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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

I would like to think that after 20 years of effort, Netscape actually does more than 7.5 times as much stuff as it did in 1996. Assuming the original version even runs anymore, you should fire it up and see how it compares to a modern web browser.

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> Assuming the original version even runs anymore, you should fire it up and see how it compares to a modern web browser.

It doesn't do too well: http://oldweb.today/

Absolutely fascinating site, thanks! I felt incredibly nostalgic loading Netscape on Mac OS and using those squidgy grey menus. Wow do I suddenly feel old and miss those old simple machines (the OS version is 7.5.5).

Wonderful link - thanks!

Found this alarmingly prescient piece on the BBC site from 2000:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/874419.stm

'The next generation of mobile phones will make it much easier for the police to carry out covert surveillance of citizens, say civil liberty campaigners.'

Hmm, I wonder how that will play out...

The last time i tested old browsers it was impossible to view anything. The main problem is the Host field isn't sent by a lot of browsers from that time, and sites won't respond.

Character encoding issues, nexpected tags, big images all quickly lead to crashes.

> I would like to think that after 20 years of effort, Netscape actually does more than 7.5 times as much stuff as it did in 1996.

Does it though? In 1996 it included a mail client, a news client and a gopher client along with its HTTP & FTP clients. It even had JavaScript back then (I'm just going to take a moment to lament that JavaScript could have been Scheme — I don't even like Scheme as a language for programs, but as a language for web pages and web apps it would have been plenty good enough, even excellent!). It displayed images; it displayed HTML.

Honestly, 1996 was a pretty good year for browsers.

>I would like to think that after 20 years of effort, Netscape actually does more than 7.5 times as much stuff as it did in 1996.

This is precisely the problem the article is about. Why should one application grow 7.5 responsibilities instead of those being in separate applications? It's simply poor design, and now we're stuck with it.

To some extent, the 7.5 times (stuck with this arbitrary figure now …) more things that it does are not necessarily externalisable bloat—it hasn't grown an e-mail client (I think?)—but rather a response to the increasing demands of modern web pages. Offloading, say, JavaScript processing (a not-insignificant part of modern browser code, I think) to a separate application is surely possible, but also surely pointless.

I would assume that most of the logic for what Netscape did was embedded in the Netscape binary, while most modern browser features are 1% browser binary code, and 99% calls into the huge iceberg of OS-provided libraries.

Compare, for example, how VRML worked (entirely software rendering, all the code inside the browser) to how WebGL works (an API to talk to the OS graphics driver, which in turn is just a very fat API on top of the very CISC instruction set of a GPU.)

Why do you say that the GPU has a "very CISC instruction set"? The RISC/CISC divide is a somewhat historical notion, and GPUs don't really seem to fall in either camp to me (separate load/store + tons of GPRs + VLIW = RISC-like, transcendental functions + texture fetch with interpolation = CISC-like).

I was taking a bit of poetic license there; what I meant is that the ABI that the GPU presents to the CPU contains a number of high-level instructions that must be further decoded within the GPU, in the same way that modern "CISC-presenting" processors decode CISC ops into RISC μops.

That's only for graphics programming, mind you; the GPGPU interface is pretty directly representative of the GPU's internal RISC execution strategy.

Not true. To keep things compatible and minimize platform bugs, browsers embed a lot. Firefox has it's own jpeg, png, video codec and spelling libraries built-in. Try compiling it sometime. It takes forever.

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