3 ms·
It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quot
by benoau 2y ago
It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quotas and fees based on connection duration!
- gruez 2y agoFact check: firefox 1.0 (released in 2004) was only 5MB [1], which takes only 15 minutes to download on a 54 kb/s dial up connection[2] [1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs
- benoau 2y agoThat was the fastest a dial up modem could be, many modems were a fraction of that speed. And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Edit: redoing the maths properly makes the 15 megabyte download in the late 90s take approximately: - 45 minutes at 56.6kb modem - 90 minutes at 28.8kb modem - 180 minutes at 14.4kb modem http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape > Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass[33] (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic). > This period of time would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998,[34] while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.
- gruez 2y ago>And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Software tends to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. Therefore the size of firefox in 2004 should be an upper bound for a browser back in the 90s.
- benoau 2y agohttp://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ It seems like by the late 90s the Netscape installer was already around 15 megabytes.
- jakub_g 2y agoNetscape went on first to become Mozilla (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite), but it was a big and bloated; and only then came Firefox as a slimmed down Mozilla only for web browsing.
- benoau 2y agoYeah, and the important detail here is all of this happened years after the "browser wars", which saw Netscape rapidly free-fall from being worth billions to being discontinued once IE was bundled with Windows 95. And then years later, Mozilla built Firefox from what remained.
- tonyarkles 2y agoKeep in mind that Netscape "Communicator" 4 wasn't just a browser. It was a browser, an email client, an NNTP client, an HTML editor, etc. Firefox was a fork that stripped all that junk out and made it lean and mean again.
- throwaway2037 2y agoOverall, lots of good points in your post. However, this one: > Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998 I am really dating myself here! I remember using Netscape pre-1998, and there is no way that I paid for it -- I was a broke uni student. (And, I don't think that I pirated it either.) Was I always using a (free) beta version? I cannot remember all of the details.
- WalterBright 2y agoOr you could get it on a CD.