Netscape it's rise, fall, and eventual revenge

[@MeriaDuck]

Oh the nineties... I worked at one of those early internet providers at the time. People asked what it took to get on the internet. Quite a few hung up after we explained that a computer was involved.

[@evionlast]

Computers from that time were very hard to use unlike the portable devices most of us carry in our pockets

[@petevenuti7355]

I started an ISP for a short time and people would ask "oh you're with AOL? " "No I'm not, I am my own ISP! " "What's an ISP?" I'd explain and then they'd say they have their local library ,their telephone &their cable TV, didn't want another bill and hang up before I could say--- "wait it replaces all of them!!" The few customers I had only used my service to connect to AOL mail without a long distance call, saving them hundreds a month and making me nothing, a break even month , after months of losses . I mainly used my own service to save on my personal phone bill...

[@RowanHawkins]

from 94-96I worked for a small PC manufacturer that later grew into a low cost isp which eventually went under after accidentally adding a virus to their dialup software CD and the major investors in china finding out the local owner hadn't invested in the kind of cement they wanted. Even when IE first came out we called it internet exploder it was so slow and buggy it would explode at the slightest misclick, or maybe that was just WinBlows.

[@orangejjay]

@@evionlast They weren't hard to use at all. Once Windows 95 and plug n play was a thing, computers were easy. You simply installed your software and that was that ... not much different than today other than you needed to get a dial-up provider but they all had scripts that automatically created the DUN file needed to connect.

[@loginavoidence12]

they should have instead had Ted Stevens' secretary print them out an internet from the series of tubes.

[@cefrodrigues]

IIRC, the Internet Explorer anti-trust suits were less about IE being bundled with Windows, and more about Microsoft prohibiting OEMs from pre-loading other browsers with Windows PCs.

[@agy234]

The browser being an integral part of Windows was also a big component

[@vulpo]

And dirty tricks they played on their competitors like Word Perfect and DR-DOS.

[@GWNorth-db8vn]

For a while, updating IE would disable Netscape and make registry entries that prevented re-installing it.

[@floycewhite6991]

You paid an extra $99 for Windows when you bought a computer -- even if you ordered it to be sent with new, blank hard drives.

[@MrSaywutnow]

What I find amusing (and bemusing) is that nowadays Google and Meta are arguably better targets for anti-trust action than Microsoft was two decades ago, yet no action has been taken by the DoJ. Hell, some of the things Google does with Chrome are almost identical to what Microsoft did with IE back in the day. The only reason I can think why is it's because both companies are sitting on such vast vaults of personal information they've been given free rein at the behest of government agencies such as the FBI and NSA.

[@Simmo3D]

Man I miss Netscape. That cool N logo with the shooting star was the best thing since sliced bread back then lol. The IE4 vs Netscape 4 war was epic. A whole desktop upgrade for Windows 95 with IE. It was a fun time.

[@mikeburch2998]

I loved Netscape Navigator. And I still miss it.

[@JaxVideos]

Um. It stil runs...

[@iecasper]

Firefox

[@RamblingManDan]

So do I Sanka, so do I. It's funny too, given the fact that my dad was always such a anti-apple and pro-microsoft guy and software enigneer, so always made sure we had a basic bare bones PC around. But we wound up with a MacIntosh II at the same time. I liked NetScape Navigator way more than I did Internet Explorer at the time. Admittedly, at the time is a pointless statement, since it pretty much got all but abandoned by like... 2002/3 or so for Safari.

[@OttoIncognito]

Personal experience here. IIRC at some point in the 90s IE had smooth scrolling and Netscape didn't, and to my teenager self that seemed like a killer feature so I switched to IE. And after that the inclusion of IE in the OS made the switch from IE to Netscape was much harder than the opposite because of laziness, so even nerds like me just ended up staying on IE until Firefox came out

[@bramptongora2008]

Best answer in the thread

[@purplepioneer5644]

Dude… I did the same thing after the NTL tech had my mum Install Netscape for the same reason too.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Yah, I used IE in Win98 myself, since it came with it. (Don't remember what I used in 95 -- might've been IE there too since we had Plus!) Though I used Netscape on the Macs at school and my grandma's house. I stuck with my Win98 box rather too long though, due to lack of money for upgrades. But by 2006, IE was crashing every third browser window. So I installed Firefox and never looked back. 🦊 I kept using it on newer XP and Win 7 PCs, and still use it in Linux today.

[@chitlitlah]

Internet Explorer was looking pretty sexy compared to Netscape Navigator when 4.0 came out. The smooth scrolling was a significant part of that. Now, I've come back around and use Firefox in Linux, but you've reminded me why I used IE with Windows 98 and 2000.

[@KittenFeet-zw7hm]

IE didn’t exist for years after Mosaic and Netscape iirc. And when it dod exist it was horrible: Microsoft was the evil empire to my 14 year old brain at that time. I hadn’t yet realized that people are awful in general. Gates turned out to be one of the good bad ones. We have sunk so far since then

[@dataterminal]

For those who want some context of the time line when Netscape became big, that was 1994 when there was just 2,738 websites on the internet. In 1993 there were just 130 websites. Let that set in your mind for a moment. Now, when 1995 rolled around, and people did start dialling up for the first time, there were still only 23,500 websites. A massive jump from the previous year but by no means a huge number. Yahoo wasn't even a proper search engine at that point, because, they just put all the websites in a big list like a telephone book split up by categories. Simples.

[@technopoptart]

so, do you think that contributes to why it is so hard to find websites from before 1996? before everything started shutting down in the 2010's i used to dig and dig through old sites and it was pretty conspicuous that 1996 and beyond you could find websites for all sorts of things but almost never find anything older than that. i think i have come across less than 20 pre-1996 websites in my two decades online

[@dataterminal]

@@technopoptart The biggest issue is a lot of the websites simply don't exist anymore. For example, CERN only kept the website up historical reasons. Connecting to the FTP as described on that website, no longer works. The no longer works part will have happened to a lot of websites over the years. The one site that tried to keep records of sites, internet archive with their Way Back Machine was only founded in May 1996. So sites were lost prior to that, and were ones that weren't indexed and saved after. And would probably account for why you can't find any prior to that.

[@technopoptart]

@@dataterminal ty

[@Sam-tb9xu]

I’m pretty sure there were more than 3000 websites just at my university back in 1994.

