Ah the death of Netscape. I remember it well and I guess I'll miss it, a large part of computer history and my own too I guess, so goodbye and thankyou Netscape Navigator.
Just finished reading this blog post on wired that reports that Netscape Navigator is to fold it's tent and slip into the night early next year and I have to admit I'm not quite sure how I feel. Some of the people who worked on it are glad it's going away and who am I to argue with that though I guess. One big issue with Netscape Navigator is security - not that the people working on it are doing anything wrong, they (were?) are not, but it just represents another layer of code to go wrong and another gate that fixes have to trickle through to end up on desktops where they are needed.
I'm not sure about some of the revisionist nonsense in the post though. Netscape the underdog? Surely some mistake, Netscape was THE standard browser whether you liked it or not for a good long time. IE only started to become usable with IE 3.0 which was round about the time Netscape started to release the odd sucky update.
Netscape championed standards? <blink> O RLY? </blink> You mean in their spare time from creating monsters like the blink tag? Or do you mean some other Netscape that didn't make it's own things up when needed?
Actually a large part of innovation on the web happened back then precisely because IE and Netscape navigator were far more concerned with gaining users and doing cool new things* than they were with standards.
Back then, both 'camps' did what they wanted and standards bodies codified the stuff that seemed useful for both to adopt, leaving other less useful things to die off. We saw a lot more 'innovation' back then that we do now that committees design things on paper and expect people to rush around implementing things that no one uses or shows any sign of wanting.
It seems that I'm just the latest in the line of people (many far more powerful and interesting than me) calling for a return to the browser wars.
* Keep in mind when looking at my examples of "cool" new non-standard tags, we had very different ideas about what "cool" meant and definately about what was then possible back in the day. Eeeeeh when I were young you had to download everything via modem. And it was slow in both directions. You youngsters don't know you're born etc, etc.
No Comments