkey browser. Fairly decent and includes all the things laters Netscape versions included (mail, HTML editor, etc etc). In fact, I still use it once in a while if I find myself in need of a quickly cobbled-together web page.
What about Firefox? lol
Seamonkey was my go-to browser for years and I also still use it occasionally. These days I prefer Avast Secure Browser - it does the job for me.
@@MelodyGoadSeaMonkey is a parallel project to Firefox. Indeed, I believe originally Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird were all under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation, but around 15 years ago (IIRC) Mozilla chose to focus solely on the web browser (Gecko rendering engine and Firefox).
SeaMonkey and Thunderbird are now separate projects, but both still use the Mozilla Foundation's Gecko engine.
Since they are all open source projects, I expect there is a lot of overlap in the background on code.
Technically, I think it would be okay to consider Gecko the upstream project, with Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Firefox the downstream projects.
The nostalgia is strong with this one!
I loved Navigator and Communicator back in the day. I remember trying to download Navigator 2.something for a Windows 95 beta release using an exceptionally slow 14.4 modem and unreliable line. It took hours. Something like 6 hours plus a couple of failed attempts. But to my teenage mind it was worth every minute. And maybe it was. I have a feeling I never got it working properly and had to resort to installing from some magazine cover disk instead.
*Good video, with lots of good comments.* One more thing: one of Microsoft's controversial schemes was to put a download size limit on Internet Explorer that was very slightly smaller than the size of Netscape, making it much more difficult to get Netscape even over a fast connection.
IE -- The browser you used only once, to download your favorite browser, and never use again.
7:00 Well...fun story, it actually *was* my mum dialling up in 1995. And before 1995, in fact. Albeit not to use the web, but bulletin boards. That's how she met my dad, and that's the reason I exist today. I reckon, as a '95 baby, I'm probably one of the first ever children to result from online dating.
That’s really cool actually
Kaitlyn is that, that is very cool.
online dating and even online marriages where bride groom and priest were in separate towns/cities goes all the way back to the days of the telegraph in the 1890s!
@@JoePinball2006 I would categorise that in the wider category of distance dating, as it was also done by post and videotape and stuff after all, but I do get where you’re coming from
@@JoePinball2006 Did they exchange vows by Morse code?
At some point I remember Netscape having an occasional issue with something and I tried out IE for the first time (3, I think). It worked better in those situations so it got me until I heard about Firefox, which I still use. At one of my jobs we had to support clients using IE 6 much longer than its normal lifespan because companies would get locked into particular OS and software versions.
IE3 was the first version of IE to be superior to NW, IMO.
A big problem for Netscape was Microsoft's idea for what dynamic html should be in IE4 was adopted by the industry as the standard and Netscape's idea ignored which meant Netscape was really lacking on that one really important feature. Embrace and extend it may have been, but Microsoft's idea was just better and could do more. It's hard to imagine that for a long time IE really was the best browser. Netscape 4 was not a good release.
Also, Netscape also engaged in "embrace and extend". They added lots of Netscape-specific stuff on top of the existing standards.
And today, Chrome is the defacto standard, so Google can add whatever they want, the actual "standards" be damned. lol
So many anecdotes inspired by this video I don't know where to start. I wish I could go back and do it all again. I don't even think I'd change a thing, it was such an adventure. Thanks for sharing.
I never used IE except as a backup for accessing very specific pages that only worked on IE, and I started back on Mosaic and Netscape 0.9.6. My family had Macs, so I E wasn't a default.
Mosaic was the first browser I used. My college started to put in computer labs and Mosaic was the first browser, on the computers. It didn't take long for Netscape to arrive and it was like Mosaic stopped existing. Using Netscape vs Mosaic was like taking a trip into the future. Netscape just seemed to be light-years ahead.
