Twenty-five years ago today, a group of tech pioneers founded the company that would eventually create Netscape Navigator. The browser lived a short life, but its legacy looms large.
I was thinking about the browser wars of the 90s, and wondering why Netscape Navigator, a browser I loved to use at the time faded away. I didn't know the story, so I searched for a good article to get up to speed. This is a quick read, and illuminates some of the history.
It's no wonder so much of the cutting edge of internet technology today is built around the fundamental idea of a democratized web. That vision has been a guiding star for over 20 years!
(Apr 4, 2019; Popular Mechanics)
In 1992, Andreessen was a gifted Unix coder making $6.85 an hour at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Andreessen wanted to democratize the world wide web and make it truly global.
...
It didn’t work.
...
“It’s hard to be a start-up. We just couldn’t compete with Microsoft.” While [Jim] Clark argues that his web browser was superior to Internet Explorer, to many web users, some logging on for the first time, the differences were negligible. The deciding factor was that Microsoft owned Windows 95.
...
Navigator may be a relic buried in the internet’s browsing history, but [...] Netscape’s true legacy lies in its vision to democratize the internet.
Read the rest from PUB_SITE_NAME: Later, Navigator: How Netscape Won and Then Lost the World Wide Web)
To think that the internet has been around for so long, it's similar to cryptocurrencies, not many people approve of them, but nobody does anything to eliminate them, so the day will come when all this explodes just like the internet, I guess this man had no credibility and look now, well I wasn't born, I've had the best of technology, I'm 24 years old
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I think it's in large part because of people like this that the world's technological landscape has progressed the way that it has!
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My first browser was the Netscape predecessor - NCSA Mosaic - on SunOS, and I had to download and compile it for myself and everyone in the office. "Discovering" Mosaic is still one of my favorite technology memories, on par with when I learned about blockchain. Andreessen was still at NCSA at the time, and Netscape hadn't even launched yet.
I will try to read the linked article tomorrow or later in the week, but my recollection is that Netscape faded away after it got bought by AOL, and they stopped innovating. In retrospect, I guess they were probably cash-strapped after the AOL/Time Warner merger and subsequent dotcom bubble collapse.
All these years later, Netscape is gone, but AOL is still hanging on (in some form), and I still use the same AOL email address that I created around 1995 or 1996.
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lol it's fascinating that you still have that email address.
If I recall from the article, you're close to correct about what happened. The article adds something about Microsoft squashing Netscape in their attempt to dominate.
I feel the same way about Mozilla in general; that they don't innovate very well. They sort of keep up, I guess... but I'd love to see them push the market a bit. There's a lot of valuable positioning in terms of keeping the web open, democratizing, etc. but their products never seem to quite make the grade in bringing any of that to the mainstream.
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I agree about Mozilla. It seems like Brendan Eich was their main innovative force. Now Brave is rising and Mozilla is stumbling.
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