7 ms·

NetScape: A Sneak Preview of the shape of WWW Browsers to come (1994)

94 points by Lammy 4y ago

Lammy 4y ago
Meta: the submitted title isn't visible in the article itself but can be seen on the TOC of Urban Desires Vol 1 Issue 1: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co... e: whoops, I linked to the wrong thing. This is the link I intended to submit: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, changed from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co... now.
tpmx 4y ago
... the most significant is the way it allows the user to go on browsing while it downloads items not immediately needed in the background. Rather than forcing you to wait for a graphic to load, Netscape, loads a page's text first, allowing you to scroll down the page or jump ahead to another URL while that nice looking, but perhaps not immediately necessary graphic, loads a piece at a time and without the need to wait for the page to paginate. This "continuous document streaming," combined with Netscape's ability to download several documents or images at the same time has the effect of dramatically reducing time devoted to waiting, and increasing the time spent exploring the Internet's bewilderingly diverse content. Coupled with an overall performance increase optimized for 14,400 kbs [sic] modems, this makes Netscape, by far the speediest Web browser currently available.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute. As the image crawled into view, you’d hope the top slice of the image would reveal whether it’s worth waiting for or if you should move on. Progressive JPEG was invented to solve this frustration, but it wasn’t always a great improvement when you were staring at a blobby first-pass rendering of the image trying to guess what it might be.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries and threading. Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage: Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got infected with a virus.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0? https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s. The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov 10-11, 1993.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        That did not last long. November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new. https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/mosaic/readme.txt https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0027.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PPC versions of Windows NT.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You can read the page before images load!" And click to the next one.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bitwize 4y ago
Ah, good old Netscape. With its hardcoded buttons going to hardcoded URLs to give you a starting point for "surfing" the World Wide Web. And the "throbber"... they could have put up the system's hourglass cursor, but they used the throbber animation to signal to the user that the network, not the machine itself, was busy. UIs had a much clearer vocabulary back then, the money was in the user having situational awareness and making informed decisions about what to do, not in blind "engagement".
- blihp 4y ago
  The money was in blind banner ads back then. (to the extent there was serious money in ads back then... I don't recall the flood of banner ads until 95/96 or so)
- pupppet 4y ago
  I still love that throbber animation, when I see it I remember how navigating to a new page was a fun, almost mysterious little adventure.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    Many a minute spent watching those comets drift by... https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif
    - kloch 4y ago
      comets and supernova
    - kingcharles 4y ago
      And my second favorite animated GIF of the early Internet: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/9/97/Hotmail_logo.gif/revision/latest?cb=20150130161102 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/9/97/Hotm...
- unhammer 4y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&type=extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&... aww, was hoping for a nostalgic addon to bring it back
postalrat 4y ago
"Graphical User Interface, or "gooey" in nerdspeak" Now it's almost reversed. "Graphical User Interface" is the nerdspeak.
chrisjc 4y ago
Somewhat related, but I listened to recent episode of the acquired podcast where they were interviewing Brendan Eich and there were some pretty interesting moments discussing the state of Mozilla/Firefox over the years. They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time. On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-eich-chief-architect-of-netscape-mozilla-and-ceo-of-brave https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  > "They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time." Don't forget XAML. I too was excited for these two things as well ~20 years ago.
  - chrisjc 4y ago
    There is no data. There is only XUL!
    - superkuh 4y ago
      XUL still rules in Sea Monkey Classic and Pale Moon.
- rascul 4y ago
  > On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead. I felt the same, and I may have done more than simply dismiss Brave if that were the case. Although I do understand that Gecko isn't exactly simple or easy for a third party to build off of.
  - guessbest 4y ago
pmoriarty 4y ago
One thing from that era that the web hasn't fully jettisoned is the completely unnecessary and redundant use of the www domain name prefix for web servers. I expect it'll still be there in the year 2525.
- rollcat 4y ago
  It's not completely redundant. You can't make a naked CNAME record (technically you can, but things will break in mysterious ways), and there's no standardised means of dynamically updating an A/AAAA record e.g. to match a virtualised load balancer (e.g. AWS ELB). Vendors have non-standard extensions to work around this, e.g. Route53 has the ALIAS virtual type (which presents itself as an A/AAAA to the clients); I wrote some cron+dig hacks in the past when that wasn't available (e.g. with ChinaCache).
- bawolff 4y ago
  At the time it probably was more neccesary. Http wasn't the only game in town. But don't underestimate the value of branding either.
- 0des 4y ago
  also reminds me of folks who went with web.* instead of www.* a while back when we thought thats how things would go. still cant remember the full reason behind it.
- saila 4y ago
  I prefer no-www for aesthetic reasons, but there do seem to be some good reasons for some sites to use www: https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/
grishka 4y ago
> Maybe one day we'll all be connected through our nice fat cable TV lines, but that's a long way off and most of us aren't going to wait. And these days DOCSIS, the thing that runs over a coaxial TV antenna cable, is on the low end of internet access technologies, at least where I'm from. It's fun to see how times change.
- kloch 4y ago
  It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket with more wireless Internet bandwidth than anyone had (in any media) in 1994.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket which renders the web so slow like it's 1994.
sbf501 4y ago
I still use Motif Window Manager & X/Motif when writing native linux apps because I miss those big blocky buttons.
hising 4y ago
Every time I read about NetScape I start to have nightmares about stuff like document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.write("Hello World") Came later on (Netscape 4 I think, but I still get shivers from it)
- hising 4y ago
  DynAPI helped out back then https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html
nobleach 4y ago
That article really gives the impression that the browser chrome (the back button, etc) is the GUI that is downloaded, and is made up of HTML. The picture in the article doesn't help.
shortlived 4y ago
Can we have the URL changed to the actual page - https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...
- dang 4y ago
  Yes. Changed now from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co....
ngcc_hk 4y ago
The only memory of this is that you have to keep on downloading the latest version as the last always have some issue. It was great. Better than mosaic. But … a hugh miss in fact in hindsight … as Microsoft talked to the selling pitch of Netscape in their office (as I read somewhere) what is this? You selling me a text browser. We have …. No they don’t. Just like internet is not appletalk … having network and text reader with tag ability is not “browser”. It is so much harder for a giant to react. But when they did, as Russia finally did its last bid to try to counter its lowering status, it tried to use everything it can to get that back. No world peace, no consumer need, no fair competition on that ground … just me and this security (market) threat to me. Me me me. And the war is launched.
richardfontana 4y ago
Actual URL of article (under the title "Mosaic Netscape: One Small Step for the Web..."): https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
0.9 marks the first "Pubic Release" in the software's development. Yikes, to have this live on forever. Good reminder to always spell-check!
marstall 4y ago
Download images button ... nice
hericium 4y ago
The text is divided between two pages - make sure to click "next" at the bottom to read it in full. It's not a link to next post.

