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Netscape Meteors
- fnordpiglet 3y agoLost me a bit when they extolled high fidelity to the original then changed it :-/
- imperialdrive 3y agoMe too, but gosh darn that was a nice trip through a blast from the past! Thanks for the warm fuzzy feelings OP. What a time to be alive :)
- fnordpiglet 3y agoMe too - I was there in fact - jwz was a friend back in the day. “Monkeybutter” is the password to his loft parties :-) my big contribution to the world of the web was search strings in the URL bar, which prior required a valid URL.
- nathancahill 3y agoAh, so we have you to thank for my grandparents typing in "google" to get to google.com/?q=google.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe original rules were any single word was converted to www.<query>.com, I.e., www.google.com unless preceded by a ?, and any string with a white space was a search. YMMV on different browsers. An interesting story from that chapter of my life came when we were logging. To resolve the dispatch the search string hit our servers. That means we got a log of all search requests. I took a principled stand that we should never log any ip addresses or Netscape cookie trackers with the search requests. Management agreed. Hence we went out of business and got the browser we deserve, Chrome and Edge.
- mark242 3y agoTo be fair, it wasn't the lack of search data revenue that wound up bankrupting the company -- that whole data mining industry didn't really exist outside of a couple of players and the USG. What did Netscape in was the browser revenue stream evaporating because of IE getting shipped with Windows, and the huge amount of time and people put into the Enterprise Server project that effectively got destroyed by the birth of Apache, and then double-destroyed by the birth of PHP. Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoActually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues. The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.” That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.
- wolfhumble 3y agoThanks, saved me a lot of time! :-)
- weinzierl 3y agoFor me the Meteors are the very first thing I remember from when a friend showed me the www and I saw it for the first time. The screen was flashing irregularly when he moved the mouse between the browser window and other windows, because this was a Sun workstation and apparently it used a different color palette for the browser. When we waited for a slow page to load and I remarked how fascinated I was about the smooth Meteor animation my friend replied dryly: "They'd better spend the cycles for loading the page faster." and we laughed about that. It was a fun time, good memories!
- Dudester230602 3y agoThat was a good move bro, thanks.
- acheron 3y agoha. I still use separate URL and search bars in my browser. My 11 year old asked me awhile back "why do you have two search bars?"
- jonathanlydall 3y agoThis is totally silly of course, but to me IE 3 and 4 always “felt” faster compared to Netscape because of the speed of their animation. I always wondered if MS intentionally made it faster due to perception.
- agumonkey 3y agoI'd love to investigate that. Timing UI changes with or without laggy/janky spinners or loaders and compare user perception. Having a sense of fluidity makes it like the machine is well programmed and organized, while a slow gif animation will feel like something is wrong.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoThe earlier versions of IE were really fast and feature packed. They also were quite small executables.
- mysterydip 3y agoNot silly, human psychology I think. I remember reading a thing a while back where appearance of response feels faster even when slower. You can try this yourself in your favorite language by having an app with three buttons: - first button waits 9 seconds and then displays "done" - second button updates a progress bar once a second for 10 seconds then displays "done" - third button updates the progress bar once every 100ms for 10 seconds then displays "done" See which one feels fastest
- rvnx 3y agoWhat is the answer ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mysterydip 3y agoGenerally, the one with the most responsive progress bar will feel faster, because you're seeing progress more often.
- mongol 3y agoWhat did Mosaic use? It was some kind of cable in an S-shape I believe?
- msla 3y agoAn S with a globe in the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic_Browser_Screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic_Browser_Scree... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/NCSA_Mosaic_Browser_Screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/NCSA_Mos...
- doctor_eval 3y agoThat brings back serious flashbacks for me. Compiling Mosaic and demoing it to my boss on his windows PC which was running some kind of X server. Just as a comet smashed into Jupiter.
- nathancahill 3y agoHit me right in the nostalgias. Such a great time to join the world wide web.
- nntwozz 3y agoYeah me too. The pure web without all the bells and whistles :) Then Netscape developed javascript (first Mocha/LiveScript) and here we are now.
- Dudester230602 3y ago"cobbled together" would probably be a better choice of words.
- myth2018 3y agoIndeed. It made me remember of one of my first programming projects: a teacher of mine had written a spaceship game for Netscape and I ported it to IE's UI model. There was no standardized DOM and, IIRC, forcing non-compatibility was one of the pillars of Microsoft's strategy.
