Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today

October 13, 2024 1:12 PM

“According to my notes, Netscape went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. — jwz (Jamie Zawinski) reminisces on his blog about releasing the first public version of Netscape.

jwz previously, describing the making of the Mozilla logo, recreating Borges's Library of Babel (digitally), standing up to the San Francisco licensing board in his club and talking of early web design.

Quite the history. It's not quite 30 years since I first saw his blog, but not too far off.

posted by ambrosen (28 comments total)

I was in university at this time and I remember going to the computer lab and all the computers had this new way of going online. It said "Netscape" and I clicked on the icon and this screen came up and it was very very cool-looking. In the top corner there was this animated "N" that would rotate when it was searching and I thought, "The future is now."

A real watershed moment for the internet. I can't even remember what screens looked like previous to Netscape Navigator...was it just text-based?
posted by zardoz at 1:26 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]

zardoz: NCSA Mosaic supported graphics.
posted by indexy at 1:30 PM on October 13 [5 favorites]

I remember the first time I saw a web page with Netscape. I believe I scoffed that it was just gopher with pictures and would never be popular. I may have been slightly wrong about that.
posted by Eddie Mars at 1:36 PM on October 13 [18 favorites]

When I was graduating from university, with a degree in Radio and Television Arts, one of my classmates said he was going to go into something called "web design" and I laughed at him and said the Internet was basically a souped-up CB radio and he should stick to something dependable like broadcast media.

I've never put much stock in my ability to predict the future since.
posted by Shepherd at 1:42 PM on October 13 [9 favorites]

My connection to Mosaic is that I was at library school at the University of Illinois while the original Mosaic was being written--I couldn't quite throw a rock from my apartment and hit NCSA, but someone with a stronger arm might have. Hypertext really seemed like the way to go for online information in general and in fact I handed in a class project on hypertext and hypermedia as a Hypercard stack, but most people in our library school that I talked to didn't seem to know what it would do to our profession and the world. I guess that's why we're a little short on billionaires.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:37 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]

Sorry to rain on the nostalgia parade but here's a graph of Firefox usage 2007 to 2024 (source: statcounter). It shows Firefox going from 24% market share to today's 2.7%. Wikipedia has some text stats going back to the year 1996, when Netscape Navigator was 89% and almost the only browser there was. IE surpassed Netscape sometime around 1999 depending on what report you believe.

Past is past but the future for Firefox is grim. It's been under 5% market share since 2018 so being at 2.7% is maybe an accomplishment of longevity? Still it's a shame that they get all those enormous payments from Google and have never succeeded in improving their market share.

Ironically those payments may be stopping soon if the anti-trust remdies against Google goes that way. Also today is the very day Google finishes its sabotage of uBlock Origin, the best ad blocker for Chrome. You'd think that'd be an opportunity for Firefox, that's my exit plan at least. But instead last week Mozilla picked a fight with the uBlock author over something minor and stupid.
posted by Nelson at 2:40 PM on October 13 [5 favorites]

I'm hoping Google's recent decision to remove manifest v2 from Chrome might bump Firefox usage a bit, re: adblockers (which are, like, totally not the reason Google was so gung-ho at sunsetting manifest v2, nosirree, how dare you even think that!)
posted by slater at 2:55 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]

Early versions of Netscape had a pulsing, breathing "N" for the "throbber", and there was a campaign online to replace it. I don't remember a rotating "N", but at some point it became a white serif "N" perched atop a tiny planet in some sort of meteor storm that lit the scene as it passed.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:05 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]

Netscape’s big improvement was its nonblocking UI.

I was off in Tokyo in the 90s so somewhat disconnected to the tech scene, such as it was…. The big news I’d get from time to time came via the Macweeks I’d find in IIRC upscale printing chains…

My IIcx was soldiering on in ‘94 and ran Netscape well, given my slow 128k ISDN connection.

NT&T didn’t have free local calls so my internet habit cost me $200 - $300 mo back in the 90s… $6/hr added up fast!

That summer I was also belatedly getting into MtG so it was a pretty pivotal period for me as an post-college adult…
posted by torokunai at 3:09 PM on October 13

The story of Firefox is a story of rebirth. Internet Explorer had all but destroyed Netscape, and became almost the only game in town until the Mozilla release. It took a few years, but the Firefox project was almost a complete rewrite of everything in Mozilla that wasn't the rendering engine. It soared from nothing to that 24% between around 2003 and 2007, and basically clawed back space from IE until Chrome was released.