94 points by Lammy 4y ago

Meta: the submitted title isn't visible in the article itself but can be seen on the TOC of Urban Desires Vol 1 Issue 1: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co... e: whoops, I linked to the wrong thing. This is the link I intended to submit: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

dang 4y ago
Ok, changed from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co... now.

tpmx 4y ago

... the most significant is the way it allows the user to go on browsing while it downloads items not immediately needed in the background. Rather than forcing you to wait for a graphic to load, Netscape, loads a page's text first, allowing you to scroll down the page or jump ahead to another URL while that nice looking, but perhaps not immediately necessary graphic, loads a piece at a time and without the need to wait for the page to paginate. This "continuous document streaming," combined with Netscape's ability to download several documents or images at the same time has the effect of dramatically reducing time devoted to waiting, and increasing the time spent exploring the Internet's bewilderingly diverse content. Coupled with an overall performance increase optimized for 14,400 kbs [sic] modems, this makes Netscape, by far the speediest Web browser currently available.

pavlov 4y ago
Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute. As the image crawled into view, you’d hope the top slice of the image would reveal whether it’s worth waiting for or if you should move on. Progressive JPEG was invented to solve this frustration, but it wasn’t always a great improvement when you were staring at a blobby first-pass rendering of the image trying to guess what it might be.
- hinkley 4y ago
  The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries and threading. Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage: Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got infected with a virus.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0? https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s. The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov 10-11, 1993.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      That did not last long. November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new. https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/mosaic/readme.txt https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0027.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PPC versions of Windows NT.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You can read the page before images load!" And click to the next one.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bitwize 4y ago

Ah, good old Netscape. With its hardcoded buttons going to hardcoded URLs to give you a starting point for "surfing" the World Wide Web. And the "throbber"... they could have put up the system's hourglass cursor, but they used the throbber animation to signal to the user that the network, not the machine itself, was busy. UIs had a much clearer vocabulary back then, the money was in the user having situational awareness and making informed decisions about what to do, not in blind "engagement".

