Netscape Meteors | Hacker News Reader

Netscape Meteors

erynwells.me

404 pointsingve121 comments

I managed to extract the animation from the winworldpc.com download of Netscape Communicator with an easy ritual of:

    binwalk -e cc32d48.exe
    cd _cc32d48.exe.extracted
    unshieldv3 extract comm.z comm
    python extract_images.py --ico --png -d ns/ ~/Downloads/Netscape/_cc32d48.exe.extracted/comm/program/*.dll --continue-on-errors

where `extract_images.py` is from my https://github.com/akx/res-extract project (once upon a time someone needed the Excel 95 icons, and I obliged).

However, they're just 32x32 frames, not the glorious 60x60 from the article:

https://i.imgur.com/sXcEEDU.png

The actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile. Not a complaint against you in anyway, it just looks absurd. Massive Futurama add on top, some other promoted content below, and about 3% of the screen is the specific image for that page. Obviously because the picture height is only 30px.

Mobile imgur is really bad. It doesn't allow hotlinking, has a lot of annoying ads and other content, sometimes automatic quality degradation, and at one point they even hijacked the back button. We should just use something like abload.de or similar.

The actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile.

It's only 13K. I wonder how many HN comments it would take to post the image as BASE64 USENET-style.

Use a pastebin instead.

Firefox Mobile allows you to use addons, so you can Ublock Origin your way to an ad-free mobile experience.

You're still going to get redirected from the image to a javascript-heavy page. Better to get people to stop using imgur - if them showing they don't care about preservation by deleting all images not associated with an account recently wasn't reason enough.

> once upon a time someone needed the Excel 95 icons, and I obliged

May I introduce you to reshacker.exe: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/

Spent a lot of time as a teen using it to change windows graphics. (E.g. the image shown when loading windows or shutting down the PC). Fun times

Sure, I think I used a version of it back in the day too - but I wanted something cross-platform and batch capable ;)

There's https://www.nongnu.org/icoutils/

Also MinGW's windres might be able to do it (it can add and copy resources from .exe files at least).

wow I forgot about this. I used this to "break" the cyber-patrol filtering app on my pc so that I could get my parents to uninstall it lol.

You do mention it, but to draw it out for those who might not notice the naming: this is a later, fancier, more colorful version from Netscape _Communicator_ (‘Netscape 4’), which had a more golden hued, more ‘detailed’ UI.

The article discusses the animation from Netscape _Navigator_, probably version 3 (‘Netscape 3’).

Navigator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+navigator&t=h_&iar=images...

Communicator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+communicator&t=h_&iar=ima...

Yeah, probably need to track down a Netscape 3 download and do the same ritual to it.

http://ftp.vim.org/pub/netscape/communicator/english/3.04/wi...

Well, `binwalk` is no dice on either of those EXEs, so that's already a bit tougher...

Well now I want to know how many versions of the meteor animation there were.

Here's the animation of just the loop (frame 1 excluded) https://i.ibb.co/DMDBR7L/Netscape-Communicator-Meteor-Loop.g...

An archive of the Dataglyph website (Marsh Chamberlain) has some different versions of the animation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph....

An older version of the site that attributes the spinning compass (unused icon) to Dataglyph too:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981206034010/http://www.datagl...

Incredible. How do you find these things?

Wasting time when I should be working.

I was reading through jwz's blog and someone linked to the icon contest winners. I saw Marsh named as the artist who spruced up the animation, so I checked if his company had a website portfolio. The current website wasn't useful, but I checked the archived version and poked around until I saw the Netscape icon page.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/12/the-secret-history-of-about...

http://web.archive.org/web/20080206124223/http://wp.netscape...

http://dataglyph.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20011214155044/http://dataglyph....

Here are all of them (Not just the one for Netscape 4): http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an...

Well, now that that site is back up: is it all of them? The one from the OP doesn't seem to be there. (It doesn't seem like the OP's is Netscape 4, either; according to [1], it seems like the one OP was after is from Netscape 1. Or as the author says, " the original Netscape Navigator", emphasis mine.)

(And [1]'s image has been altered: there's a white border, the last few frames appear to be missing, the palette isn't quite right — vs. the palette in the OPs is just spot-on and screams the era. Seems to only drive home some of the points in the OP.)

