4 ms·

I was an early employee at Netscape, and worked on the browser, server, and the services platforms. It was a hell of a ride - you felt the world changing under

I was an early employee at Netscape, and worked on the browser, server, and the services platforms. It was a hell of a ride - you felt the world changing under your keyboard. I am glad to see it still brings joy to people to use the product of our work in its original form. I often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance. After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome and related technologies, which were sadly in service of another monopolist - but this one protecting its dominance in pervasive surveillance.

neverrroot 3y ago
Thank you for replying, your work shaped me into what I came to be. I was a backend developer at the end of the 90’s, sadly not for Netscape Server, it was mostly C++ CGI. Have you been around during this time period (birth hour of Mozilla)? https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Oh I should sit and watch that. Yes I was there and helped a lot. Jwz was a friend at the time (although I later became too uncool for him). The launch party for Mozilla was awesome.
Throw839 3y ago
> often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance > technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome IE was pretty innovative, it introduced AJAX (async javascript requests...), web version of Outlook in 1998... There was also Opera browser, pretty innovative, it introduced tabs, mouse gestures, user styles, no script, basic adblocking... It could run on anything, even phone without MMU.
- sedatk 3y ago
  Besides AJAX, IE introduced CSS and IFRAMEs too as far as I remember.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    There were already competing things in these areas already. They were the ultimate standardizations, but the momentum was already there and something would have standardized. It happened that after crushing Netscape no one bothered to develop the alternatives. I’d note that all of these emerged while Netscape was still a viable business delivering those alternatives. I look at the gap after AJAX and notice nothing really comes along until almost a decade later.
alberth 3y ago
> ”After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome” No innovation came pre-Chrome? Like KHTML (or WebKit) … or Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I didn’t say no one released rendering engines (note Firefox is Netscape reborn). But these products didn’t do any fundamental additions to HTML, HTTP, or ancillary web and internet technologies. They provided alternatives to IE.
wk_end 3y ago
No personal offense intended, but Netscape was crushed by its own technological problems and missing business model as much as anything else. By the time IE4 was out, it was unquestionably the better browser - the Communicator suite was buggy and bloated by comparison, and only fell further behind as Mozilla scrambled to rewrite the whole thing. Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Microsoft redirected billions of dollars from their OS monopoly into developing a free product bundled into the operating system to bring down a competitor in a different market. It’s not my take, it’s the judgement of the courts. Mozilla was based on gecko and related technologies which were being developed for communicator, but when the revenues associated with the browser evaporated, there was no point in investing in it any further. Rather than simply letting it rot we decided that the way to stick a thumb in Microsoft’s eye was to take one step further and not just make it free, but make it open, with an organization to perpetuate open browser technologies. But everything that went into Mozilla was already long in development. That said, IE 4 was a better product - which goes to show an unlimited war chest, a singular drive, and no commercial necessities can go a long way in developing software. They also had a lot of layout experience internally with office, and made smart key decisions that we had blundered on early due to lack of layout experience. We were mostly an internet protocol company, and our layout experience was fairly simple. That translated into a really key early mistake - when calculating table layout, which were the primary way of organizing visual elements at that time, we assumed tables were infinitely large and as we loaded elements and calculated their size we sized the table to fit them. Microsoft did the opposite and assumed they were zero sized and rendered each element in lay out as its size is known. This allowed a perception of faster loading because you could see the loading as it progressed. Unfortunately the layout engine in early Netscape browsers was so deeply enmeshed in the code that removing it and replacing it with gecko was a multi year effort, and we were being driven my marketing and product to release versions so as to not be seen as falling behind. Ultimately that was the downfall of Netscape - product had way too much power over engineering, and while we had the best engineering team I’ve ever worked with in my career (including at multiple FAANG, unicorns, Wall Street quant groups, etc), we were constantly hamstrung by product chasing some short term priorities to keep notching differentiating features. Microsoft had a very clear goal - eliminate Netscape’s browser revenue at any cost - and the ability to redirect most of their engineering talent into that goal. Once they released a bundled browser that was technically superior as a web rendering tool for absolutely free (not just free, but mandatory and inseparable from their OS), it was all over for us. All the differentiating features were buggy baggage on a partially completed product vision that had no revenue model - so, the product never finished. The key is there -was- a business model, and it was successful. But no one can compete against a monopoly price dumping to zero. Given another six months we would have had the new layout and rendering engine in place, and would have had the better browser again. But with no revenue possible, the only option was to fold. But the smarter option was the one we took, and thus set up the precedent for large open source transfers and foundations. And, IE languished and rotted, because why bother investing in something that makes no revenues?
scarface_74 3y ago
Let’s be real. It use to be a source of pride when geeks bragged about how well their operating systems handled Netscape bugginess and crashes. Of course the Mac came in dead last because a Navigator crash would cause the entire operating system to crash
Zardoz84 3y ago
> After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome and related technologies You mean Mozilla Firefox.
bane 3y ago
I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also had the pleasure of having to duplicate), with Netscape, Eudora, and Trumpet Winsock so they could dial-in. Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users. No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user. Netscape made the business possible.

neverrroot 3y ago

Thank you for replying, your work shaped me into what I came to be. I was a backend developer at the end of the 90’s, sadly not for Netscape Server, it was mostly C++ CGI. Have you been around during this time period (birth hour of Mozilla)? https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Oh I should sit and watch that. Yes I was there and helped a lot. Jwz was a friend at the time (although I later became too uncool for him). The launch party for Mozilla was awesome.

