Frankly, the offline feature was never a satisfactory experience. It was making the best of the reality of slow modem speeds, versus the clear increase in deman

Frankly, the offline feature was never a satisfactory experience. It was making the best of the reality of slow modem speeds, versus the clear increase in demand for interactive and multi media web services. Netscape was trying to address a situation that was simply not theirs to control; no amount of money was going to roll out universal broadband in 1997. Offline experience required content providers to associate a web manifest with their pages that they offered for offline. Even those who went to heroic lengths to re- structure their sites to work that way, were often defeated by the utterly unreliable nature of dial-up internet service. Did the resource fail to load because dependency tracking is NP-hard, or did it fail because someone picked up the phone at 10pm, or forgot to disable call waiting, or the ISP dropped the connection, or…? Not the hill to die on. Nevertheless, those very first moments of JavaScript and CSS were indeed very exciting, because however murky some essential details, the fact that web experiences were the future of UI for decades to come — that was crystal clear. It was a Singularity moment. Right there in the offices recently vacated by WebTV, across the street from the Shoreline Amphitheater, now part of the GooglePlex. I’m not sorry I was there. (I was offered a job at pets.com — if you picked up an AOL installer CD, a pets.com sock puppet would spontaneously materialize and hand you an offer letter — but there’s crazy fun and then there’s just crazy.)