I Am Long on Netscape (1999) | Hacker News Reader

I Am Long on Netscape (1999)

boards.fool.com

27 pointsferdowsi20 comments

> I read a report some whare (sic), and the person said that the people who control the browser will have the power in the future.

They weren't wrong.

"You know your so very right. Netscape should be worth 50 billion"

50bn = 88bn today. The size of Volkswagen, the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world.

It's really incredible how years go by but the things you hear spewed out with absolute certanety during manias are always the same.

"buy your house now; prices will only go up" - real estate market, 2022

Delusions and hopium.

People were never gonna pay for a browser, it turned out to be the modern day equivalent of the turnstile to access DisneyLand.

Sure it's needed and it has to be installed for security purposes, but nobody is enthusiastic about the turnstile when they go to DisneyLand.

Turnstile checked their payment to Disneyland.

I would pay for a browser that was fast, extendable and catered to power users over casual users. $5-$10/mo would be the sweet spot. I would have paid for Firefox except they now fall into the bucket of “cater to average users” even though they do have the developer edition but it’s still basically the same browser. Give me a browser with equivalent of postman/insomnia built in, better bookmarks, keybindings, unrestricted plugins and more please.

It is a great idea actually.

The 1999 OP announced being long on Dec-1-1999.

AOL (which had acquired Netscape) stock topped on Dec-13-1999 at 94/share. He bought the exact top of an epic speculative bubble.

He was maybe in the green for 1 or 2 sessions.

Id pay for most mozilla stuff if i could get -just- the base functionality.

Just be a browser for fuck sake. I'd pay 20 bucks a month for a firefox that just did www and a thunderbird that just did email really well. Let me install extensions if I want extra stuff.

Have you heard about qutebrowser?

Some others to check out:

Luakit

Waterfox

LibreWolf

> People were never gonna pay for a browser

People were paying for browsers. It was the norm before Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free, which sort of killed that business model. Even so, well into the 2000s there were still browsers that you paid for (like Opera)

Had Microsoft not shipped IE for free, piracy would have taken Opera and Netscape out of business.

Or Adobe would have. Enterprise customers don't have the time to shop one piece of software for every function.

Microsoft Server solves(ed) them lots of problems.

I don't see how that follows. In fact Opera existed as a paid product for years after IE started being bundled with Windows, Netscape open-sourcing and even after Google released Chrome. It's now been bought by a Chinese conglomerate and is apparently "freeware", but the fact that it lasted so long against free or OSS browsers suggests they probably would've survived just fine.

>People were paying for browsers. It was the norm before Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free,

No, not really. Most people paid $0 for web browsers even in the early Netscape's days in October 1994. That was Netscape's deliberate intention and was stated in their press release: https://web.archive.org/web/20061207145832/http://wp.netscap...

Personal use was free. Netscape intended for businesses to pay for the browser. Both the older Mosaic browser and Netscape Navigator were free for non-commercial use in 1994. Free browsers were the norm before the Browser Wars of 1995 kicked off with MS releasing Internet Explorer 1.0.

I paid over $71 for a Netscape subscription in 1996. (I still use Thunderbird to this day, as well as Firefox of course).

A close pitch from recent times is Zoom. Yes, people will still video-communicate for as long as humanity exists. Doesn't mean the share price (down over 80% from its highs) will go up.

Same post says this person was also long Amazon. Up 3600% or so since Jan 1999. Reminder that the purpose of making lots of bets is you know you're not going to be right on all of them.

> By the way, how did you access this site? Was it NETSCAPE?

Not even close.

I still use Netscape occasionally, mostly for testing and nostalgia. Not many sites work with it, but I make sure that mine do.

I accessed fool.com with Waterfox, which is directly descended from Netscape.

Also long AMZN.

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