It seems that the public may need to feel how bad things are again, the way absolutely everyone detested the stagnant and infuriating IE browser in 2002. It's worth remembering that the breathless dynamic Web development byword "AJAX" was basically code for "Hey, nobody uses IE4 any more! We can use features from IE5 and later now!"

Of course, this seems likely to become one of those "It's the year of Linux on the desktop because nobody uses desktop computers any more except for weird nerds." things: browsers aren't a major concern online in the way they were in 2005. Everyone just Downloads An App now, and stays locked in to things through that.

They miss out on Metafilter, that way...
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:10 PM on October 13 [8 favorites]

jwz is a known critic of modern mozilla and the past few years show that he's right (to some degree). Though he uses Safari, IIRC, which, ya know. Not like there's any real alternative.

The latest "hotness", Arc, is YACBB (Yet Another Chromium Based Browser), and has had a bug that basically leaked everything from users... I believe it's patched now(?) but... not a good sign for a new browser. PaleMoon based on the old UXP platform of the old pre-Quantum FF is apparently run by some anti-woke choads. Likewise, the new Ladybug by Andreas Kling, while actually a NEW renderer and not just Blink/Webkit/Gecko/Quantum/Servo based, is run by another anti-woke choad.

Apparently there is an attempt at making Servo a proper browser, not just an engine, IIRC. It would be free from the shackles of Mozilla (or minimal interference I believe). So that would be *something*.

But we NEED to have W3C make a reference engine. We need to have some sort of USER based W3C, not corporate dominated as is now. Google has been playing the same bullshit MS did back in the 90s (well technically so did Netscape).

BTW, Seamonkey is actually fun to use or at least get the feel of the old Netscape Communicator back. I actually enjoyed using it a bit. Right now I'm stuck on Vivaldi. The recent shenanigans of FF default opt-in for "privacy aware ads" (in league with Meta) is just one more example of the evil scumfufuckery they're up to, after umpteen "mistakes" the past decade. I'm so done with them, which is sad, because they're the only alternative to Google hegemony.

I do think it would be good if the suit against Google FORCES the browser to be separate and absolutely no ties to the advertising company. But I don't hold my breath and I won't believe the big G still won't pull bullshit to make it their little baby precious user-hostile browser.

Anwyays, I love seeing the reminder of of how far we've changed over the years, ups and downs... Also FML, I'm *this* old. I remember my friend coming home from college talking about "Mosaic", it was a whole new world, but me being on PC and coming online a little later (prole plebe, me) got online first with Lynx for DOS, then in 95, Netscape 1.2x(?) or 2.x... Then the stupid MS thing happened, and blah blah blah.

I just want good competition, I want a consortium for the USERS and FREEDOM (not beer). I don't trust Mozilla anymore which is really sad because even up to maybe 2020 I was still pushing friends to use it, but I don't anymore, there's not enough point, when they just join up with the same ideology, pushing AI, pushing ads, using deceitful methods (default opt-in), it's too much for far too long.

/off my old man soapbox.
posted by symbioid at 3:16 PM on October 13 [17 favorites]

Seamonkey is actually fun to use or at least get the feel of the old Netscape Communicator back. I actually enjoyed using it a bit.

I've happily used it for years, but it got so outdated. Currently I use Waterfox as my main browser.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:34 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]

In 1995 I was working for the US Army and for a unit of 200 people we had 3 Netscape licenses. I was one of the few who knew about it; I mostly used it to read The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. (I also may have signed up for a Dorothy Dunnett mailing list using my work email address.)

Anyway, because there were only 3 licenses, I would have to hang around and try to open the application periodically. I worked through the government shutdown in 1995 (? the one caused by Newt Gingrich getting pissy about his seat on the plane), and because so few civilians were working, I had no trouble catching up on all my important Bab5 information.

oy.
posted by suelac at 5:01 PM on October 13 [11 favorites]

Mosaic, that was it! So very long ago...
posted by zardoz at 5:10 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]

pushing AI, pushing ads, using deceitful methods (default opt-in), it's too much for far too long.

I'm a firefox user, I still tell everybody to use it, and it's the best browser by far, but it really has been steadily getting worse and worse. And in the stupidest of ways. The thing that frustrates me most, and would have me leaving if there were anywhere near a better alternative, is the continuous removal, year after year, of longtime features that were actually useful. Mozilla's answer is "just install some random plugin to do the same thing," but, for good reason including various concrete examples, I find it harder to trust that random plugins written by some random third party are, and will continue to be, secure or functional. And sometimes the functionality isn't even available through plugins and is just gone altogether.