[@RandomBitzzz]

In 1994 (or 95), I actually bought a book titled The Internet Yellow Pages. I used it for about a year.

[@MrBildo]

Something not mentioned in the video was retail cost. Netscape Navigator at it's peak would cost you ~$50 if you walked into a Babbage's or Electronics Boutique and bought it off the shelf. It was not free. And this was a time when downloading large pieces of software was not much of a thing. AOL, Compuserve, et al would often bundle a free version if you used their services, but otherwise you either paid for it or dealt with an endless trial version if you could manage the bandwidth to download. IE was essentially free for Windows users. In a round-a-bout way Microsoft made browsers a free piece of software when open-source and free software was not the norm. Cost was a big part of why Netscape died. Their early business model was selling software. Microsoft gave away similar software for free. Hard to compete.

[@huberthumphry280]

I have no idea what you are talking about. The internet was literally born out of "open source" sharing of code and it continued that way until they decided to commercialize the internet with the www. Also, prior to public access with the start of ISPs the public gained access to free software and code through BBS services Further, Netscape was made free for non-commercial users, it wasn't a "trial version" despite their attempt to do so when they changed their terms to be free for educational and non-profit. It was always the full commercial version available online and on disk (from ISPs and books/magazines) and did not expire or give "pay us" popups like actual trial software. It is also worth noting that Mosaic was also free for non-commercial use

[@stephenhosking7384]

I got my first PC in early 1998 (Win95) and it had IE, but (somehow) I was conscious of what was called "the browser wars" and I wanted to try Netscape. I vividly recall visiting their site and being greeted with "You're winning the browswer wars!" where they announced that Netscape was now free. From that, I got the impression that prior to that it was not free. $50 rings a bell. Maybe I'd seen it in stores.

[@MrBildo]

@@stephenhosking7384 That's correct. It was based off Mosiac, which was also sold in stores (Mosiac in a Box). Netscape was free for academic and non-profit use initially. My earliest memory of the free version was the one they gave my wife in college. Most people who wanted it had to go to a store and buy the floppies. Eventually it was open-sourced, but only after MS gave their browser away for free (with their OS, of course). The entire browser war narrative makes no sense if Netscape was free. Open source just wasn't the thing people think it was in the 90's. People that invested their time and money into building software sold it to make money. Distribution and publishing was difficult and expensive.

[@Asiatranceboy]

@@huberthumphry280agree, my personal experience was that I never paid for Netscape, and don’t remember ever having to work hard to avoid paying for it. Initially got online in July 1994, using CompuServe. Then got access to the web without restrictions after a few months. Netscape was given away free by magazines, ISPs etc… However I don’t know to what extent my personal experience is the same as most other people’s experience

[@kaminekoch.7465]

@@huberthumphry280 Shareware and pirated software is not free software. In 80s and the early 90s everybody and their mother tried to monetize their weekend programming projects by asking you to send them $15 in an envelope for a game that barely worked. Most software back then didn't have a free (and open-source) alternative like it does now and most commercial software was worse than today's weekend project by some rando on Github.

[@ctid107]

Wonderful video, I remember getting Winsock and Mosaic working for the first time over SLIP. Then shouting to the family "I'm connected to America!"

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Fantastic work. I went to University in 1995 and Netscape Navigator was my first Web browser. The "loading" animation was just magical!

[@floridaman0219]

I remember being hypnotized by the IE4 loading animation in the corner. made going online feel like an adventure

[@Lynxdoc]

I loved that loading animation! I wish the would bring it back!

[@DrTedEsq]

I remember sitting in on a meeting, somewhere around 1996/97 where the discussion of the company web browser was the topic at hand. I know… my heart skipped a beat too when I was asked to attend. The (predetermined) answer was that Internet Explorer was going to be the company standard because Netscape now wanted money. The dirty look I got from the Microsoft sycophant when I reminded him 3/4 of the company ran on Macintosh… if only I could have converted that to electric power. North America would only now be needing a recharge. 😂 (Edited the first sentence for clarity)

[@ZiggyMercury]

Was Netscape substantially, objectively better than IE at the time, especially in terms of what the company needed to get from giving its employees access to the internet? Because if not, it would have been stupid of the company to pay, when it can get a just-as-good alternative for free.

[@seamusoblainn]

@@ZiggyMercury IE was pure rubbish at the beginning and for a few years, as far as I can remember

[@LatitudeSky]

@@ZiggyMercury Browsing on a MAC using IE was awful in those days. Netscape was the right choice. MAC browsing didn't really get decent until Apple did Safari.

[@pythonflying]

Hilarious. Back in the day when management were tech experts.

[@DrTedEsq]

@@pythonflying Back in the day? That still happens, my dude. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’m not in IT anymore.

[@MoultrieGeek]

You have become my favorite 'tech' channel on YT. Your knowledge and irreverent humor is top-notch and your choice of topics is right up my alley. Thanks!

[@0xffffffffffff]

Used Netscape 4.x during the late 90-s - on Windows, Linux and Solaris. Thanks for the video!

[@kevinbarry71]

My first browser was Lynx used on a UNIX account at University. However, pretty soon it stopped working on any site that required frames. I also remember purchasing CDs over telnet as early as 1992. Imagine that insecure mess

[@RetroBytesUK]

I remember using an early search engine over telnet, that let use search for a file across all the ftp servers it indexed. The Web was just about a thing at this point.

[@RandomBitzzz]

Lynx was my first browser too. I used it on my Commodore 64 via a terminal program (Novaterm).

[@martindindos9009]

Lynx was the first for me and I thought it's awefull since it was text only in the terminal. So I've looked for alternatives and found Mosaics first and then Netscape. I've just started working for Uni and installed Netscape on our Win3.1 and later 95 machines.

[@fuel-pcbox]

CHRIST, that would be UNTHINKABLE these days lol

[@MatthewHolevinski]

@kevinbarry71 I think I remember doing that too, wasn't it called cdnow or something like that?

