Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#61

Post by teddyh »

hliyan wrote: post #33

Looking 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…

> using colors only where it is relevant.

That image lacks color because it is from a monochrome display. Early NeXT computers used four-bit monochrome displays (i.e. 16 shades of gray).

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#62

Post by paulific »

bartread wrote: post #47
hliyan wrote: post #33

Looking 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.

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#63

Post by thrower123 »

paulific wrote: post #62
bartread wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

In college I had one of those eeePC netbooks. It came with Windows XP on it, but it was so underpowered it couldn't really run a browser, so I threw headless Ubuntu onto it and got briefly good with emacs. I tried a few different console browsers; as I recall elinks was slightly better than lynx, but you could get most of the content you wanted back then, at least. I suspect that a large portion of the web is completely useless if you are still trying to use those browsers now.

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#64

Post by FabHK »

I used MacWeb [1] on my PowerBook 145b in the early 90s. Lovely solid machine, 25 MHz Motorola CPU, 4 MB RAM, and a massive 80 MB hard disk. And yes, it was possible to surf the web with that, with information dense content, mostly text (the "T" in HTML and HTTP!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWeb

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#65

Post by krapp »

thrower123 wrote: post #63
paulific wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

In college I had one of those eeePC netbooks. It came with Windows XP on it, but it was so underpowered it couldn't really run a browser, so I threw headless Ubuntu onto it and got briefly good with emacs. I tried a few different console browsers; as I recall elinks was slightly better than lynx, but you could get most of the content you wanted back then, at least. I suspect that a large portion of the web is complet…

I still have one of the original models that came with its own version of Linux. It worked really well with Fluxbox but unfortunately that's no longer being supported, it's currently running Puppy Linux.

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#66

Post by UncleSlacky »

michrassena wrote: post #20
krapp wrote: post #13

Did anyone else ever use Arachne?

I remember trying it in the mid 90s and then not using it much. I remember it being quite slow. The lack of even rudimentary multi-tasking caused it to hang easily. I could see where it might be useful in a lab with 8086 and 286 machines. But I think even at the time, this software had what seemed like a high cost, like $99. If there had ever been a DOS-only port of Lynx (without requiring Win32), that would have bee…

Arachne's still (freely) available though it hasn't been updated since 2013 (and 2010 for the last Linux (curses) version). There is now a version for 386 and better which should be a bit quicker: http://www.glennmcc.org/

There's also a DOS version of Lynx (DOSLynx) that's been around for some time: http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/doslynx.htm

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#67

Post by mbreese »

dboreham wrote: post #39
jonathankoren wrote: post #30

If 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.

I remember running Mosaic on Windows 3.11 with WinSock in the 93/94 time frame. Maybe this was a 3.11 thing though... I never tried it with standard 3.1.

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#69

Post by [deleted] »

lucideer wrote: post #57
oblio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Most people want images. Most people want more than images, they want video. You just need to look at news sites, the main Reddit page or the Facebook feed of a regular person. What techies want is far removed from what the majority of people want. Similar story with free products (regu…

I don't believe that this is true. What's true is that images & video are effective distractors, and most content "servers" want impressions and ad clicks. I don't think this means that most visitors/readers are necessarily looking for image-/video-heavy content. The likes of Youtube, etc. may be an exception (where it's clear people have come to the site looking specifically for a video), but even there, the suggest…

[deleted]

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#70

Post by timw4mail »

bartread wrote: post #47
hliyan wrote: post #33

Looking 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.

Coming from a much more graphical background, Links always seemed easier for me than Lynx.

Not sure if Links is the same as ELinks.

Post reply on HN