Netscape had the last laugh in the end...as it got gobbled up by AOL but mainly it released it's source code with the Mozilla Foundation which they used to create Firefox and many other spinoffs... so theoretically Netscape is still around today thanks to the Mozilla Foundation.... Though I miss Netscape...It would be nice to see Mozilla revive that name "Netscape" with that green and black color scheme in a new open source browser.
Another great documentary, RetroBytes is quickly becoming my favorite tech channel
Netscape was the first browser I used. I found Mosaic afterwards and actually preferred it 😁 I switched to IE for a while, but I recall being one of the early Firefox users, starting with Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox. Dabbled with Chrome for a bit, and then returned to Firefox again. Feels right that Netscape was my original browser experience, and Firefox is my latest
I like the "Thank you for watching" .. reminds me of the old SUN colours and text/logo's they used for a while.
I was a System Administrator at an ISP in central PA in the 1990s. We started with modem racks and terminal servers called Livingston Portmaster 2e. We worked that way until we could get channelized T1 and PRIs, which allowed us to use the Livingston Portmaster 3 and let us grow pretty big. I also got to build and manage a bunch of UNIX, and later, Linux machines and get into a lot of other technologies like T1 and T3 circuits. Still remember things like line encoding and setting up circuits on Cisco routers with a CSU/DSU. That job was so much fun. Sadly, it ended with some bitterness when the owner sold the company and it was basically pulled apart since the new company didn't care about anything other than the customer list. While it was going on though, I absolutely loved it. So much fun! Thanks for bringing the memories back!
Small correction: the Sun/Netscape "alliance" only existed from the time that the AOL sale process began. The backstory was that Sun wanted to acquire the server division of Netscape. However, for tax reasons the company couldn't be split and sold: browser and online services to AOL, server products to Sun. The alliance and subsequently iPlanet was a creative hack around that problem. De facto the Netscape employees who worked on server products ended up working for Sun (all the managers were Sun employees), but they were in fact actually AOL employees (their paycheck came from AOL). This arrangement lasted for a few years but eventually came apart with the Server/AOL employees all being told to stop working for their Sun managers. Meanwhile on the Sun side they had hired/transferred new engineers into the group so there were able to carry on with their "fork" of the server products. Server/AOL employees continued working on their fork of server products for a couple of years before again being sold (for real this time) to RedHat.
I used Windows 3.1 up until like 1998 and Netscape was pretty much the de facto browser for a lot of us. At first my internet connection was through a local BBS that used Worldgroup for Windows and eventually direct PPP connection. Netscape was just more powerful and versatile. It wasn't slim and light but that's probably because I only had 8MB of RAM.
By the time I got my Windows 98 machine it was IE for a while. Then Firefox and...well Chrome for like a decade
Great to revisit an old friend and thanks for highlighting the joy and power of Netscape at its peak. I paired it with Eudora Mail and lived happily for a time :)
Great video, but I feel you kind of glossed over the AOL era a bit too quickly, even though I know this video is about the browser itself, I feel it should be noted that AOL in the early - late 00's used the Netscape name for a budget dial-up ISP($9.99 USD a month for unlimited usage) here in the United States that had it's own web portal with news, weather, etc.. of which I used for a few years, as my area did not get high speed internet till late 07, and for a dial-up ISP it was quite good, and reliable having plenty of local numbers to dial into, and almost always giving me a 49.9K - 53.3K connection the first try.
I was an avid Netscape user in the late 90's and I made my first websites with the Netscape Communicator HTML editor. I really hated what Microsoft was doing with adding their own proprietary standards, and since they were dominant, websites used those standards exclusively and they wouldn't work properly in anything other than Internet Explorer. So in those days I refused to use CSS. Recently I've gotten into web development again and now CSS is one of my favorite things, but at least it's a proper standard now. Since Firefox came out I've been using mainly that, but my new web development projects I test mainly on Chrome, since most people use that, but I make sure I use proper standards that all modern browsers support. I don't want to go back to those dark days where you basically build separate websites for the different browsers to make them work properly.