Throw839 3y ago

> often wonder how technology would look today if Netscape hadn’t been crushed for threatening Microsoft’s os dominance > technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome IE was pretty innovative, it introduced AJAX (async javascript requests...), web version of Outlook in 1998... There was also Opera browser, pretty innovative, it introduced tabs, mouse gestures, user styles, no script, basic adblocking... It could run on anything, even phone without MMU.

sedatk 3y ago
Besides AJAX, IE introduced CSS and IFRAMEs too as far as I remember.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  There were already competing things in these areas already. They were the ultimate standardizations, but the momentum was already there and something would have standardized. It happened that after crushing Netscape no one bothered to develop the alternatives. I’d note that all of these emerged while Netscape was still a viable business delivering those alternatives. I look at the gap after AJAX and notice nothing really comes along until almost a decade later.

alberth 3y ago

> ”After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome” No innovation came pre-Chrome? Like KHTML (or WebKit) … or Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I didn’t say no one released rendering engines (note Firefox is Netscape reborn). But these products didn’t do any fundamental additions to HTML, HTTP, or ancillary web and internet technologies. They provided alternatives to IE.

wk_end 3y ago

No personal offense intended, but Netscape was crushed by its own technological problems and missing business model as much as anything else. By the time IE4 was out, it was unquestionably the better browser - the Communicator suite was buggy and bloated by comparison, and only fell further behind as Mozilla scrambled to rewrite the whole thing. Certainly, bundling IE into the OS helped - not to mention Microsoft's classic EEE approach to web standards - but post-Netscape but pre-Chrome there was a time when people were happy to switch to Firefox from IE because Firefox was simply the superior browser.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Microsoft redirected billions of dollars from their OS monopoly into developing a free product bundled into the operating system to bring down a competitor in a different market. It’s not my take, it’s the judgement of the courts. Mozilla was based on gecko and related technologies which were being developed for communicator, but when the revenues associated with the browser evaporated, there was no point in investing in it any further. Rather than simply letting it rot we decided that the way to stick a thumb in Microsoft’s eye was to take one step further and not just make it free, but make it open, with an organization to perpetuate open browser technologies. But everything that went into Mozilla was already long in development. That said, IE 4 was a better product - which goes to show an unlimited war chest, a singular drive, and no commercial necessities can go a long way in developing software. They also had a lot of layout experience internally with office, and made smart key decisions that we had blundered on early due to lack of layout experience. We were mostly an internet protocol company, and our layout experience was fairly simple. That translated into a really key early mistake - when calculating table layout, which were the primary way of organizing visual elements at that time, we assumed tables were infinitely large and as we loaded elements and calculated their size we sized the table to fit them. Microsoft did the opposite and assumed they were zero sized and rendered each element in lay out as its size is known. This allowed a perception of faster loading because you could see the loading as it progressed. Unfortunately the layout engine in early Netscape browsers was so deeply enmeshed in the code that removing it and replacing it with gecko was a multi year effort, and we were being driven my marketing and product to release versions so as to not be seen as falling behind. Ultimately that was the downfall of Netscape - product had way too much power over engineering, and while we had the best engineering team I’ve ever worked with in my career (including at multiple FAANG, unicorns, Wall Street quant groups, etc), we were constantly hamstrung by product chasing some short term priorities to keep notching differentiating features. Microsoft had a very clear goal - eliminate Netscape’s browser revenue at any cost - and the ability to redirect most of their engineering talent into that goal. Once they released a bundled browser that was technically superior as a web rendering tool for absolutely free (not just free, but mandatory and inseparable from their OS), it was all over for us. All the differentiating features were buggy baggage on a partially completed product vision that had no revenue model - so, the product never finished. The key is there -was- a business model, and it was successful. But no one can compete against a monopoly price dumping to zero. Given another six months we would have had the new layout and rendering engine in place, and would have had the better browser again. But with no revenue possible, the only option was to fold. But the smarter option was the one we took, and thus set up the precedent for large open source transfers and foundations. And, IE languished and rotted, because why bother investing in something that makes no revenues?

scarface_74 3y ago

Let’s be real. It use to be a source of pride when geeks bragged about how well their operating systems handled Netscape bugginess and crashes. Of course the Mac came in dead last because a Navigator crash would cause the entire operating system to crash

Zardoz84 3y ago

> After Netscape internet technologies went through a dark age without innovation until Chrome and related technologies You mean Mozilla Firefox.

bane 3y ago

I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also had the pleasure of having to duplicate), with Netscape, Eudora, and Trumpet Winsock so they could dial-in. Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users. No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user. Netscape made the business possible.