blihp 4y ago
The money was in blind banner ads back then. (to the extent there was serious money in ads back then... I don't recall the flood of banner ads until 95/96 or so)
pupppet 4y ago
I still love that throbber animation, when I see it I remember how navigating to a new page was a fun, almost mysterious little adventure.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Many a minute spent watching those comets drift by... https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif
  - kloch 4y ago
    comets and supernova
  - kingcharles 4y ago
    And my second favorite animated GIF of the early Internet: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/9/97/Hotmail_logo.gif/revision/latest?cb=20150130161102 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/9/97/Hotm...
unhammer 4y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&type=extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&... aww, was hoping for a nostalgic addon to bring it back

postalrat 4y ago

"Graphical User Interface, or "gooey" in nerdspeak" Now it's almost reversed. "Graphical User Interface" is the nerdspeak.

chrisjc 4y ago

Somewhat related, but I listened to recent episode of the acquired podcast where they were interviewing Brendan Eich and there were some pretty interesting moments discussing the state of Mozilla/Firefox over the years. They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time. On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-eich-chief-architect-of-netscape-mozilla-and-ceo-of-brave https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...

tiffanyh 4y ago
> "They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time." Don't forget XAML. I too was excited for these two things as well ~20 years ago.
- chrisjc 4y ago
  There is no data. There is only XUL!
  - superkuh 4y ago
    XUL still rules in Sea Monkey Classic and Pale Moon.
rascul 4y ago
> On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead. I felt the same, and I may have done more than simply dismiss Brave if that were the case. Although I do understand that Gecko isn't exactly simple or easy for a third party to build off of.
- guessbest 4y ago

pmoriarty 4y ago

One thing from that era that the web hasn't fully jettisoned is the completely unnecessary and redundant use of the www domain name prefix for web servers. I expect it'll still be there in the year 2525.

rollcat 4y ago
It's not completely redundant. You can't make a naked CNAME record (technically you can, but things will break in mysterious ways), and there's no standardised means of dynamically updating an A/AAAA record e.g. to match a virtualised load balancer (e.g. AWS ELB). Vendors have non-standard extensions to work around this, e.g. Route53 has the ALIAS virtual type (which presents itself as an A/AAAA to the clients); I wrote some cron+dig hacks in the past when that wasn't available (e.g. with ChinaCache).
bawolff 4y ago
At the time it probably was more neccesary. Http wasn't the only game in town. But don't underestimate the value of branding either.
0des 4y ago
also reminds me of folks who went with web.* instead of www.* a while back when we thought thats how things would go. still cant remember the full reason behind it.
saila 4y ago
I prefer no-www for aesthetic reasons, but there do seem to be some good reasons for some sites to use www: https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/

grishka 4y ago

> Maybe one day we'll all be connected through our nice fat cable TV lines, but that's a long way off and most of us aren't going to wait. And these days DOCSIS, the thing that runs over a coaxial TV antenna cable, is on the low end of internet access technologies, at least where I'm from. It's fun to see how times change.

kloch 4y ago
It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket with more wireless Internet bandwidth than anyone had (in any media) in 1994.
- hulitu 4y ago
  It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket which renders the web so slow like it's 1994.

sbf501 4y ago

I still use Motif Window Manager & X/Motif when writing native linux apps because I miss those big blocky buttons.

hising 4y ago

Every time I read about NetScape I start to have nightmares about stuff like document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.write("Hello World") Came later on (Netscape 4 I think, but I still get shivers from it)

hising 4y ago
DynAPI helped out back then https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html

nobleach 4y ago

That article really gives the impression that the browser chrome (the back button, etc) is the GUI that is downloaded, and is made up of HTML. The picture in the article doesn't help.

shortlived 4y ago

Can we have the URL changed to the actual page - https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

dang 4y ago
Yes. Changed now from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.com/1.1/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co....

ngcc_hk 4y ago

The only memory of this is that you have to keep on downloading the latest version as the last always have some issue. It was great. Better than mosaic. But … a hugh miss in fact in hindsight … as Microsoft talked to the selling pitch of Netscape in their office (as I read somewhere) what is this? You selling me a text browser. We have …. No they don’t. Just like internet is not appletalk … having network and text reader with tag ability is not “browser”. It is so much harder for a giant to react. But when they did, as Russia finally did its last bid to try to counter its lowering status, it tried to use everything it can to get that back. No world peace, no consumer need, no fair competition on that ground … just me and this security (market) threat to me. Me me me. And the war is launched.

richardfontana 4y ago

Actual URL of article (under the title "Mosaic Netscape: One Small Step for the Web..."): https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.com/1.1/Features/netscape.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

0.9 marks the first "Pubic Release" in the software's development. Yikes, to have this live on forever. Good reminder to always spell-check!

marstall 4y ago

Download images button ... nice

hericium 4y ago

The text is divided between two pages - make sure to click "next" at the bottom to read it in full. It's not a link to next post.