Those were terrible days. There were websites that were just .exe files. Brrr…
Wow, this brings back memories when I first got introduced into web design/development around 2000. Back then, I wondered why could anyone come with a generic graphical api that implement the same look and feel regardless of which web browser being used.
Microsoft FrontPage was notorious for producing absolutely crap HTML.
Great video! Brings back memories of being an amateur web designer --which was a nightmare back then because a page designed in the communicator editor would suck ass when viewed in IE …..and vice versa. (One designed in Front Page would suck ass when viewed in communicator (navigator)They never gelled….macromedia (adobe) dream weaver helped alleviate some of the conflicts but it was still a biatch to appease both audiences! Thanks for the memories!
Thanks for a great video again. My first browser was NCSA Mosaic, I remember ftping the binaries onto my account on the Sparcstation 2 box at uni in 1993.. made a nice change from using gopher!
Made me laugh about the evil Kermit!
Also remember the download times for a browser, it took 7 hours to download a version of Netscape over my 33k modem at home once.
I then worked at Freeserve in the dialup days and remember the guy preparing all of the CDs to bundle in with Dixon's computers etc that had branded browsers on the disc to save the download time!
I still install Netscape Navigator 2.02 and Communicator 4.61 on every OS/2 and ArcaOS machine that I set up. Admittedly there is a build of Firefox (along with a newer browser based on WebKit) available, I still install Netscape (along with the others of course). I can recall building and testing many websites in Netscape, IE, IBM's WebExplorer, and multiple others just to make sure my websites looked okay across all browsers.
As someone who supported Netscape on Solaris in 2000/01, this brought back some memories. Thanks.
I like your voice and humorous way of speaking.
A huge reason that IE got a leg up was that Microsoft was huge in the Enterprise sphere. This was the time period that Exchange mail servers and Active Directory were being installed in businesses everywhere.
Imagine a medium sized business that has a few hundred computers, a mail server, network share and internal domain server.
Of course you are going to balk at employees installing a 3rd party browser. Especially since this era of WIndows was not terribly stable.
Now once people started building Intranets with IIS server fronting a Microsoft database, of course they are writing in some proprietary Microsoft active server page nonsense that might work on Firefox, but will definitely work on IE.
So we found ourselves opening IE to get to the database to browse sales leads using SQL queries.
I was still seeing enterprise software which specified IE6 or 8 in the early 2010's.
I know a fair few places that stuck with ie6 long into the 2000s due to exactly the reasons you mentioned above and a few activex controls. Dispite the fact ie6 was a security liablity by that point.
Ahhh, the '90s! Great times! Netscape and dial-up Internet! Alta-Vista as the search engine - remember that? :)
I'm in NZ and I remember that IBM was my first ISP and they were great!
Seeing that good ol' US Robotics modem made me all misty-eyed as I had one and remember it well!
I think my first 'net access was on RedHat 5.0. I think I may have had to tweak a few settings but that was all part of the fun and I *hugely enjoyed* it when I successfully brought up a Web page!
I still remember the fuss when web browsers gained the ability to display both images AND text side by side... Imagine that! Up to that point, them early browsers could display images but not 'inline' so what a breakthrough that was!! But I still have vivid memories of the nightmare trying to install and set up Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.X machines just so that we could get the damn things online. Millennials have no idea of how they're lucky that their OSes come with their own TCP/IP stack nowadays. 😀
Great content as always, however you missed a step. Firefox was originally called Phoenix but had to re-brand again due to trademark issues.
Nicely told. Thanks for making this.
Other pieces of Netscape technologies didn’t only go to Sun. Red Hat acquired part of Netscape back in 2004 and which included Netscape Directory Server (LDAP) and Netscape Certificate Management System. So those are now under the IBM/Red Hat umbrella.
Directory Server ended up being sold twice: to both Sun and RedHat.