[1]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/netscape-browser

Ironic that someone can write a blog and spend all this time reproducing a small portion of something that thousands of us have seen. Islands of information.

Or there's just so much chaff. I've done similar searches, and the number of results akin to the 400x400 one she got just seem to blanket the results. Bad resizes, bad crops, JPEG'ing, people photographing a screen, etc. … when you're looking for the OG.

And this particular animation is practically a treasure, now, as it was burned into the collective consciousness of the time. That is should be hard to find says a lot about search engines, the Internet, or both…

Well, seems like that site got the HN hug o' death.

The blog post survives, though…

NCSA Mosaic ftw. Especially if running on SunOS. Oh the nostalgia...

That dithering, combined with the quantized palette, is extraordinarily evocative of that era.

I haven't thought about web safe colors in a long time.

They're burned into my brain. I still think "web safe" whenever I enter a hex code in CSS.

The dithered reds are especially interesting, looking at the side-by-side examples at the bottom.

Yes absolutely brought back memories

palette

(The above comment is now obsolete. The GP originally said “pallate”.)

Ah the Netscape navigator icon. Warm memories. It was a beautiful and relaxing colors for the Netscape site and the browser. I knew I had an internet connection if the meteors were moving, if not, well call at another time.

This is totally silly of course, but to me IE 3 and 4 always “felt” faster compared to Netscape because of the speed of their animation.

I always wondered if MS intentionally made it faster due to perception.

It definitely makes a difference, the Facebook team replaced their iOS app startup loader from the facebook style row of lines ||||| to the standard iOS spinner because users perceived Facebook being slow with its loader and perceived iPhone being slow with the iOS spinner

Not silly, human psychology I think. I remember reading a thing a while back where appearance of response feels faster even when slower. You can try this yourself in your favorite language by having an app with three buttons:

- first button waits 9 seconds and then displays "done"

- second button updates a progress bar once a second for 10 seconds then displays "done"

- third button updates the progress bar once every 100ms for 10 seconds then displays "done"

See which one feels fastest

What is the answer ?

Generally, the one with the most responsive progress bar will feel faster, because you're seeing progress more often.

I'd love to investigate that. Timing UI changes with or without laggy/janky spinners or loaders and compare user perception.

Having a sense of fluidity makes it like the machine is well programmed and organized, while a slow gif animation will feel like something is wrong.

You mean the icon with the clouds moving behind the Windows logo? It had an absurd speed on my laptop, like the clouds moving at warp speed. Can't remember if it was IE 3, but it never looked right to me lol

EDIT: It was IE 2

The earlier versions of IE were really fast and feature packed. They also were quite small executables.

IE 4 was impressively fast compared to Netscape, and also included the little tick-bump navigation sounds, which I liked at first but they've now been mercifully put down.

i was told its because IE is pinned in RAM at boot.

First version of IE3 didn't even support file uploads without an add-on, but IE4 on OS9 was great.

Hit me right in the nostalgias. Such a great time to join the world wide web.

Yeah me too.

The pure web without all the bells and whistles :)

Then Netscape developed javascript (first Mocha/LiveScript) and here we are now.

"cobbled together" would probably be a better choice of words.

Indeed. It made me remember of one of my first programming projects: a teacher of mine had written a spaceship game for Netscape and I ported it to IE's UI model. There was no standardized DOM and, IIRC, forcing non-compatibility was one of the pillars of Microsoft's strategy.

Allow me to leave this stack of .net and Wired magazines right here whilst you listen to some modem handshakes.

Don't forget "Yahoo! Internet Life" magazine.

And Computer Shopper.

Which we can all now browse at our leisure thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526

Anyone know what kind of process was used to create the original animation? Was each frame hand-drawn, or some other technique used?

I would assume frame drawn, but back in the day there was ANI to GIF converters. So it could have been done in 3D Studio Max, or Maya on SGI or Lightwave on Amiga -> .ANI-> .GIF

This by the way, means there could be a way to extract/archaeology dig after the original project file and make a nice 8K render of it.