[@noland65]

Worth mentioning why Netscape 4.0 wasn't that good at CSS: Netscape had introduced its own approach to style sheets based on JavaScript (yes, as in fully integrated), but lost regarding standards to MS's competing CSS proposal. So CSS became just a translation layer to what was already shipped in Netscape Communicator. Also worth a mention: the e-mail client that came with Netscape browsers, which was one of the best of its time. (But there were also minor issues, e.g, while frame sizes could be specified in pixels - which is what every developer did -, Netscape browsers converted this to integer percentages internally. Hence, it was nearly impossible to line up frames pixel perfect to what was visually a seamless page and web design had to somehow hide this cleverly. Notably, this had been not an issue with IE. Also, the code base of the layout engine was beginning to show its age. This was handling static page rendering sufficiently elegantly, but it the general document-based approach had issues with reflowing layouts - like it's done on a general basis nowadays. Effectively, each part that was subject to change had to be technically a window of its own, either as a frame or as a DHTML- layer. This is where Gecko came in as a new start on the layout engine, which became the community project, which became Firefox.)

[@mglmouser]

During the Netscape Communicator 4.x days, I was working for Montreal-based CS&T. We were the OEM provider for Netscape Calendar (as well as HP OpenTime and our own branding CS&T CorporateTime). Those were interesting days. Netscape had provided their UI toolkit for the floating palettes UI they were fond of at that time. They had learnt a page or two of Microsoft's legal cookbook as our contract with them gave them access to "our technology", forcing us to branch off another company (Lexacom) for a while. Anyhow. The big winner was Oracle which bought the whole thing when we had regrouped under a single banner, Steltor. I still work for Oracle at this day. Not something I could have planned.

[@saint00]

Netscape had the last laugh in the end...as it got gobbled up by AOL but mainly it released it's source code with the Mozilla Foundation which they used to create Firefox and many other spinoffs... so theoretically Netscape is still around today thanks to the Mozilla Foundation.... Though I miss Netscape...It would be nice to see Mozilla revive that name "Netscape" with that green and black color scheme in a new open source browser.

[@rymixxx]

The nostalgia is strong with this one! I loved Navigator and Communicator back in the day. I remember trying to download Navigator 2.something for a Windows 95 beta release using an exceptionally slow 14.4 modem and unreliable line. It took hours. Something like 6 hours plus a couple of failed attempts. But to my teenage mind it was worth every minute. And maybe it was. I have a feeling I never got it working properly and had to resort to installing from some magazine cover disk instead.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

_"Cleaning a thousand malware toolbars off of somebody's Windows machine when you should just reformat"_ That is IE. _spits on IE's grave_

[@Darryl_Frost]

I remember those days, good times! Don't know how many times I have reinstalled windows for people.

[@marklgarcia]

This is the reason I switched to Firefox 0.9. Too many family members clicking on the wrong things and getting tool bars attached to IE that were difficult to remove.

[@hydrolifetech7911]

Dude! You just unearthed some bad memories! You let a family member or some person who knows little about computers to browse internet using your computer and you come back to find tonnes of stubborn dodgy toolbars on IE!

[@MostlyPennyCat]

For a while I had a zipped up copy of win98se burnt to cd. A straight fresh install, if somebody needed their windows de-malwaring I'd just replace the windows folder, either with or without a full format.

[@awetisimgaming7473]

I use Firefox not only to get back at Windows (plus I use exclusively Linux at this point), but I also use it because they in fact, still use plugins, and they added lots of good ad blocking stuff, as well as cookie deleting stuff, don't track me Google, search by image, trantlation of a full page with a right click, the works

[@fraggsta]

I remember using IE, and then pretty rapidly switching to Netscape in about 1993 - 1995, at the start of common internet access at home. With 33.6 and then 56k dialup. It was miserable having download speeds of 5 KB/s, you could literally wait for a few minutes watching a web page load. At this point in the UK, dialup was charged per minute as a local rate call. You would go online, do what you needed to do, download files etc, then disconnect and mess with the stuff you had got while offline. When I went to university in 1996, Netscape was there on Windows machines, but much more significantly for me, on a variety of UNIX workstations, mostly Solaris. The biggest change was I went from 56k to a symmetric 100 Mb/s connection that was always on. Suddenly the internet was something you could spend all day on, and you could download...uhh..freely available, Creative Commons licensed content in the public domain quickly and easily. It's hard to understate how much of a blight on the web of that time things like Flash were. In a world where KZbin didn't exist yet, horrible sites like Newgrounds were full of flash games and movies. Downloading the latest memes (although they weren't called that yet) and trending videos mostly involved a friend sending you a link to some random FTP or web server where you could directly download videos in Realvideo, or some other horribly low resolution format. One thing this video missed was that after open sourcing itself, Mozilla didn't just spontaneously spit out Firefox fully formed. It worked with the existing Netscape source base for a while, before deciding that it was unmanageable and at this point Mozilla decided to completely rewrite the browser, using none of the existing source code from Netscape. They released the "Mozilla browser", which was not Firefox. This had all the bloat of things likeUSEnet and email clients, and a separate calendar. Eventually the email client was split off into a separate open source project, Thunderbird (which I still use) and the browser was really stripped down to just being a web browser and became Firefox.

[@dcc1165]

Netscape itself still lives as the Sea Monkey browser. Fairly decent and includes all the things laters Netscape versions included (mail, HTML editor, etc etc). In fact, I still use it once in a while if I find myself in need of a quickly cobbled-together web page.

[@fuel-pcbox]

What about Firefox? lol

[@bja2477]

Seamonkey was my go-to browser for years and I also still use it occasionally. These days I prefer Avast Secure Browser - it does the job for me.

[@TevelDrinkwater]

​@@fuel-pcboxSeaMonkey is a parallel project to Firefox. Indeed, I believe originally Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird were all under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation, but around 15 years ago (IIRC) Mozilla chose to focus solely on the web browser (Gecko rendering engine and Firefox). SeaMonkey and Thunderbird are now separate projects, but both still use the Mozilla Foundation's Gecko engine. Since they are all open source projects, I expect there is a lot of overlap in the background on code. Technically, I think it would be okay to consider Gecko the upstream project, with Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Firefox the downstream projects.

[@cdl0]

*Good video, with lots of good comments.* One more thing: one of Microsoft's controversial schemes was to put a download size limit on Internet Explorer that was very slightly smaller than the size of Netscape, making it much more difficult to get Netscape even over a fast connection.