To note part of the reason Netscape got into Microsoft radar was an ambition to turn Netscape into an internet based OS. Where other than downloading and installing apps to you computer, nearly all apps would be web based. 90s Microsoft main hold on the industry was it hold on a majority of software that would work only on DOS or Windows. Web Apps that were system independent was super scary to MS. Hence ActiveX as a way to keep hold of window only apps.
And now we have ChromeOS dominating the low-end laptop sales.
Which actually happened, eventually, so they were right!
Really great video! Love your content!
What a brilliant video - takes me back to an exciting era
I used to love using Netscape Navigator and the other variant, Netscape Communicator
I loved Netscape so much! I was only like 8 when we got our first PC and I spent hours on Netscape.
You probably didn't see this in the UK, but in the 90's if you were in the US or Canada you could download the 128-bit SSL version. It knew you were in USA or Canada by IP however you had to still declare and certify on the download page for the 128-bit version that you were in those countries - and would not export it. Everyone else got the 64-bit (I think?) version. The idea was that the US government at the time considered 128-bit encryption something only we should have.
I worked at a university help desk and helped many people connect to the internet using Netscape. We had cheat sheets on typical questions, but there were times I had to be on the phone for an hour or so to check all the settings. I remember many Netscape screen shots printed for people to follow.
I love these strolls down memory lane... Growing up and learning about computers when it was still possible to truly know how they function was awesome! And watching the coverage of the Micro$oft trial while rooting for the downfall of Mr. Evil was great fun! I still remember high fiving my best friend when the news of the verdict broke! My, what a different world we'd be living in if it had stuck!
Still, Microsoft is well and kicking and going on. Every business worthwhile has done it, so it's not new, without Microsoft, the penetration of low cost PC would have been delayed and so would the computer revolution across the world with poor countries.
I’ve watched a number of your videos, and thoroughly enjoyed them. I find it amusing to find this video given the waves that Google is making with Manifest V3. One of the few non-Chrome based browsers is Firefox so it’s definitely a good time to switch back, which is only possible because of Netscape.
I'm so old I remember buying a copy, for my dial up connection. At work our first browser was Mosaic, running on a SPARC server connected directly to the Internet ("Cisco - who are they again?)"
Great video, thanks for making this!
wow.. that takes me back to my 1993 IBM 80486 PC, It had a terrible modem but i had my first pleasant experience with Netscape on an external Rockwell 56K modem.
Same here. Had a 486SX 25 MHz in 1993 with 4 MB RAM. You?
My memory was setting up a huge booth at a convention for the place I worked for and suddenly hearing from the higher ups that we *must* switch to IE *right now* before the convention starts because they don't want to see any damn Netscape anywhere. We did that and of course it broke nearly everything we had done in HTML.
With modern web technologies, there is zero reason to develop a site specifically for one browser or browser engine, and Mozilla Firefox is my default browser for absolutely everything which isn't ham-fistedly coded to only work in Chrome (did we not already learn in the IE6 era that coding for one specific browser is a bad idea? It took Microsoft 10+ years to shake off IE6-only sites and get people to start supporting Edge instead).
I miss that BEAUTIFUL logo. We hardly have artwork that beautiful anymore. It really conveyed the magic of exploration.
What a walk down memory lane. Thanks for this !!!
Really enjoyed this video - TBF though, World Wide Web wasn't the final web browser available for NeXT/OpenSTEP, honourable mentions to OmniWeb, and NetSurfer. Yes I did very much enjoy the NeXT video as well ;D
I started using Red Hat Linux in 2000 on my home computer to avoid running MS Windows and its evil IE. At that time RH used a super configurable version of Gnome with a browser called Galleon. It was the most advanced, cutting edge browser available at the time and was the first to include tabbed browsing. Eventually Gnome came out with a new major version that stripped it of much of its configurability. So I ditched RH and experimented with many other Linux distros and browsers. I finally wound up on Mepis Linux with KDE instead of Gnome, and fortunately Firefox was released to take the place of Galleon. Does anyone else remember Galleon?