- Varriount 3y agoAnyone know what kind of process was used to create the original animation? Was each frame hand-drawn, or some other technique used?
- unixhero 3y agoI would assume frame drawn, but back in the day there was ANI to GIF converters. So it could have been done in 3D Studio Max, or Maya on SGI or Lightwave on Amiga -> .ANI-> .GIF This by the way, means there could be a way to extract/archaeology dig after the original project file and make a nice 8K render of it.
- zgluck 3y agoI'm imagining some hacked up workflow that includes: - Something like Autodesk 3D Studio R3/R4 (DOS) or Lightwave 3D (Amiga) for the base animation and the light rendering - that would be hellish to do manually. - Some custom-built software for palette optimization - Photoshop on Mac for the compositing (the 'N' doesn't change) - A bunch of manual work per frame Not necessarily in that order. (3d Studio Max was released in 1996, Maya in 1998.) Edit: on the other hand: Netscape was founded and founded by Jim Clark (of SGI fame), so the 3d stuff was probably done on software running on an SGI machine.
- Vrondi 3y agoNo, it was all flat 2D BMP. Just a row of frames full of pixels. Super simple. Most were made with GIF Construction Set and MS Paint.
- zgluck 3y agoWe are discussing how the original animation was (or might have been) created in 1993/1994. Not what tools were used by Netscape users when creating replacements of it 3-5 years later.
- wazoox 3y agoBefore Maya there was Power Animator from Alias|Wavefront :)
- danw1979 3y agoAllow me to leave this stack of .net and Wired magazines right here whilst you listen to some modem handshakes.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoDon't forget "Yahoo! Internet Life" magazine.
- reaperducer 3y agoAnd Computer Shopper.
- kayge 3y agoWhich we can all now browse at our leisure thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526
- cryptodan 3y agoHere's a 400x400 image http://artfcity.com/2014/11/07/gif-of-the-day-netscape-navigator/ http://artfcity.com/2014/11/07/gif-of-the-day-netscape-navig...
- red_trumpet 3y agoIs that the one OP writes about? > I started out doing some web searches that turned up several versions. One was promising but far too big: 400×400 px. Worse, after some shoddy resize attempts, the “pixels” had become rectangular.
- afandian 3y agoThat dithering, combined with the quantized palette, is extraordinarily evocative of that era.
- layer8 3y agopalette
- layer8 3y ago(The above comment is now obsolete. The GP originally said “pallate”.)
- theandrewbailey 3y agoI haven't thought about web safe colors in a long time.
- qingcharles 3y agoThey're burned into my brain. I still think "web safe" whenever I enter a hex code in CSS.
- JamesLeonis 3y agoThe dithered reds are especially interesting, looking at the side-by-side examples at the bottom.
- albert_e 3y agoYes absolutely brought back memories
- akx 3y agoI managed to extract the animation from the winworldpc.com download of Netscape Communicator with an easy ritual of: binwalk -e cc32d48.exe cd _cc32d48.exe.extracted unshieldv3 extract comm.z comm python extract_images.py --ico --png -d ns/ ~/Downloads/Netscape/_cc32d48.exe.extracted/comm/program/*.dll --continue-on-errors where `extract_images.py` is from my https://github.com/akx/res-extract https://github.com/akx/res-extract project (once upon a time someone needed the Excel 95 icons, and I obliged). However, they're just 32x32 frames, not the glorious 60x60 from the article: https://i.imgur.com/sXcEEDU.png https://i.imgur.com/sXcEEDU.png
- nonethewiser 3y agoThe actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile. Not a complaint against you in anyway, it just looks absurd. Massive Futurama add on top, some other promoted content below, and about 3% of the screen is the specific image for that page. Obviously because the picture height is only 30px.
- miah_ 3y agoFirefox Mobile allows you to use addons, so you can Ublock Origin your way to an ad-free mobile experience.
- account42 3y agoYou're still going to get redirected from the image to a javascript-heavy page. Better to get people to stop using imgur - if them showing they don't care about preservation by deleting all images not associated with an account recently wasn't reason enough.
- reaperducer 3y agoThe actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile. It's only 13K. I wonder how many HN comments it would take to post the image as BASE64 USENET-style.
- myth2018 3y agoCoincidentally, yesterday I finished reading Zawinski's interview in Coders At Work, from Peter Seibel. Highly recommended!
- jonny_eh 3y agoPlease provide a link.
- sgerenser 3y agoThis is the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092R8RQM3/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092R8RQM3/ Not aware of the interview being posted anywhere online.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- notcensored02 3y agoI just linked it to the guy. It's definitely online. epub, pdf, and audiobook.