[@CamdenBloke]

I never used IE except as a backup for accessing very specific pages that only worked on IE, and I started back on Mosaic and Netscape 0.9.6. My family had Macs, so I E wasn't a default.

[@CTCTraining1]

Thanks for a lovely wander down memory lane. I remember Netscape very fondly as my previous experience of the Internet was based on using a Lynx text only web browser and trying to get sensible results out of AltaVista. Graphics on web pages ... what sheer extravagance, that will never catch on especially over my 9.6k modem. 😀👍

[@RetroBytesUK]

I still use lynx occasionally ssh'd into a remote machine to test stuff.

[@f.f.s.d.o.a.7294]

Our corporate web page, which has code dating back to 1999, still defaults to a text-optimized layout for Lynx (and BlackBerry) browsers.

[@BigSleepyOx]

One aspect missing from this video. A huge portion of Netscape's revenue came from the web server software. They had the idea of "give the browser away for free (including allowing corporations to use the browser in the free "evaluation" mode indefinitely), thus popularize the web, so as to make lots of Netscape web server sales. Apache is the one that killed off that revenue stream, once they began giving web server software for free. So, it wasn't just Microsoft that dealt Netscape a blow, Apache did as well.

[@cleverlyblonde]

Also, Microsoft gave IIS away for free, as part of NT.

[@davidboreham]

I worked in the Netscape server group. This isn't really right. First, bare web server product was never a big revenue source. That came from email server, app server, etc. But overall there wasn't much revenue ever from servers. But second, Apache was never a competitor on the radar. IIS was, however. Remember that in those days the "PC-as-a-server" we have today did not exist. Servers were Sun, HP, IBM, dec machines that were very expensive. Apache on a cheap Intel-based server didn't become mainstream until later, after the server group was sold to Sun. So yes, eventually "web server" became Apache on an Intel Linux box (later nginx), which costs nothing, but that's a general pattern that applies to all server software. There's no market today for bare server software. Money is only made from running such software to provide some added value service.

[@paulallen8495]

Mosaic was the first browser I used. My college started to put in computer labs and Mosaic was the first browser, on the computers. It didn't take long for Netscape to arrive and it was like Mosaic stopped existing. Using Netscape vs Mosaic was like taking a trip into the future. Netscape just seemed to be light-years ahead.

[@antonioalexandercastro3520]

IE -- The browser you used only once, to download your favorite browser, and never use again.

[@lupinzar]

At some point I remember Netscape having an occasional issue with something and I tried out IE for the first time (3, I think). It worked better in those situations so it got me until I heard about Firefox, which I still use. At one of my jobs we had to support clients using IE 6 much longer than its normal lifespan because companies would get locked into particular OS and software versions.

[@BigSleepyOx]

IE3 was the first version of IE to be superior to NW, IMO.

[@VK2FVAX]

I like the "Thank you for watching" .. reminds me of the old SUN colours and text/logo's they used for a while.

[@geebee7529]

You probably didn't see this in the UK, but in the 90's if you were in the US or Canada you could download the 128-bit SSL version. It knew you were in USA or Canada by IP however you had to still declare and certify on the download page for the 128-bit version that you were in those countries - and would not export it. Everyone else got the 64-bit (I think?) version. The idea was that the US government at the time considered 128-bit encryption something only we should have.

[@EsotericArctos]

Plugins are still used today as such, though they are called Extensions now. They work in a similar way to plugins, on the basic level. Yeah yeah, I know different, but similar sort of thing. Adds functionality that is not there by default

[@jamesmorton-m6tzo396]

Another great documentary, RetroBytes is quickly becoming my favorite tech channel

[@BrooksterMax]

Great to revisit an old friend and thanks for highlighting the joy and power of Netscape at its peak. I paired it with Eudora Mail and lived happily for a time :)

[@mindphaserxy]

I used Windows 3.1 up until like 1998 and Netscape was pretty much the de facto browser for a lot of us. At first my internet connection was through a local BBS that used Worldgroup for Windows and eventually direct PPP connection. Netscape was just more powerful and versatile. It wasn't slim and light but that's probably because I only had 8MB of RAM. By the time I got my Windows 98 machine it was IE for a while. Then Firefox and...well Chrome for like a decade

[@dv7533]

I was an avid Netscape user in the late 90's and I made my first websites with the Netscape Communicator HTML editor. I really hated what Microsoft was doing with adding their own proprietary standards, and since they were dominant, websites used those standards exclusively and they wouldn't work properly in anything other than Internet Explorer. So in those days I refused to use CSS. Recently I've gotten into web development again and now CSS is one of my favorite things, but at least it's a proper standard now. Since Firefox came out I've been using mainly that, but my new web development projects I test mainly on Chrome, since most people use that, but I make sure I use proper standards that all modern browsers support. I don't want to go back to those dark days where you basically build separate websites for the different browsers to make them work properly.

[@tsaszymborska7389]

Those were terrible days. There were websites that were just .exe files. Brrr…

[@marcuswilliams3455]

Wow, this brings back memories when I first got introduced into web design/development around 2000. Back then, I wondered why could anyone come with a generic graphical api that implement the same look and feel regardless of which web browser being used.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Microsoft FrontPage was notorious for producing absolutely crap HTML.

[@mhyzon1]

Other pieces of Netscape technologies didn’t only go to Sun. Red Hat acquired part of Netscape back in 2004 and which included Netscape Directory Server (LDAP) and Netscape Certificate Management System. So those are now under the IBM/Red Hat umbrella.

[@davidboreham]

Directory Server ended up being sold twice: to both Sun and RedHat.

[@AntneeUK]

Netscape was the first browser I used. I found Mosaic afterwards and actually preferred it 😁 I switched to IE for a while, but I recall being one of the early Firefox users, starting with Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox. Dabbled with Chrome for a bit, and then returned to Firefox again. Feels right that Netscape was my original browser experience, and Firefox is my latest

[@fsbayer]

7:00 Well...fun story, it actually *was* my mum dialling up in 1995. And before 1995, in fact. Albeit not to use the web, but bulletin boards. That's how she met my dad, and that's the reason I exist today. I reckon, as a '95 baby, I'm probably one of the first ever children to result from online dating.

[@kaitlyn__L]

That’s really cool actually

[@RetroBytesUK]

Kaitlyn is that, that is very cool.