As of way too many years ago I can't fully stop a page from loading or gifs from playing on a given page without disabling animations altogether. It used to be easy. This is a serious usability issue on some webpages. It's also by design, for bad, ridiculous reasons. (That thread is extra frustrating to read because all the "just use an extension and stop complaining!" comments point to extensions that stopped working years ago, iirc because Mozilla made further limits to the ability to actually stop a page from loading.) That there was a reason back then to change the existing design is one thing; that nobody felt there was any reason to enable the functionality through a different pathway is something else altogether.

Another example: I wanted to set the udm=14 google (i.e., google without the AI stuff) as a default search engine. Used to be you could, you know, add your own custom search engine string through the Settings page. It used to be both easy and discoverable. Now, the only option you're given is to search through the search engines extensions that other people went through the process of submitting officially to Firefox, or to learn that process and submit some search engine for public use yourself. Want to just enter your own custom search engine string, for yourself, in 2 seconds, like you used to be able to? It actually turns out you still can: you can go to about:config, add a new boolean entry (browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh), set it to true, and then you'll have an option to add your own search engine through the Settings UI, like you used to. Where is this documented? In random reddit or forum threads. Nowhere in the official FF user documentation, as far as I could see. How long will it keep working? Who knows.

Let's not even talk about how cumbersome searching on different engines is now in Firefox Mobile (Android) compared to what it was a few years ago. As someone with RSI issues, it's hard not to resent how many more taps really basic things require today than they used to. Maybe there's some way this is an improvement to somebody somewhere, but I can't think of how.

There are so many other smallish, seemingly-random changes that have drip-dropped over the years. They've individually and cumulatively been making FF feel less useful and more antagonistic to use. I could understand some of them as an issue of "we don't have enough resources to maintain these code pathways" but then Mozilla comes out with some new project or random new feature whose reason for being I, and apparently most users, don't understand, and it's like okay, apparently you do have resources, you just spend them on faffing around.

I want to keep using - and liking - Firefox. It's a good thing in a stupid world. For any Mozilla employees who might see this - please stop making FF more and more stupid.
posted by trig at 5:16 PM on October 13 [15 favorites]

All that said: 30 years is amazing, and what was born out of Netscape has been, despite everything, a giant gift.
posted by trig at 5:23 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]

"...apparently you do have resources, you just spend them on faffing around."

I get the feeling that for quite a while they've (Mozilla) felt like they were dying/on-edge. And the "faffing around" desperately flailing for something new and constantly failing. Hard to be new against MS and Google.

That said, I always wondered why they didn't try to work out some kind of deal with Proton Mail to have that encrypted mail be part of the Browser. The Browser would take care of encryption/decryption (though Proton Mail) and present the mail through the Browser on both ends. At one time, enough people would have trusted Mozilla to do it. Now, don't know.
posted by aleph at 5:36 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]

I had a shell-based internet account via my mother, and I had to learn how to use Unix to download games I'd get off of Gopher. Lynx was mostly a curiousity, everything useful was on news groups back then. But then I saw via the 'w' command that some users were running a strange program called 'slirp' I think. Investigating it turned out to be a way to fake SLIP access, which is waht you needed to use the graphical web.

The very first thing I went to look at was a hugely dithered 16 colour JPEG of Kurt Cobain that took 2 full minutes to load at 2400 baud. I immediately knew this was the future. It was also the month I blew through the 20 hours of internet access we got in like 3 days and had to wait in agony to get back online again.

On modem connections the N meteor shower was the most important feature of teh whole browser.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:42 PM on October 13 [5 favorites]

Like a lot of people, I first came across in a university computer lab. I was working at a VAX dumb terminal (probably trading tapes through Usenet) and saw someone using it on a PC across the aisle. I am generally a late late adopter, and frequently wrong about IT trends, but it was pretty clear on my earliest examination that this was the future.

Still miss the green screen and satisfying mechanical ‘clunk’ of those dumb terminal keyboards, though.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:04 PM on October 13 [1 favorite]

I first became aware of Jamie Zawinski through the mesmerizing ”Code Rush”.

His blog is fun, too - charming to see how dedicated he is to running a music venue, and how honest he is about how hard it is.
posted by mathjus at 8:00 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]

It will be sad if Netscape/Firefox die off. The WebGL renderers in Google Chrome and Apple Safari (on macOS and iOS) use Metal, while the WebGL renderer in Firefox uses OpenGL, and Firefox's renderer absolutely smokes Chrome and Safari in performance. Not even a competition, and the issue tracker for Metal backs that up with FPS numbers. My worry is that people will think the Apple platform sucks for WebGL for data visualization in web applications, and that WebGL sucks on the whole, because it is true! Google and Apple have crippled WebGL there, and with the monolithic control that Google and to a much lesser extent Apple have over the browser usage space via Chrome and iOS Safari, Firefox's demise at Google's hands would pretty much put a nail in WebGL's coffin, if not the final one.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:13 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]

Funny story about Mosaic. I first learned of its existence thanks to TLC, back when that was an acronym for "The Learning Channel". My previous interactions with the nascent Internet had all been text based through a dialup shell account. Basically just IRC, FTP, and Gopher up to that point.