- notcensored02 3y ago[dead]
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoDone this search myself at one point so can relate to this. Really beautiful bit of branding, dripping with soul and artfulness.
- guerrilla 3y agoNow someone just needs to make a Netscape theme (userChrome.css?) for Firefox. I really liked the old Netscape 4.5-4.8 aesthetic. https://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/557401/pictures-visual-history-netscape-navigator/ https://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/557401/pictures-visual-h...
- exhilaration 3y agoJust a few comments above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985178
- darkmuck 3y agoThere used to be themes like that but over time they became broken due to changes to the Firefox UI architecture changes. I would pay for a good userchrome.css that still worked to to implement a classic Netscape theme on modern firefox!
- krylon 3y agodeep sigh That brings back memories... I remember downloading Netscape 4.0 over an ISDN line, took at least an hour. Fun times...
- CalRobert 3y agoISDN!!! royalty over here
- astrodust 3y ago64 kilobits of fury, or 128 if you could get a bonded connection.
- krylon 3y agoThat also meant you had to pay for two connections at once, and it was not universally supported among ISPs (AFAIR, at least).
- astrodust 3y agoI had business connection over a 128Kbit ISDN upstream to UUNET which cost $500CAD/mo. Within five years you could get a 1Mbit cable connection for basically $100CAD/mo. ISDN had a brief but glorious reign!
- detourdog 3y agoI got a call from an ISDN salesman desperate to makes sales. The place I worked didn't want an ISDN line but I sure did. My place in Brooklyn barely had phone service but I got I think 2 64kbit channels and a 9.6kbit a channel for an around $100. The a channel couldn't be used but the b channels each represented a single phone number. Digital TeleMedia was the one ISP in NYC trying to offer static IPs over ISDN lines. We used Ascend Pipeline 50s and I was using MailShare from Glenn Anderson and Chuck Shotton's Webster. See that Glenns project died just a couple of years ago which is sad if I had Known it existed I would bought a license. I just checked and I'm happy to report Chuck Shotton is sill at MacHTTP.
- stewx 3y agoI would love to have a web tool that lets you replace the "N" with a different letter so you can make your own avatar with the first letter of your name.
- shiftpgdn 3y agoThis used to exist. There was a whole ecosystem of silly Netscape animation replacements available.
- reaperducer 3y agoI remember one with the Mozilla lizard.
- unixhero 3y agoabout:mozilla
- Vrondi 3y agoI used to have a lot of fun making replacement Netscape "throbbers" (as they were called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber ). I made a color changing dragon, the USS Enterprise flying by, Xena animations, etc. Good times.
- myth_drannon 3y agoAh the Netscape navigator icon. Warm memories. It was a beautiful and relaxing colors for the Netscape site and the browser. I knew I had an internet connection if the meteors were moving, if not, well call at another time.
- kuschkufan 3y agoSee this classic Netscape theme for Firefox. It has the animated logo as well https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxscape-light/ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxscape-light/
- netsharc 3y agoSo Vivaldi as a Chromium-based browser also has personas/user accounts/whatever you want to call it, that shows your icon on the top right. It doesn't need to be an online account, and it allows you to choose a custom icon, even from disk (my Chromium install offers 24 icons but no "load image" picker). And... the custom icon can be an animated GIF! So this is what the top right corner of my Vivaldi install looks like right now, but in real life it's animated: https://i.imgur.com/pqvhlsz.png https://i.imgur.com/pqvhlsz.png
- nodelessness 3y agoThank you for finding this!
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoFun nostalgia but weird post? Detailing a "quest" to find an "original" GIF? Like, how do we know what sizes were around at the time? Finding the largest "original" version of a graphic and that's it? The small sizes are what was around at the time, leave it at that. And obviously there's a billion copies of it and the 80x25 banners and what not everywhere. Nostalgia abounds!
- mark242 3y agoA fun project for someone would be to run this through Midjourney to get an un-pixelated, huge animation.
- doctorwho42 3y agoWas thinking the same thing.
- Vrondi 3y agoHere are all of them (Not just the one for Netscape 4): http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-and-logos/ http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an...
- birdyrooster 3y agoIronic that someone can write a blog and spend all this time reproducing a small portion of something that thousands of us have seen. Islands of information.