I used Netscape since its heyday in the 2.0/3.0 days. To say that Netscape's codebase was aging by Netscape 4.0 was an understatement.
- Enormous 18MB file download size that would take around an hour to download on a 56k modem
- No CSS support
- Frequent and unexpected crashes
- The browser reloaded the page if you resized the window.
- Hard (and I mean HARD) freezes - you'd be unable to move your mouse at all.
I think the final nail in Netscape's coffin was that absolute turd that was Netscape 6.0 that was based on Mozilla prerelease code. That decision to release it did enormous damage to the Netscape brand. Luckily Firefox rose from the ashes, but that's its own story with their mismanagement.
Good stuff! Very interesting
Funny thing, Google Chrome and Safari are both descended from KHTML rendering engine, which was forked by apple to became Webkit, and later forked by Google to become Blink, KHTML was also an open source HTML renderer developed for the KDE Desktop Environment under Linux. Essentially two open source projects killed Internet Explorer, and today, Microsoft Edge is based on Chromium/Blink. Most browsers aside from Firefox these days are.
I'm disappointed there's no mention of SeaMonkey. When Netscape Navigator (the standalone internet browser) became Mozilla Firefox, Netscape *Communicator* (the 'internet suite' that contained a browser, HTML editor, Email client, digital address book, and IRC chat) became the Mozilla Application Suite. A few years later Mozilla decided to shift focus onto the standalone Firefox and Thunderbird, and stop developing the Application Suite, but handed off development to an open source development team. This team would eventually call themselves the SeaMonkey Council and, as one would assume, rebranded their continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite as SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is still in development today, and while the gap between it and Firefox has widened considerably, it still uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and is very reminiscent of the classic Netscape Communicator suite in its default configuration.
When I worked for Netscape I used to live in Navigator. It was an excellent email client & planner, unmatched really until MS Outlook. Ultimately I think it was probably a good idea to split the monolithic product into separate email & web components simply to reduce the chance of one part taking out the other but it was still cool. One sad aspect of AOL acquiring Netscape is they forced devs to switch from regular email accounts and Navigator to using their godawful AOL client and email addresses mixed in the same domain as users. So I had dozens of folders & rules for sorting emails by mailing list and so forth, custom columns & tags and then reduced to using some garbage client that listed 20 emails on a screen in no order.
Oh, nostalgia, how I love thee. This is a great video about bygone days of brilliant creativity that we now think of as pedestrian by comparison to current capabilities. What I think is worth noting is how a desktop browser encompasses all the power that is parceled out to many individual apps on tablets and phones.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane in this video.
RealPlayer... excuse me while I take a moment to cry and barf at the same time.
Another top notch video.
Bit of nostalgia there, using Navigator on the ISDN2-connected PC in the corner of the IT room at school at the tender age of 15. I remember all those god-awful AO-hell CD's of the late 90's and early 2000's, and I am still spooked by Connie's "Welcome, to AOL" for those few people I ended up installing that awful load of bloatware for.
My step-dad, on the other hand, used those CDs to scare birds off of his allotment. Even though he only grew green beans it always seemed a much more fitting use.
Internet Explorer was only the single use browser for Windows users. I switched to using Linux from Win95, so I never had IE on my computer. It was the thing I cursed, because of those time strapped coders who didn't test on Netscape.
Thanks for the jaunt through some lived history.
Netscape was my first web browser :) Great video!
This was a joy to watch mate. 🎩💜
Ah; the memories. NCSA Mosaic on a 1200 baud dialup connection. Click a link; come back five minutes later. Netscape Navigator was a significant improvement in speed. Of course, I went with Firefox (and Thunderbird) when Mozilla was founded; I had forgotten that AOL (aka A-holes OnLine) had purchased Netscape. Firefox on Linux is still my daily driver.
A friend of mine rode the rollercoaster when he worked there he got pre. IPO shares at 25 cents apiece. within a year, they were worth well over a $100 each. They were somewhat less than that by the time he was allowed to sell, but I'm sure he did okay. We didn't talk actual numbers, but at some point he said something about buying a modest house with the money.