[@JoePinball2006]

online dating and even online marriages where bride groom and priest were in separate towns/cities goes all the way back to the days of the telegraph in the 1890s!

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@JoePinball2006 I would categorise that in the wider category of distance dating, as it was also done by post and videotape and stuff after all, but I do get where you’re coming from

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@JoePinball2006 Did they exchange vows by Morse code?

[@K9TheFirst1]

I highly recommend everyone concerned about so many ads on the net, and Big Tech owning your data, switch to Firefox. Google's chrome is gutting the code used by ad blocker and privacy extensions. And with Edge being Chromium based, it means those Edge versions won't work either. Firefox, because it uses it's own code, will continue to allow ad blocker extensions to work as intended.

[@toddfraser3353]

To note part of the reason Netscape got into Microsoft radar was an ambition to turn Netscape into an internet based OS. Where other than downloading and installing apps to you computer, nearly all apps would be web based. 90s Microsoft main hold on the industry was it hold on a majority of software that would work only on DOS or Windows. Web Apps that were system independent was super scary to MS. Hence ActiveX as a way to keep hold of window only apps.

[@arahman56]

And now we have ChromeOS dominating the low-end laptop sales.

[@davidboreham]

Which actually happened, eventually, so they were right!

[@CommodoreFan64]

Great video, but I feel you kind of glossed over the AOL era a bit too quickly, even though I know this video is about the browser itself, I feel it should be noted that AOL in the early - late 00's used the Netscape name for a budget dial-up ISP($9.99 USD a month for unlimited usage) here in the United States that had it's own web portal with news, weather, etc.. of which I used for a few years, as my area did not get high speed internet till late 07, and for a dial-up ISP it was quite good, and reliable having plenty of local numbers to dial into, and almost always giving me a 49.9K - 53.3K connection the first try.

[@rs.matr1x]

Funny thing, Google Chrome and Safari are both descended from KHTML rendering engine, which was forked by apple to became Webkit, and later forked by Google to become Blink, KHTML was also an open source HTML renderer developed for the KDE Desktop Environment under Linux. Essentially two open source projects killed Internet Explorer, and today, Microsoft Edge is based on Chromium/Blink. Most browsers aside from Firefox these days are.

[@geniferteal4178]

A friend of mine rode the rollercoaster when he worked there he got pre. IPO shares at 25 cents apiece. within a year, they were worth well over a $100 each. They were somewhat less than that by the time he was allowed to sell, but I'm sure he did okay. We didn't talk actual numbers, but at some point he said something about buying a modest house with the money.

[@ponyote]

As someone who supported Netscape on Solaris in 2000/01, this brought back some memories. Thanks.

[@mrmosk2011]

I worked at a university help desk and helped many people connect to the internet using Netscape. We had cheat sheets on typical questions, but there were times I had to be on the phone for an hour or so to check all the settings. I remember many Netscape screen shots printed for people to follow.

[@mikejuneau]

Great video! Brings back memories of being an amateur web designer --which was a nightmare back then because a page designed in the communicator editor would suck ass when viewed in IE …..and vice versa. (One designed in Front Page would suck ass when viewed in communicator (navigator)They never gelled….macromedia (adobe) dream weaver helped alleviate some of the conflicts but it was still a biatch to appease both audiences! Thanks for the memories!

[@scottlarson1548]

My memory was setting up a huge booth at a convention for the place I worked for and suddenly hearing from the higher ups that we *must* switch to IE *right now* before the convention starts because they don't want to see any damn Netscape anywhere. We did that and of course it broke nearly everything we had done in HTML.

[@Mostlyharmless1985]

I think the other part of the death of Navigator, was the way Microsoft completely broke what little web standards existed. Most websites had to maintain different sets of markup for different sets of browsers, or if they were particularly callus, flat assume you were using IE and send markup specially "broken" to work properly in IE, others would go the other way and write markup that "SHOULD" work in IE but didn't and flat told you "use a proper browser." Still others went another direction and told you to use IE. It was a freaking mess. We really don't give W3C enough credit for finally wresting control of the madness and got everyone working together. Unless you have some particularly crusty markup, "Best viewed with" is largely a thing of the past. I imagine the youngins would look on in horror if you told them seriously "Well, try loading the webpage in Opera/Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE5, not IE9" for display weirdness.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

7:39 GIF was still subject to a patent claim at the time, so the budding Free Software movement tended to avoid it. This was why PNG was created as an open lossless format (JPEG, thankfully, could be used as a lossy format without patent problems).

[@morofry]

Mozilla Firebird was an awesome browser when I downloaded it for the first time. It was fast, had tabs, and made the temp folder easy to clean out with a button.

[@MonochromeWench]

A big problem for Netscape was Microsoft's idea for what dynamic html should be in IE4 was adopted by the industry as the standard and Netscape's idea ignored which meant Netscape was really lacking on that one really important feature. Embrace and extend it may have been, but Microsoft's idea was just better and could do more. It's hard to imagine that for a long time IE really was the best browser. Netscape 4 was not a good release.

[@BigSleepyOx]

Also, Netscape also engaged in "embrace and extend". They added lots of Netscape-specific stuff on top of the existing standards. And today, Chrome is the defacto standard, so Google can add whatever they want, the actual "standards" be damned. lol

[@gnif]

Great content as always, however you missed a step. Firefox was originally called Phoenix but had to re-brand again due to trademark issues.

[@Hollaendaren]

I first used Netscape 3 back in the day, and built my first website with Composer with NS4. Today I am a backend programmer and sites with millions of visitors per day rely on my code, it's fair to say that Netscape is at least partially responsible for my chosen career path.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

I still remember the fuss when web browsers gained the ability to display both images AND text side by side... Imagine that! Up to that point, them early browsers could display images but not 'inline' so what a breakthrough that was!! But I still have vivid memories of the nightmare trying to install and set up Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.X machines just so that we could get the damn things online. Millennials have no idea of how they're lucky that their OSes come with their own TCP/IP stack nowadays. 😀

[@NullStaticVoid]

A huge reason that IE got a leg up was that Microsoft was huge in the Enterprise sphere. This was the time period that Exchange mail servers and Active Directory were being installed in businesses everywhere. Imagine a medium sized business that has a few hundred computers, a mail server, network share and internal domain server. Of course you are going to balk at employees installing a 3rd party browser. Especially since this era of WIndows was not terribly stable. Now once people started building Intranets with IIS server fronting a Microsoft database, of course they are writing in some proprietary Microsoft active server page nonsense that might work on Firefox, but will definitely work on IE. So we found ourselves opening IE to get to the database to browse sales leads using SQL queries. I was still seeing enterprise software which specified IE6 or 8 in the early 2010's.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I know a fair few places that stuck with ie6 long into the 2000s due to exactly the reasons you mentioned above and a few activex controls. Dispite the fact ie6 was a security liablity by that point.

