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ANALYSIS: Farewell, Netscape, but I Suppose It’s Time


News of an old friend stirs memories

By P. J. Connolly
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.


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