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

arstechnica.com

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

#71

Post by robotbikes »

oblio wrote: post #59
lucideer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertisers go to where people are, not the other way around. People didn't want MySpace, but they don't want HackerNews, either. They want Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit. I think it's about time we accept that. People want colors, want animations, want life . Bland, static and lifeless is as annoying to them as super colorful and dynamic.

I'd suggest that people go where people are. They probably do want life and would likely be happier if they were interacting with other real live people. But our society is increasingly fragmented with people with good jobs being forced to work all the time and people with bad jobs being forced to work irregular hours and the people with stable reasonable jobs shrinking. This is probably just one factor that leads people to try to socialize online and thus seek a simulacrum of authentic experience which leaves them lacking often in comparison to what a real life experience would be. People who are seeking utility or information through the Internet are less inclined to desire distractions, but people who are seeking distractions or entertainment are probably more inclined towards shiny. The challenge we face is that all human activity is being pushed into the domain of a surveillance panopticon house of mirrors where even people seeking to interact with other people face to face are required to participate lest they be disinvited. This is specific to things like Facebook groups and events to coordinate activities. But yeah advertisers do follow people and they also help corral people by feeding social media companies into places so they have a captive audience.

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

#72

Post by jhbadger »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #55
kbumsik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

> So in his spare time, [Berners-Lee] wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and…

The Wikipedia article on ENQUIRE says it ran under SINTRAN III (the standard OS for many Norsk Data mainframes in the 1970s-1980s). So not a CERN-specific OS, just one not known to many people outside European users of mainframes at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE

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

#73

Post by gioele »

Let's all remember that the first client-side scripting language was Tcl (inside ViolaWWW).

http://www.viola.org/viola/vw/brief.html

> (If this were rendering on ViolaWWW, the button could actually be live on this document page!)

Loss of functionality well before JavaScript. ;)

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

#74

Post by gyc »

jonathankoren wrote: post #29
incompatible wrote: post #27

I 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…

I once took a programming class from a later (post-Andreessen)NCSA Mosaic team who would joke about Netscape coincidentally having the same bugs as NCSA Mosaic.

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

#75

Post by dredmorbius »

Interesting to see Viola mentioned so prominantly here, and to see its impact on Andreesen, Mosaic, and Netscape. Whilst I'd never used it myself, I ran across it a year or so back when looking at how the n=modrn browser mechanics were estabished: navigation, history, bookmarks, scropting. Viola extended many of these concepts, and explored ground that's since been lost; Applets, scripting (Tcl), stylesheets, frames, forms, equations editor, columnar layouts, sidebar as integral element, and more.

Its descriptive pages are well worth revisiting.

http://www.viola.org

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

#76

Post by dredmorbius »

jonathankoren wrote: post #29
incompatible wrote: post #27

I 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…

How much of that was univerity politics? So vicious because the stakes are so small ...

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

#77

Post by devbat8712 »

timw4mail wrote: post #70
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.

Coming from a much more graphical background, Links always seemed easier for me than Lynx. Not sure if Links is the same as ELinks.

I'd use ELinks or Links2 over Links, AFAIK the originall Links is no longer maintained. There's also partial JS support in ELinks which fixes some sites that require it.

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

#78

Post by jonathankoren »

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 don’t know. I was running it before 95 and never had NT. There may have been some random libraries like WinG and WinSock to install, but the lack of install libraries isn’t really an end user wowing feature.

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

#79

Post by acheron »

acheron wrote: post #18

My first graphical web browser was Slipknot. From what I remember you would telnet into a shell account and it essentially acted as a graphical front end for Lynx.

(Realizing I miswrote that yesterday — obviously the point of Slipknot was that you would dial up to your shell account, because you didn’t have telnet access on your machine.)
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