[@MWGrossmann]

HUGE thumbs up for correctitude. Finally! At ~6:00-ish -- not just thevunis but more importantly, the people who were on line *every* effin' *day* for reasons *other than* reading someone else's book collection. At ~11:00-ish -- finally!! A proper history! Painfully accurate . At ~13:00-ISH -- much more painful accuracy. Of *course* I've subbed; the rest of your content better be this good. At 17-ish -- oh, yeah. All geeks had to change their underclothing on that announcement. At 18:00-ish -- FF still alive, but jas corporate-ized into acsort of MS/IE behemoth which *also* ignores users' requests/demands and dictates usage. Which, I guess, shouldn't be nearly as surprising as it first was. Again, bloody excellent vid. Fanks.

[@jamesbevan50]

Really enjoyed this video - TBF though, World Wide Web wasn't the final web browser available for NeXT/OpenSTEP, honourable mentions to OmniWeb, and NetSurfer. Yes I did very much enjoy the NeXT video as well ;D

[@amrkoptan4041]

wow.. that takes me back to my 1993 IBM 80486 PC, It had a terrible modem but i had my first pleasant experience with Netscape on an external Rockwell 56K modem.

[@archcast9282]

Same here. Had a 486SX 25 MHz in 1993 with 4 MB RAM. You?

[@jefffrasca4054]

Internet Explorer was only the single use browser for Windows users. I switched to using Linux from Win95, so I never had IE on my computer. It was the thing I cursed, because of those time strapped coders who didn't test on Netscape. Thanks for the jaunt through some lived history.

[@ebinrock]

I miss that BEAUTIFUL logo. We hardly have artwork that beautiful anymore. It really conveyed the magic of exploration.

[@UmVtCg]

I like your voice and humorous way of speaking.

[@thewiirocks]

You say that it was hard to download other browsers, but it's important to note that everyone did it anyway. Missing from this retrospective is just how fractured the web became in this time. Both Microsoft and Netscape had "best viewed with [IE|Netscape]" badges that indicated which browser the site was designed for. Of course, many site would test on both and have both badges, but there was a ton of preference for Netscape. Microsoft looked like they were trying to horn in and no one really appreciated that. What ultimately killed Netscape was that Microsoft out-Netscaped Netscape. Part of how Netscape beat out Mosaic is that they added feature after feature after feature to the browser. Even down to the tag, which YES was absolutely a joke gone too far. IE4 and Netscape were still on somewhat even footing, but IE5 is what killed it. Microsoft introduced true Dynamic HTML in that release, which made websites more interactive than they'd ever been before. Netscape's engine was designed around streaming HTML into the rendering engine, and they simply couldn't handle this new dynamic DOM. Their engine was creaking and would literally crash if you pushed it too hard. This massive re-engineering for DOM/DHTML in IE caused Microsoft to simply drive away with the win. It took a very short time after that for the web to become unfriendly to the Netscape browser. Of course, the story is a lot more interesting than that. The "Web 1.0" was actually supposed to be a lot more sophisticated and capable through the integration of Java. Microsoft attempted to use standards bodies to force the "Web 2.0" that we all know and love, then abandoned it as soon as they won. There's a good write-up on this by Jerason Banes on Quora under "How did Javascript get its name" if you're interested.

[@zaxchannel2834]

I'm watching this on Seamonkey with a Netscape theme, the 1990s never ended it's all the same under the glossy finish

[@gaius_enceladus]

Ahhh, the '90s! Great times! Netscape and dial-up Internet! Alta-Vista as the search engine - remember that? :) I'm in NZ and I remember that IBM was my first ISP and they were great! Seeing that good ol' US Robotics modem made me all misty-eyed as I had one and remember it well! I think my first 'net access was on RedHat 5.0. I think I may have had to tweak a few settings but that was all part of the fun and I *hugely enjoyed* it when I successfully brought up a Web page!

[@hrmzk]

I used to love using Netscape Navigator and the other variant, Netscape Communicator

[@davidboreham]

Small correction: the Sun/Netscape "alliance" only existed from the time that the AOL sale process began. The backstory was that Sun wanted to acquire the server division of Netscape. However, for tax reasons the company couldn't be split and sold: browser and online services to AOL, server products to Sun. The alliance and subsequently iPlanet was a creative hack around that problem. De facto the Netscape employees who worked on server products ended up working for Sun (all the managers were Sun employees), but they were in fact actually AOL employees (their paycheck came from AOL). This arrangement lasted for a few years but eventually came apart with the Server/AOL employees all being told to stop working for their Sun managers. Meanwhile on the Sun side they had hired/transferred new engineers into the group so there were able to carry on with their "fork" of the server products. Server/AOL employees continued working on their fork of server products for a couple of years before again being sold (for real this time) to RedHat.

[@MissMTurner]

I was in high school when I first went online in around 1993/4. I didn't have a computer, but a friend did and we'd all hang at his house playing video games and I'd use his computer. I used Netscape of course on his Mac and even years later when I had my own pc, I was loyal to Netscape since it was my first experience. I hated IE and moved on to Firefox when Netscape went downhill. I made a point to never use IE and I even remember being so annoyed at the non-standard html IE used when making early, rudimentary web pages around 98-00.

[@Shinji_Dai]

I loved Netscape so much! I was only like 8 when we got our first PC and I spent hours on Netscape.

[@hyoenmadan]

18:56 The irony.... Googoool themselves have become practically a browser monopoly, worse and more ruthlessly than MS in the old days.

[@davidshepherd265]

Yep. For a while I've considered Chrome to be the modern day Exploder. Lol.

