4 ms·

I remember when the only available web browser was the "Mozilla suite", which was extremely slow and basically unusable. In this period, Netscape 4.x still wor

I remember when the only available web browser was the "Mozilla suite", which was extremely slow and basically unusable. In this period, Netscape 4.x still worked pretty well and was available on Linux. Opera was also available for Linux at that time. So, it's definitely not true that the Mozilla Suite (which was indeed horrible) was the only available browser. You could not play MP3 files out of the box due to patent issues. I remember mpg123, xmms, etc. being available in many distributions. It was primarily Red Hat who didn't distribute MP3 support out of the box. IIRC free decoders were exempt from the decoder licensing fees. Most graphic cards only worked in VESA mode, so we had no 3D acceleration of any kind. Around 2000 there were not that many 3D chipsets. 3DFX was still ruling the world and there was 3D support for Linux per Glide. Many 2D accelerators did have support (e.g. Tseng Labs ET series, Matrox chipsets, ATI chipsets, most S3 chipsets). I had a 3DFX Voodoo 3 and was playing accelerated OpenGL games on Linux. I remember tinkering with NetBSD and having to go back to software rendering, which was frustrating. But the worst thing was the lack of fonts. Fonts were truly abysmal. Erm, Microsoft's 'Core fonts for the Web' were distributed since 1996. There has been a Sourceforge project (msttcorefont) distributing the fonts since Microsoft took them offline. Many distributions had an installer or package to get these Microsoft fonts. Then you had all the usual Windows fonts.

chris_wot 10y ago
Netscape had a horrible bug that blocked on startup until a DNS request finished or timed out. This was dreadful for dialup users, such as myself.
ajsalminen 10y ago
My recollection is very different. Netscape 4.7 seemed to be falling apart all the time at the point when Mozilla reached 0.9.x and started to be usable which made me very happy to promptly switch to it. I don't remember when Mozilla got tabs but possibly they were already in at that point. Of course things got even better once Phoenix/Firebird later to be known as Firefox got started.
- notalaser 10y ago
  The 4.x line of Netscape was really, really bad, on every platforms, not just Linux. I distinctly remember a small period of time, between the time when Netscape 4 came out and the time when I learned about Opera being available on Linux, when I was routinely using lynx, non-ironically, locally. It crashed all the time and had all sorts of weird bugs.
babuskov 10y ago
> Many distributions had an installer or package to get these Microsoft fonts. Then you had all the usual Windows fonts. I think this shows the main problem with users' perception of Linux at the time. Most of the people who tried Linux expected things like that to work out of the box, and when they got the bad defaults instead they proclaimed Linux "unusable". They most likely never knew that MS Fonts package existed. I think I was using Linux for over a year before I discovered it. I think I spent months fiddling with Linux before I got it to great looking, productive, usable OS which was in some regards even better than Windows XP at the time. For example, CD burning on Windows required 3rd party software which took over the CPU and your machine was basically unusable while it was doing that. K3B on Linux was so much better. I used KDE in the beginning, but then I switched to IceWM, and spent days configuring it until I got it to run really fast, with USB drive icons showing up and stuff like that. And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day.
- ldev 10y ago
  >And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day. Yeah Linux attracts some really strange people - why, why, why do you need these monitors? Why do you need conky with your hostname? With your IP? With your kernel version? Your workstation is not another random server you administrate, so hostname showing is absolutely not required (unless when you sit down in front of a computer you are high as hell and cannot tell it's your computer, or just too stupid to tell which computer it is)... There are times I need to check CPU usage, but simple eye candy for 12 year olds who watched too much Hacker movies widgets won't help anyways...
  - babuskov 10y ago
    > why, why, why do you need these monitors? It really pisses me off when I double click to run a program and there's no indication that it's starting up. Seeing CPU spike confirms that it's working. If I had a penny for every time I started a program twice on Windows... Similar problem when I start some operation in some CPU/HDD intensive program. If the program itself has no progress bar or similar indication I have no clue if it started doing it, or maybe I misclicked. Similar problem when a browser or another network program seems stuck on a download and I have no clue whether it's the network problem or the program itself is the culprit. And there are some programs that eat RAM like crazy and on Windows you have no clue when it starts swapping to disk. With monitors you can clearly see that 1. you ran out of RAM and 2. you disk I/O is the cause why the system is slowing down. I really don't care about hostname or kernel version though. But, I absolutely want to know what's happening in order to use my computer efficiently. So, you are either using your system inefficiently or you have some beast of a machine with infinite RAM, CPU power and super fast disks.

chris_wot 10y ago

Netscape had a horrible bug that blocked on startup until a DNS request finished or timed out. This was dreadful for dialup users, such as myself.

ajsalminen 10y ago

My recollection is very different. Netscape 4.7 seemed to be falling apart all the time at the point when Mozilla reached 0.9.x and started to be usable which made me very happy to promptly switch to it. I don't remember when Mozilla got tabs but possibly they were already in at that point. Of course things got even better once Phoenix/Firebird later to be known as Firefox got started.

notalaser 10y ago
The 4.x line of Netscape was really, really bad, on every platforms, not just Linux. I distinctly remember a small period of time, between the time when Netscape 4 came out and the time when I learned about Opera being available on Linux, when I was routinely using lynx, non-ironically, locally. It crashed all the time and had all sorts of weird bugs.

babuskov 10y ago

> Many distributions had an installer or package to get these Microsoft fonts. Then you had all the usual Windows fonts. I think this shows the main problem with users' perception of Linux at the time. Most of the people who tried Linux expected things like that to work out of the box, and when they got the bad defaults instead they proclaimed Linux "unusable". They most likely never knew that MS Fonts package existed. I think I was using Linux for over a year before I discovered it. I think I spent months fiddling with Linux before I got it to great looking, productive, usable OS which was in some regards even better than Windows XP at the time. For example, CD burning on Windows required 3rd party software which took over the CPU and your machine was basically unusable while it was doing that. K3B on Linux was so much better. I used KDE in the beginning, but then I switched to IceWM, and spent days configuring it until I got it to run really fast, with USB drive icons showing up and stuff like that. And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day.

ldev 10y ago
>And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day. Yeah Linux attracts some really strange people - why, why, why do you need these monitors? Why do you need conky with your hostname? With your IP? With your kernel version? Your workstation is not another random server you administrate, so hostname showing is absolutely not required (unless when you sit down in front of a computer you are high as hell and cannot tell it's your computer, or just too stupid to tell which computer it is)... There are times I need to check CPU usage, but simple eye candy for 12 year olds who watched too much Hacker movies widgets won't help anyways...
- babuskov 10y ago
  > why, why, why do you need these monitors? It really pisses me off when I double click to run a program and there's no indication that it's starting up. Seeing CPU spike confirms that it's working. If I had a penny for every time I started a program twice on Windows... Similar problem when I start some operation in some CPU/HDD intensive program. If the program itself has no progress bar or similar indication I have no clue if it started doing it, or maybe I misclicked. Similar problem when a browser or another network program seems stuck on a download and I have no clue whether it's the network problem or the program itself is the culprit. And there are some programs that eat RAM like crazy and on Windows you have no clue when it starts swapping to disk. With monitors you can clearly see that 1. you ran out of RAM and 2. you disk I/O is the cause why the system is slowing down. I really don't care about hostname or kernel version though. But, I absolutely want to know what's happening in order to use my computer efficiently. So, you are either using your system inefficiently or you have some beast of a machine with infinite RAM, CPU power and super fast disks.