Anyway, it seemed really freaking cool, so I set out to obtain a copy and boy was it an epic rabbit hole. The computer I was using had Windows 3.0 on it, there was a Windows version, so I figured I was good. No, not even a little bit, it turned out.

First, I figured out that I needed Trumpet Winsock. Fine, I download it to my shell account and transfer it to my computer. Do a little reading of the documentation and find that I'll need to run slirp on the shell account so that my computer is directly on the Internet to make Winsock work. Fine, I download that and figure out how to build software on a Unix box from source. Thanks, README. I get Winsock working, yay. Finally, I download Mosaic, install it, and try to run it. Oops, it requires this thing called Win32s. Now I'm off to Microsoft's FTP site to find a copy. Download that, try to install it, and wouldn't you know if, it requires Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Well, fuck, I think, that's going to cost money and I don't have money. So it's off to the pirate BBSes i had access to in those days. I dig around and well, shit, they have all the games and random utilities one could ever want, but not a single copy of Windows to be found on any of the BBSes I had leech accounts on. What a waste of the phone company's money that was.

The next day, I'm relating my woes to someone in class at school, and through pure dumb luck some other kid overhears the conversation and says he's got a stack of Windows disks at home that he can lend me. And sure enough, the next day he produces! Out with the old, in with the new. Windows 3.0 gone, Windows 3.11 up and running. Win32s installed, Trumpet Winsock installed, Mosaic installed! How exciting!

So I dial up the shell account, run slirp, launch Trumpet Winsock, and run Mosaic. It works! I click around. Yep, it displays text and images on the same screen. Cool.

Reader, I got bored of all this within 30 minutes. There just wasn't that much interesting available at the time. I went back to IRC and never used that fucking browser again. This took a week or two of real clock time. I'd be mad about it, but the experience was utterly invaluable. Since then I have never once in my life felt like I couldn't make a computer do something I wanted it to do. I may not have gotten the new toy I thought I was getting, but I got something better, the knowledge of how to read arcane documentation, find things I was looking for, and a lot more confidence than I'd actually earned.

Netscape provided a similar experience when I decided to give the web another shot. By then I was running Slackware Linux. I didn't even have Windows on my shiny new Pentium. I also hadn't bothered setting up X Windows. Hoo boy did I learn way more than I ever wanted to know about how VGA monitors work to get graphics working. Once I did get that working, though, running Netscape was a breeze. Still didn't find much worth looking at for a few more years, but it eventually got there and not long after I was buying books and CDs from this weird site called Amazon and buying plane tickets from Travelocity and using some search engine whose name I can't recall that indexed open Windows file shares and their wealth of mp3s.
posted by wierdo at 9:08 PM on October 13 [9 favorites]

The story of Firefox is a story of rebirth

The earliest version was called Phoenix browser.
Later named Firebird then finally Firefox
posted by yyz at 7:09 AM on October 14 [4 favorites]

I thought both Chrome and Firefox were using ANGLE as their WebGL backend, except maybe on Linux. (Which backs to Metal on macOS because there's no more OpenGL)
posted by credulous at 7:24 AM on October 14

I guess the full name is Metal ANGLE. There is an OpenGL renderer available via a custom flag, but it is a nuisance for developers and end users alike to get it set.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:04 PM on October 14

...was it just text-based?

When I was at RIT in 1994, it was indeed! We used Lynx, but it required telnet-ing to a unix box first. Graphical interpretations of online documents was still a very novel thing. I also recall watching the status bar at the bottom of the Netscape window make connections and wait for responses, and later versions would download (slowly) pixelated versions of graphics inline to the text itself.
posted by Wild_Eep at 10:08 AM on October 15

I love that Lynx is still around in 2024, still being updated. It's just as snappy as it ever was. And when you're just trying to read the bloody text on a page, no other browser beats it.
posted by grubi at 10:25 AM on October 15 [2 favorites]

Ah, memories.... Switching off images so pages would load that little bit faster via modem...
posted by phigmov at 3:28 PM on October 15 [1 favorite]