- deathanatos 3y agoOr there's just so much chaff. I've done similar searches, and the number of results akin to the 400x400 one she got just seem to blanket the results. Bad resizes, bad crops, JPEG'ing, people photographing a screen, etc. … when you're looking for the OG. And this particular animation is practically a treasure, now, as it was burned into the collective consciousness of the time. That is should be hard to find says a lot about search engines, the Internet, or both…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deathanatos 3y agoWell, seems like that site got the HN hug o' death. The blog post survives, though…
- postmodest 3y agoNCSA Mosaic ftw. Especially if running on SunOS. Oh the nostalgia...
- deathanatos 3y agoWell, now that that site is back up: is it all of them? The one from the OP doesn't seem to be there. (It doesn't seem like the OP's is Netscape 4, either; according to [1], it seems like the one OP was after is from Netscape 1. Or as the author says, " the original Netscape Navigator", emphasis mine.) (And [1]'s image has been altered: there's a white border, the last few frames appear to be missing, the palette isn't quite right — vs. the palette in the OPs is just spot-on and screams the era. Seems to only drive home some of the points in the OP.) [1]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/netscape-browser https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/netscape-browser
- erickhill 3y agoThe internet era when it felt like anyone could sit down and read a 6" thick book from Borders Bookstore to learn to write HTML and go for it and create a career. In fact, that's what I did - and I used a program located within Netscape to get started.
- adventured 3y agoThe WYSIWYG Netscape editor, Composer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
- UncleSlacky 3y agoWhich is still in SeaMonkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer
- KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y agoAh Borders, that was a magic time.
- Minor49er 3y agoI miss their Waldenbooks subsidiary
- colechristensen 3y agoI still have a version of Netscape I purchased on CD somewhere. Imagine buying a physical copy of a web browser these days.
- kuschkufan 3y agoYou will have a monthly subscription for your browser "app" and you will like it.
- renewiltord 3y agoOh this and the communicator throbber bring back such memories. I would wait some amount of time and then hit stop. This would render the page if you hit it just right, fail to load if you didn't have the data yet, and hit an error page if you waited too long and hit a timeout. What a terrible way to live: 14.4 kilobits per second.
- masswerk 3y agoI remember the glitch well. And I did wonder why they wouldn't fix it. (Is there a story behind this?)
- blt 3y agoI wonder if there was ever a dither-free version in a different format?
- astrodust 3y agoIt's a GIF, so unless the source artwork is still around, probably not. Aggressive dithering was very much an early web thing due to the early color limitations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors).
- aimor 3y agoAn archive of the Dataglyph website (Marsh Chamberlain) has some different versions of the animation: https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph.com/Graphic.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph.... An older version of the site that attributes the spinning compass (unused icon) to Dataglyph too: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206034010/http://www.dataglyph.com/html/movey.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981206034010/http://www.datagl...
- momento 3y agoIncredible. How do you find these things?
- aimor 3y agoWasting time when I should be working. I was reading through jwz's blog and someone linked to the icon contest winners. I saw Marsh named as the artist who spruced up the animation, so I checked if his company had a website portfolio. The current website wasn't useful, but I checked the archived version and poked around until I saw the Netscape icon page. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/12/the-secret-history-of-aboutjwz-aboutmozilla-and-the-netscape-throbbers/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/12/the-secret-history-of-about... http://web.archive.org/web/20080206124223/http://wp.netscape.com/home/contest/index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080206124223/http://wp.netscape... http://dataglyph.com/ http://dataglyph.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph.com/Graphic.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph....
- m463 3y agoI remember all the easter eggs: about:mozilla about:1994 about:authors about:<name> -> http://people.netscape.com/<name>
- Kwpolska 3y agoSo, you spent a lot of time finding the “correct” and “original” version, and then proceeded to change it yourself? Why? Those pixels were red and orange originally, and that might have been the artist’s intention.
- avidphantasm 3y agoJust waiting for some dipshit to upscale this to 8K.
- cubes 3y agoI love this little deep dive!
- azinman2 3y agoI understand why we don't have this anymore, but also I wish there was an option for browsers to still have some kind of cool loading animation.
- deathanatos 3y agoWe do, in a way. There's a throbber on the tab on the tab bar while the page loads. But yeah … it lacks the personality of the Netscape meteor shower. I'd be cool with one, esp. if it continued to animate while AJAX were pending … would reveal how many sites are just loading and loading and loading …
- HocusLocus 3y agoI was devastated as a child by the plight of the 'lowercase n' and jubilant at its ending. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btVGz294X0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btVGz294X0w