ANALYSIS: Farewell, Netscape, but I Suppose It’s Time
News of an old friend stirs memories
January 3, 2008 —
The holidays aren’t really the holidays without a ghost of years past, and in 2007, the ghost was called Netscape.
When I heard that AOL had pulled the plug on the Netscape Web browser, I was less surprised by the news than by the revelation that the company was still maintaining it.
At the risk of betraying my age, let’s just say that I’ve been around the track a few times, and I remember when the rumors surfaced in 1993 of a graphical Web browser that was being worked on at the University of Illinois’ main campus. As a Northwestern grad, I wasn’t sure that the farm boys could make it work, but I was happy to be proven wrong.
In those days, I was the IT manager of a daily legal newspaper in San Francisco, and a year or so before, my proposal for a dedicated connection to this thing called the “Internet” that would aid our writers and editors in research—and to be honest, I was looking forward to using it myself—had been unceremoniously shot down as a waste of money. But when the whispers of a browser called “Mosaic” became a buzz, all of a sudden I was on the hot seat.
Perhaps one of the things that saved some of us in those days was that HTML was just another markup language. I’d been monkeying with 1980s-vintage typesetters and publishing software for several years at that point, so a lot of the early process of putting copy up on the Web was a simple matter of changing the macros that set up the formatting strings. After all, XML is just SGML with better marketing, isn’t it?
Honestly, in 1994 it was more exciting to have a connection nailed up than it was to make something render attractively on a Web page. But the standards were lower then, and the bandwidth sucker that became Flash was still a dream.
Time passed and Microsoft got its act together—on the fourth try. Like most of the computing community, I became tired of the bugs in Netscape Navigator, and eventually realized that Internet Explorer worked “well enough.” (At least, it did for Windows.)
Even though much of the Netscape Navigator legacy lives on in Mozilla Firefox, it’s not the same thing. Like the child who surpasses the parent’s achievements, Firefox is the browser that Netscape should have built.
So the story ends a couple of weeks from now, when AOL officially ends support, and since it’s been a decade since Netscape was relevant, I guess it was overdue. But that doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye to an old friend, no matter how long it’s been since you had any fun together.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/31471
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|