[@BigSleepyOx]

How can that be? Google's motto is "Don't be evil". /s

[@ThomasKundera]

@@BigSleepyOx It's not any more and actually ggl is evil now

[@DavidFBird]

I'm so old I remember buying a copy, for my dial up connection. At work our first browser was Mosaic, running on a SPARC server connected directly to the Internet ("Cisco - who are they again?)"

[@JamieStuff]

Ah; the memories. NCSA Mosaic on a 1200 baud dialup connection. Click a link; come back five minutes later. Netscape Navigator was a significant improvement in speed. Of course, I went with Firefox (and Thunderbird) when Mozilla was founded; I had forgotten that AOL (aka A-holes OnLine) had purchased Netscape. Firefox on Linux is still my daily driver.

[@BollingHolt]

Hmm.... back in the early 2000s, my university and employer briefly used iPlanet for its email. I had completely forgotten about that... when the main computer center took over each individual school's own-run email servers... it was one less thing I had to worry about (running my own email server and web server), but it also took away job security and eventually, years after I left, my position was just absorbed by the Borg known as the main computer center...

[@leeselectronicwidgets]

Thanks for a great video again. My first browser was NCSA Mosaic, I remember ftping the binaries onto my account on the Sparcstation 2 box at uni in 1993.. made a nice change from using gopher! Made me laugh about the evil Kermit! Also remember the download times for a browser, it took 7 hours to download a version of Netscape over my 33k modem at home once. I then worked at Freeserve in the dialup days and remember the guy preparing all of the CDs to bundle in with Dixon's computers etc that had branded browsers on the disc to save the download time!

[@fattomandeibu]

The browser I used on my A1200 was a Netscape knockoff that I forget the name of. It may have actually been an Amiga port of Netscape, it's that long I forgot. I got it off an Amiga Format cover CD.

[@mrkitty777]

Did you need to have upgraded CPU in your Amiga 1200 for this?

[@fattomandeibu]

@@mrkitty777 No idea, I already had the 68030 expansion with FPU and 8mb fast RAM for years by this point.

[@mrkitty777]

@@fattomandeibu that's a fast Amiga

[@fattomandeibu]

@@mrkitty777 Well, when it come out it would have been, but by the time I bought that expansion card, most computers would have had a Pentium and probably 16mb or more of RAM.

[@primus711]

Yes by that time there was 68060 and ppc accelerators

[@FreihEitner]

With modern web technologies, there is zero reason to develop a site specifically for one browser or browser engine, and Mozilla Firefox is my default browser for absolutely everything which isn't ham-fistedly coded to only work in Chrome (did we not already learn in the IE6 era that coding for one specific browser is a bad idea? It took Microsoft 10+ years to shake off IE6-only sites and get people to start supporting Edge instead).

[@rfvtgbzhn]

9:01 I remember watching streams with a 56k modem. Of course the quality was abysmal, but you could sometimes recognize something.

[@cgarby]

Remember using Netscape at university in the mid 90s.

[@BuddyLuvve]

I love these strolls down memory lane... Growing up and learning about computers when it was still possible to truly know how they function was awesome! And watching the coverage of the Micro$oft trial while rooting for the downfall of Mr. Evil was great fun! I still remember high fiving my best friend when the news of the verdict broke! My, what a different world we'd be living in if it had stuck!

[@critical_analysis]

Still, Microsoft is well and kicking and going on. Every business worthwhile has done it, so it's not new, without Microsoft, the penetration of low cost PC would have been delayed and so would the computer revolution across the world with poor countries.

[@RC-nq7mg]

I grew up through this. First browser I ever used was netscape at school on win 95. I used netscape exclusively at home until it fell apart during its AOL days. I briefly used IE at that point since it was doing certain things i liked that legacy netscape was good at but modern netscape sucked at others (tabs was a big thing i used IE because netscape fell apart and IE had tabs) After that short misery started using firefox after learning it was open source netscape and have been using it since.

[@pilcrow182]

I'm disappointed there's no mention of SeaMonkey. When Netscape Navigator (the standalone internet browser) became Mozilla Firefox, Netscape *Communicator* (the 'internet suite' that contained a browser, HTML editor, Email client, digital address book, and IRC chat) became the Mozilla Application Suite. A few years later Mozilla decided to shift focus onto the standalone Firefox and Thunderbird, and stop developing the Application Suite, but handed off development to an open source development team. This team would eventually call themselves the SeaMonkey Council and, as one would assume, rebranded their continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite as SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is still in development today, and while the gap between it and Firefox has widened considerably, it still uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and is very reminiscent of the classic Netscape Communicator suite in its default configuration.

[@drxym]

When I worked for Netscape I used to live in Navigator. It was an excellent email client & planner, unmatched really until MS Outlook. Ultimately I think it was probably a good idea to split the monolithic product into separate email & web components simply to reduce the chance of one part taking out the other but it was still cool. One sad aspect of AOL acquiring Netscape is they forced devs to switch from regular email accounts and Navigator to using their godawful AOL client and email addresses mixed in the same domain as users. So I had dozens of folders & rules for sorting emails by mailing list and so forth, custom columns & tags and then reduced to using some garbage client that listed 20 emails on a screen in no order.

[@Hal_T]

Oh, nostalgia, how I love thee. This is a great video about bygone days of brilliant creativity that we now think of as pedestrian by comparison to current capabilities. What I think is worth noting is how a desktop browser encompasses all the power that is parceled out to many individual apps on tablets and phones.

[@arahman56]

For Internet Explorer, it should be noted that its massive prominence (especially IE6) was also its death knell- things don't work well when you have a browser that disregards existing standards, and then you get companies building websites that rely on the features exclusive to the browser.

[@SimonZerafa]

I seems to remember that Netscape also introduced cookies and secure pages. This led to the first "crypto war" and the need for export control on cryptography. I also worked at AOL UK (formally CompuServe) so that was a bit of a retrospective for me 🙂

[@michael_r]

The crypto wars had nothing to do with Netscape. That was PGP that set that in motion.

[@drxym]

@@michael_r it was US cold war export restrictions that set it in motion - keys in export software couldn't be bigger than 40 bits in length. PGP just kicked the hornet's nest because it published its source code for "review" (i.e. intentionally released it into the wild) and an international version of PGP rapidly appeared that disabled the key length restrictions. As far as browsers were concerned, the 40-bit restriction was baked into the client and they shipped a US and international version. When the export restrictions lifted, browsers rapidly did away with restrictions. It wasn't quite the end for Netscape / Mozilla because client & server shared the same crypto code and Oracle had bought the server business. So for a while Mozilla only ran http-only unless you used a pre-compiled binary crypto executable in place. It was a horrible solution but eventually the crypto code was open sourced and merged in.