We had Netscape Navigator on our computer lab systems in junior high, which were cutting edge Pentium 200MHz at the time. It was an exciting time.
I was in high school when I first went online in around 1993/4. I didn't have a computer, but a friend did and we'd all hang at his house playing video games and I'd use his computer. I used Netscape of course on his Mac and even years later when I had my own pc, I was loyal to Netscape since it was my first experience. I hated IE and moved on to Firefox when Netscape went downhill. I made a point to never use IE and I even remember being so annoyed at the non-standard html IE used when making early, rudimentary web pages around 98-00.
For Internet Explorer, it should be noted that its massive prominence (especially IE6) was also its death knell- things don't work well when you have a browser that disregards existing standards, and then you get companies building websites that rely on the features exclusive to the browser.
IE became a use-it-once browser to download Chrome (and Firefox). IE still has its grubby little claws trying to take over your pc, (if you're forced to use it due to corporate policy) but MS has been that way since the beginning. Loved Netscape and still use Mozilla. Thanks for the history of the name.
Great video. I live not far from a Netscape employee from the early era....fella ain't doing to bad.
I remember Internet Explorer 3.0 being the first IE version usable as a daily and I preferred the UI to Netscape when it first was released.
Ahh the memories. I used Netscape a lot in the dial-up era. I found the most convenient way to get it was with the purchase of almost any computer magazine. Back in those days they all had CD-ROMs stuck to the front cover and they had the latest versions of almost all the free software available.
Thanks for the video...loved me some Netscape... I use Firefox now... but I do miss the screen before the browser stated up... and I know I was going to the ' Net '
I've just had to watch this for a second time after it was pointed out that my channel appears in it. You cheeky oik! I've no idea how I missed that first time round, hahaha
I did wonder if you would spot the subliminal advertising.
I first used Netscape 3 back in the day, and built my first website with Composer with NS4. Today I am a backend programmer and sites with millions of visitors per day rely on my code, it's fair to say that Netscape is at least partially responsible for my chosen career path.
Well ... while the "IE included with Windows" was indeed important and while MS did add some incompatible extensions and weird things, the thing that really killed Netscape was the Communicator. While Netscape 3.x was clearly superior to any IE 3.x, the same was not true for the 4.x versions. IE 4.0 was quicker, leaner, less memory intensive and it fixed most if not all issues with standards, while Netscape Communicator 4.0 was simply just awful bloatware. It tried to be everything for everyone and it ended up being nothing for no one. It was a sluggish memory hog.
I was an admin&IT support for an advertising company at around that time and while we did install Netscape up to 3.04 and instructed users to use that, once IE 4.0 was out, that's what we had people use. The download time is not really an issue once you have a fixed line and many computers (so you download once, install repeatedly), but the Netscape Communicator 4.0 was simply too fat for most of our office computers and we had no use for any of the other stuff.
Exactly my experience back then. While it's popular to bash Microsoft, the reality is that Netscape pretty much killed itself, as Communicator was incredibly buggy and pretty much the poster boy for "value-added" software. AKA, bloatware.
Even perfectly formatted document code made the browser crash or display nothing but a blank page, which frustrated the hell out of me when I was studying computer science and web development. I was in college at the time and working at a newspaper office on the side, and all the Mac people were intentionally uninstalling Netscape and replacing it with IE 5.5 Mac Edition. When Apple fans are getting rid of the stuff that came with MacOS and replacing it with Microsoft software, you know somebody has really screwed up.
The next release of the browser, Netscape 6, was an utter trainwreck. It was so stupidly slow that everybody refused to use it. It's hard to convey just how utterly awful it was, and I was in shock when I first tried it. That's really when the browser died.
It's sad what happened to Netscape, of course, but the rose tinted glasses are often very opaque in the geek community. I lived through the 90's, and my memories of what really happened are quite different than conventional wisdom.
