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Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#42I think in those days all the well-known graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape) were proprietary, although free for personal use. I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.
I believe NCSA Mosaic was BSD. Andreesen was hated at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only company s…
Andreessen was loved by the entire core Mosaic technical team. Management did not like him, because he was a leader they could not control: opinionated, outspoken. The core Mosaic tech team all left Mosaic project on the same day to join Marc at Netscape, and pursue the pure vision of what browser should be. Mosaic project never recovered.
Source: I was Mr. MacMosaic.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#43If anyone is wondering what was Netscape’s first big feature differentiator was, it was inline JPEGs. Mosaic could just display GIFs inline. JPEGs would require an external handler, typically LView on Windows, or xv on Linux.
Netscape's huge differentiator was running on 16-bit Windows. All the other browsers needed either NT or a Unix workstation. This was prior to Windows95 so regular folks were still running Windows 3.1.
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Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#44This maybe a little off topic but... wait what? CERN had their own OS? What was its name?
NeXTStep, Steve Jobs made a company NeXT after being kicked out from Apple. This OS became the foundation of the Mac OSX. [1] Aside from NeXTStep, it was even before Linux was born. There were many historic BSD derivatives in that moment. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-...
I don't think the article was talking about NeXTStep in that paragraph.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#45If anyone is wondering what was Netscape’s first big feature differentiator was, it was inline JPEGs. Mosaic could just display GIFs inline. JPEGs would require an external handler, typically LView on Windows, or xv on Linux.
Netscape's huge differentiator was running on 16-bit Windows. All the other browsers needed either NT or a Unix workstation. This was prior to Windows95 so regular folks were still running Windows 3.1.
That reminds me of the story of Trumpet Winsock and it's author Peter Tattam. Before Windows 95 you need 3rd party software to make a PPP connection to the Internet.
https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/the-back-story/
It was such a widely used and distributed piece of software - magazines would ship it on a CD attached to the cover which would usually contain Netscape as well.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#46Back then I used lynx on the text terminals at university and shortly after upgraded my PC at home (running Linux) from 4 MB to 8 MB of RAM (which did cost about an arm and a leg) so that I could run Mosaic with its statically linked Motif libs on it... When I think back the thing that amazes me most is the fact that I ran a Unix system along with X11 and a Motif application in all of 8 MB of RAM.
I still use lynx now and then even today. Haven't seen any Motif app for a long while, though.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#47Looking at the second screenshot in this article (the one titled "An early CERN Web browser, circa 1990"), I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant. Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts, animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to our newsletter", "do you acc…
I'm going to get flamed for this but, if all you're interested in is the text, you could do worse than Lynx. I mean, it's not pretty, but it does get to the point. For sites that absolutely require JavaScript to load content you're screwed, but it does a surprisingly decent job on many others. Can be helpful if you need to avoid becoming distracted.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#48Looking at the second screenshot in this article (the one titled "An early CERN Web browser, circa 1990"), I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant. Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts, animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to our newsletter", "do you acc…
I'm going to get flamed for this but, if all you're interested in is the text, you could do worse than Lynx. I mean, it's not pretty, but it does get to the point. For sites that absolutely require JavaScript to load content you're screwed, but it does a surprisingly decent job on many others. Can be helpful if you need to avoid becoming distracted.
Lynx is good! I also use the Links browser, a sort of a successor to Lynx.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#49Looking at the second screenshot in this article (the one titled "An early CERN Web browser, circa 1990"), I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant. Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts, animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to our newsletter", "do you acc…
> I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant.
Take a trip only 10 years back. Browse with a Wii, or a series 40 Nokia phone. Or even Lynx using a color terminal. The experience bears considerable resemblance to the one you describe.
Everything pulling the experience away from this is a cultural problem. On the technical side there's the increasing tendency to see the browser as a weird VM/runtime first (or, worse, not to think about the browser much at all, and instead see the web primarily through the lens of several popular technological hammers to which every problem looks like a nail). On the business side there's various legal, economic, and marketing incentives. Not all of these are trivially dismissed concerns, but it's still possible to do what you want in simple enough circumstances or with some careful thinking/work in more complex ones.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#50Just imagine how many little bits of diarrhea and pubes they ingested