NetScape: A Sneak Preview of the shape of WWW Browsers to come (1994) | Hacker News Reader

NetScape: A Sneak Preview of the shape of WWW Browsers to come (1994)

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94 pointsLammy57 comments

Somewhat related, but I listened to recent episode of the acquired podcast where they were interviewing Brendan Eich and there were some pretty interesting moments discussing the state of Mozilla/Firefox over the years.

They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time.

On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...

> "They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at the time."

Don't forget XAML.

I too was excited for these two things as well ~20 years ago.

There is no data. There is only XUL!

XUL still rules in Sea Monkey Classic and Pale Moon.

> On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based one instead.

I felt the same, and I may have done more than simply dismiss Brave if that were the case. Although I do understand that Gecko isn't exactly simple or easy for a third party to build off of.

There once was a browser based off of Gecko that was very popular until the team removed all the features that users loved about it. It was written in C and GTK+. It was much faster than seamonkey and only ran on linux, but when all the good features were dropped, most people moved to phoenix, later renamed firefox.

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

> 2002-11-01 6:48 AM

> Mozilla is nice, but Galeon…WOW, best browser i’ve ever used, and it beats mozilla hands down for speed (on my system atleast).

https://www.osnews.com/story/2054/

What features were removed and what was the stated reason?

https://web.archive.org/web/20021229134102/http://epiphany.m...

"[Galeon fork] Epiphany's main goal is to be integrated with the gnome desktop. We don't aim to make epiphany usable outside Gnome. If someone will like to use it anyway, it's just a plus. Ex: Making people happy that don't have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in epiphany itself."

https://web.archive.org/web/20051028022736/http://gnomedeskt...

"As such, we've reached the conclusion that we have to change our approach if we're going to avoid Galeon getting stale or bit-rotting"

"Epiphany has a bunch of active maintainers who are handling the things that we struggle to do for Galeon. But you say: Epiphany doesn't fit my needs or I'd be using it already! True, so our proposal is to bring Galeon to Epiphany."

A lot of features were removed like the control panel, variable width fonts and the tree bookmarks editor. It was 14 years ago, so it is hard to remember. The features removed weren't documented and reasons were never given. It just happened and it was very difficult to roll back because of the changes also required rolling forward or back the GTK+ libraries in debian.

There was already a browser called Epiphany and Galeon was changed to mirror the features in Epiphany even if that meant there were less features than in Galeon 1.2.x and removal of features was unpopular with the users.

https://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Web/Browsers/Galeon%...

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Phoenix, later renamed Firefox, was developed for Windows first. Linux development was considered an afterthought. It was recommended to use Mozilla or Seamonkey.

Whoops, I made a typo. I meant variable width tabs, not fonts. There never will be a web browser as fast or as intuitive as galeon again. It is the end of an era.

When Firefox ditched XUL it lost one of its most useful extensions: Pentadactyl

Have you tried Tridactyl [0] as a replacement?

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...

Interesting episode. I wonder why they seem to have removed it from their episode feed.. https://pod.link/acquiredlp

XUL is still under development as UXP, by the Pale Moon community: https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP

I'm not sure how they are dealing with documentation. Someone posted this link on Reddit's r/palemoon less than a year ago: https://udn.realityripple.com/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Overlay_E...

Ah, good old Netscape. With its hardcoded buttons going to hardcoded URLs to give you a starting point for "surfing" the World Wide Web. And the "throbber"... they could have put up the system's hourglass cursor, but they used the throbber animation to signal to the user that the network, not the machine itself, was busy. UIs had a much clearer vocabulary back then, the money was in the user having situational awareness and making informed decisions about what to do, not in blind "engagement".

The money was in blind banner ads back then. (to the extent there was serious money in ads back then... I don't recall the flood of banner ads until 95/96 or so)

I still love that throbber animation, when I see it I remember how navigating to a new page was a fun, almost mysterious little adventure.

Many a minute spent watching those comets drift by... https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif

comets and supernova

And my second favorite animated GIF of the early Internet:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/logopedia/images/9/97/Hotm...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&... aww, was hoping for a nostalgic addon to bring it back

I wrote a userChrome.css which repurposes the hamburger button w/ the jwz throbber.

There are no browser chrome class changes when a tab is loading in modern ff, so it sadly doesn't animate on load, but it does animate when you hover over it!

https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820894#30823413

ooh, is it online somewhere? :)

not yet! hoping to get it polished enough to share in the next couple of weeks or so ;^)

https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/

Meta: the submitted title isn't visible in the article itself but can be seen on the TOC of Urban Desires Vol 1 Issue 1: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co...

e: whoops, I linked to the wrong thing. This is the link I intended to submit: https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

Ok, changed from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co... now.