This was my experience at the time, IE was simply faster at everything. It was the time of dialup when you'd often have to sit there and do other things while a web page loaded, but Netscape was just slower, in reality and particularly in user perception. IE felt like it did a lot of things wrong and I never liked using it (wasn't particularly fond of Netscape either, just didn't like any of it at the time in retrospect), but it didn't FEEL like it was the thing slowing you down. IE felt like the measure of other browsers, and if you found something which felt faster such as Opera, or, much later, Chrome, you knew you had something good.
That said, I've been a Mozilla/Firefox user since it was released and for better or worse it's now the only alternative. At least it doesn't feel slow, and now it's Chrome that has the memory management problems!
In my experience it was rather the other way round, namely for the various bugs, inconsistencies and incompatibilities in IE (in JS, Java - a standard Java applet crashed on Win NT! -, CSS, etc).
As IE became a factor in the user base, developers had to spend increasingly time in debugging for IE, implementing fallbacks, and also had to limit general approaches to what IE could do. (Remember that HTTP/1.1 had amazing streaming features in 1997, but there was a bug in the HTTP chunks implementation in the Windows HTTP stack, causing the page not to render before the connection terminated in a timeout? While every other browser shipped a HTTP-stack of its own, IE relied on the Windows implementation. As a result, everybody had to switch off keep-alive on the server for some years and none became of these features, they aren't even implemented in modern browsers anymore. It's only now that we have a somewhat equivalent functionality with web sockets.)
So, eventually, most developers progressed to implement and test on IE (only) and exploiting IE-only features more and more. Which had a snowball effect on the Web in its entirety. And by this, it became more a question of what IE could do and NS not, rather than the other way round.
(Maybe, one of the decisive strategic failures of Netscape was to implement a CSS translation layer instead of sticking to JavaScript-stylesheets. As Netscape was still the leading vendor in those days and Netscape's original approach was considerably faster and much more well integrated into JS, this would have rendered IE a clearly second-rank browser. However, Netscape was playing by standards and rules, which was their eventual demise. So Netscape's translated styles implementation was always a bit clunky and at times slower, handing the apparent crown to IE, despite its inconsistencies and numerous bugs - and possible exploits. Another example is that Netscape had an elegant solution to the "this"-problem in connection with objects and events, which never made its way into IE, despite being part of the ECMA script definition, with the result that entirely new layers of JS-syntax had to be introduced in recent years to address this very problem, which had been effectively solved in the 1990s.)
My first browser was AMosaic for my commodore Amiga 3000, though I did use Netscape later. I was never a big fan of Internet Exploder though I did have to use it at work. I went from Commodore Amigas to Macintosh computers and used Safari, Firefox and Opera. While I still have these browsers on my Mac and keep them updated, these days I mostly use a Chrome derivative called Brave.
Amosic was a fairly good port of mosic from what I remember. Its the first browser I ran on machine I owned, the first time I used mosic was on a hp-ux workstation, but I did not own that machine saddly.
To this day, the soul reason I use Firefox is because it had whatever leftover code Netscape had back in the day. I absolutely loved Netscape Communicator!! It was by far a superior browser of it's day!
I'm watching this on Seamonkey with a Netscape theme, the 1990s never ended it's all the same under the glossy finish
18:56 The irony.... Googoool themselves have become practically a browser monopoly, worse and more ruthlessly than MS in the old days.
Yep. For a while I've considered Chrome to be the modern day Exploder. Lol.
How can that be? Google's motto is "Don't be evil". /s
@@BigSleepyOx It's not any more and actually ggl is evil now
Very good video! Yeah, a ton of good memories.
7:39 GIF was still subject to a patent claim at the time, so the budding Free Software movement tended to avoid it. This was why PNG was created as an open lossless format (JPEG, thankfully, could be used as a lossy format without patent problems).
I see your vid, I click like. Simple
But they're always worth it :)