[@michael_r]

@@drxym yup, I remember. Then there was the whole Clipper Chip fiasco 🤣

[@MatthewSuffidy]

I am using Firefox on Linux Fedora Core 34 to watch this right now. Yes I started with a 486 in the Netscape era. I eventually started using Linux and the FireFox in there. I did use archie, veronica, and lynx on a University terminal back in the early 90s.

[@JohnCorrUK]

What a brilliant video - takes me back to an exciting era

[@vulpo]

I started using Red Hat Linux in 2000 on my home computer to avoid running MS Windows and its evil IE. At that time RH used a super configurable version of Gnome with a browser called Galleon. It was the most advanced, cutting edge browser available at the time and was the first to include tabbed browsing. Eventually Gnome came out with a new major version that stripped it of much of its configurability. So I ditched RH and experimented with many other Linux distros and browsers. I finally wound up on Mepis Linux with KDE instead of Gnome, and fortunately Firefox was released to take the place of Galleon. Does anyone else remember Galleon?

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

Jim Clark wasn't looking to "exit SGI", he was expelled in a board coup by the members of the board; it's all described in detail in a book called "The New New Thing". Once he was ousted, that was the beginning of the end for SGI. Same as what happened to Commodore after Jack was ousted.

[@nomike31]

Let's not forget that Netscape also invented SSL Encryption, which in a later revision was renamed to TLS, the encryption standard we all use today whenever we use HTTPS or any almost any other streamed encrypted communication. I think this might have been at least as significant to the world today as the introduction of their browser. But I admit, it's more a behind the scenes thing and less visible to the casual user.

[@teknologyguy5638]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane in this video.

[@petergunn551]

somewhere on my archive HDD i have a copy of my original website i wrote in the 1990s using Netscape as the editor. it was a static page, with the only whistles and bells being a few animated gif files, but it was a nice project to work on.

[@lornetyndale7974]

I still install Netscape Navigator 2.02 and Communicator 4.61 on every OS/2 and ArcaOS machine that I set up. Admittedly there is a build of Firefox (along with a newer browser based on WebKit) available, I still install Netscape (along with the others of course). I can recall building and testing many websites in Netscape, IE, IBM's WebExplorer, and multiple others just to make sure my websites looked okay across all browsers.

[@douggrove4686]

The LDAP server 389-ds is s descendant of the Netscape directory server.

[@brettvv7475]

I haven't seen that name in a while. 389.

[@RetroBytesUK]

389 got open sourced a while ago, and is now a fedora project, mostly aimed at authentication for organisations using fedora/redhat/centos/rocky etc you can use more or less any distrobution.

[@douggrove4686]

@@RetroBytesUK ahhhh... I used to support 389-ds at Red Hat. Note that most of the internal guids start with "ns". This is from it's netscape origins. At Sun, it was the iPlanet directory server then Sun ONE. Back in the day, Netscape got 12 to 15 grand for a license...

[@Greg41982]

Man, I miss Netscape. The N icon by itself was worth it. Way better than a hourglass or a circling circle. I remember writing some HTML that my brother helped me with and starting my own webpage on Geocities. Way more fun than today.

[@jamesrusselleriii8284]

I used Netscape since its heyday in the 2.0/3.0 days. To say that Netscape's codebase was aging by Netscape 4.0 was an understatement. - Enormous 18MB file download size that would take around an hour to download on a 56k modem - No CSS support - Frequent and unexpected crashes - The browser reloaded the page if you resized the window. - Hard (and I mean HARD) freezes - you'd be unable to move your mouse at all. I think the final nail in Netscape's coffin was that absolute turd that was Netscape 6.0 that was based on Mozilla prerelease code. That decision to release it did enormous damage to the Netscape brand. Luckily Firefox rose from the ashes, but that's its own story with their mismanagement.

[@shanefeather-lopez5935]

Bit of nostalgia there, using Navigator on the ISDN2-connected PC in the corner of the IT room at school at the tender age of 15. I remember all those god-awful AO-hell CD's of the late 90's and early 2000's, and I am still spooked by Connie's "Welcome, to AOL" for those few people I ended up installing that awful load of bloatware for. My step-dad, on the other hand, used those CDs to scare birds off of his allotment. Even though he only grew green beans it always seemed a much more fitting use.

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

I've just had to watch this for a second time after it was pointed out that my channel appears in it. You cheeky oik! I've no idea how I missed that first time round, hahaha

[@RetroBytesUK]

I did wonder if you would spot the subliminal advertising.

[@michaelcarey]

Ahh the memories. I used Netscape a lot in the dial-up era. I found the most convenient way to get it was with the purchase of almost any computer magazine. Back in those days they all had CD-ROMs stuck to the front cover and they had the latest versions of almost all the free software available.

[@faboohaahh]

I’ve watched a number of your videos, and thoroughly enjoyed them. I find it amusing to find this video given the waves that Google is making with Manifest V3. One of the few non-Chrome based browsers is Firefox so it’s definitely a good time to switch back, which is only possible because of Netscape.

[@JerikkaBenton]

1:09 Can anyone elaborate on the connection between NCSA Mosaic and Telnet? Telnet was developed in the late 60s/early 70s. 15:35 So, Navigator Plugins = Good, IE ActiveX Controls = Bad ?

[@RetroBytesUK]

NCSA's verision of telenet was very popular in the late 80s early 90s for DOS and MAC users. It had very prominently displayed NCSA logo when it started. In its early days it even had its own built-in ip stack to work round the fact most installs of the OS did not. The key difference between plugins and activex, was a plugin was a bit of software you chose to install on your machine, that was passed data embedded in a webpage. Where as activex was native machine code embedded in a webpage which would run directly on your machine. The attack surface was just so much wider, and it was exploited time and time again.

[@paulvato]

I attended U of I where Mosaic was created and then years later I was in one of their last commercials campaigns, where I photo copy my behind and fall into the copier. There is a video of that commercial on my channel. Good times!