> Maybe one day we'll all be connected through our nice fat cable TV lines, but that's a long way off and most of us aren't going to wait.

And these days DOCSIS, the thing that runs over a coaxial TV antenna cable, is on the low end of internet access technologies, at least where I'm from. It's fun to see how times change.

It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket with more wireless Internet bandwidth than anyone had (in any media) in 1994.

It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our pocket which renders the web so slow like it's 1994.

I still use Motif Window Manager & X/Motif when writing native linux apps because I miss those big blocky buttons.

0.9 marks the first "Pubic Release" in the software's development.

Yikes, to have this live on forever. Good reminder to always spell-check!

"Graphical User Interface, or "gooey" in nerdspeak"

Now it's almost reversed. "Graphical User Interface" is the nerdspeak.

That article really gives the impression that the browser chrome (the back button, etc) is the GUI that is downloaded, and is made up of HTML. The picture in the article doesn't help.

The only memory of this is that you have to keep on downloading the latest version as the last always have some issue. It was great. Better than mosaic.

But … a hugh miss in fact in hindsight … as Microsoft talked to the selling pitch of Netscape in their office (as I read somewhere) what is this? You selling me a text browser. We have ….

No they don’t. Just like internet is not appletalk … having network and text reader with tag ability is not “browser”. It is so much harder for a giant to react.

But when they did, as Russia finally did its last bid to try to counter its lowering status, it tried to use everything it can to get that back. No world peace, no consumer need, no fair competition on that ground … just me and this security (market) threat to me. Me me me. And the war is launched.

Every time I read about NetScape I start to have nightmares about stuff like

document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.write("Hello World")

Came later on (Netscape 4 I think, but I still get shivers from it)

DynAPI helped out back then

https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html

The text is divided between two pages - make sure to click "next" at the bottom to read it in full. It's not a link to next post.

Download images button ... nice

... the most significant is the way it allows the user to go on browsing while it downloads items not immediately needed in the background. Rather than forcing you to wait for a graphic to load, Netscape, loads a page's text first, allowing you to scroll down the page or jump ahead to another URL while that nice looking, but perhaps not immediately necessary graphic, loads a piece at a time and without the need to wait for the page to paginate.

This "continuous document streaming," combined with Netscape's ability to download several documents or images at the same time has the effect of dramatically reducing time devoted to waiting, and increasing the time spent exploring the Internet's bewilderingly diverse content. Coupled with an overall performance increase optimized for 14,400 kbs [sic] modems, this makes Netscape, by far the speediest Web browser currently available.

Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute.

As the image crawled into view, you’d hope the top slice of the image would reveal whether it’s worth waiting for or if you should move on. Progressive JPEG was invented to solve this frustration, but it wasn’t always a great improvement when you were staring at a blobby first-pass rendering of the image trying to guess what it might be.

The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries and threading.

Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage: Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got infected with a virus.

I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0?

https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s.

The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov 10-11, 1993.

That did not last long.

November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PPC versions of Windows NT.

Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You can read the page before images load!" And click to the next one.

Do you know/remember if the NCSA Mosaic 0.x/1.x (pre-Netscape) rendering/browsing process was non-async/blocking on X/Unix as well, and not just on Windows 3.x?

It was blocking on all platforms. I was using a DEC Alpha and a Sun (some pizza box) to code and a Windows PC for Word and Mail. I think I didn't bother much with browsing on Windows. Too unstable and underpowered back then but it changed quickly. The Moore Law was strong at Intel in the 90s.

Would still be good to have for when a “web designer” saves a full-Res 5k-px on their Mac and then scales it using css width/height. Painful to watch the image slowly load on a less-than-50Mbps link.

Can we have the URL changed to the actual page - https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

Yes. Changed now from https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co....

Actual URL of article (under the title "Mosaic Netscape: One Small Step for the Web..."): https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...

One thing from that era that the web hasn't fully jettisoned is the completely unnecessary and redundant use of the www domain name prefix for web servers.

I expect it'll still be there in the year 2525.

It's not completely redundant. You can't make a naked CNAME record (technically you can, but things will break in mysterious ways), and there's no standardised means of dynamically updating an A/AAAA record e.g. to match a virtualised load balancer (e.g. AWS ELB). Vendors have non-standard extensions to work around this, e.g. Route53 has the ALIAS virtual type (which presents itself as an A/AAAA to the clients); I wrote some cron+dig hacks in the past when that wasn't available (e.g. with ChinaCache).

At the time it probably was more neccesary. Http wasn't the only game in town.

But don't underestimate the value of branding either.

also reminds me of folks who went with web.* instead of www.* a while back when we thought thats how things would go. still cant remember the full reason behind it.

I prefer no-www for aesthetic reasons, but there do seem to be some good reasons for some sites to use www: https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/

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