I'm imagining some hacked up workflow that includes:

- Something like Autodesk 3D Studio R3/R4 (DOS) or Lightwave 3D (Amiga) for the base animation and the light rendering - that would be hellish to do manually.

- Some custom-built software for palette optimization

- Photoshop on Mac for the compositing (the 'N' doesn't change)

- A bunch of manual work per frame

Not necessarily in that order.

(3d Studio Max was released in 1996, Maya in 1998.)

Edit: on the other hand: Netscape was founded and founded by Jim Clark (of SGI fame), so the 3d stuff was probably done on software running on an SGI machine.

No, it was all flat 2D BMP. Just a row of frames full of pixels. Super simple. Most were made with GIF Construction Set and MS Paint.

We are discussing how the original animation was (or might have been) created in 1993/1994. Not what tools were used by Netscape users when creating replacements of it 3-5 years later.

Before Maya there was Power Animator from Alias|Wavefront :)

It was a bitmap image that consisted of a strip of individual frames. It was common for a while to make them from animated gifs (which were plentiful and popular on the web). http://leighb.com/throbgif.htm

The internet era when it felt like anyone could sit down and read a 6" thick book from Borders Bookstore to learn to write HTML and go for it and create a career.

In fact, that's what I did - and I used a program located within Netscape to get started.

The WYSIWYG Netscape editor, Composer.

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

Which is still in SeaMonkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer

Ah Borders, that was a magic time.

I miss their Waldenbooks subsidiary

Coincidentally, yesterday I finished reading Zawinski's interview in Coders At Work, from Peter Seibel. Highly recommended!

Please provide a link.

This is the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092R8RQM3/

Not aware of the interview being posted anywhere online.

I just linked it to the guy. It's definitely online. epub, pdf, and audiobook.

Lost me a bit when they extolled high fidelity to the original then changed it :-/

Me too, but gosh darn that was a nice trip through a blast from the past! Thanks for the warm fuzzy feelings OP. What a time to be alive :)

Me too - I was there in fact - jwz was a friend back in the day. “Monkeybutter” is the password to his loft parties :-) my big contribution to the world of the web was search strings in the URL bar, which prior required a valid URL.

For me the Meteors are the very first thing I remember from when a friend showed me the www and I saw it for the first time. The screen was flashing irregularly when he moved the mouse between the browser window and other windows, because this was a Sun workstation and apparently it used a different color palette for the browser.

When we waited for a slow page to load and I remarked how fascinated I was about the smooth Meteor animation my friend replied dryly: "They'd better spend the cycles for loading the page faster." and we laughed about that.

It was a fun time, good memories!

Ah, so we have you to thank for my grandparents typing in "google" to get to google.com/?q=google.

The original rules were any single word was converted to www.<query>.com, I.e., www.google.com unless preceded by a ?, and any string with a white space was a search. YMMV on different browsers.

An interesting story from that chapter of my life came when we were logging. To resolve the dispatch the search string hit our servers. That means we got a log of all search requests. I took a principled stand that we should never log any ip addresses or Netscape cookie trackers with the search requests. Management agreed. Hence we went out of business and got the browser we deserve, Chrome and Edge.

To be fair, it wasn't the lack of search data revenue that wound up bankrupting the company -- that whole data mining industry didn't really exist outside of a couple of players and the USG. What did Netscape in was the browser revenue stream evaporating because of IE getting shipped with Windows, and the huge amount of time and people put into the Enterprise Server project that effectively got destroyed by the birth of Apache, and then double-destroyed by the birth of PHP.

Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.

Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues.

The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.”

That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.

ha. I still use separate URL and search bars in my browser. My 11 year old asked me awhile back "why do you have two search bars?"

Thanks, saved me a lot of time! :-)

That was a good move bro, thanks.

See this classic Netscape theme for Firefox. It has the animated logo as well https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxscape-light/

So Vivaldi as a Chromium-based browser also has personas/user accounts/whatever you want to call it, that shows your icon on the top right. It doesn't need to be an online account, and it allows you to choose a custom icon, even from disk (my Chromium install offers 24 icons but no "load image" picker). And... the custom icon can be an animated GIF!

So this is what the top right corner of my Vivaldi install looks like right now, but in real life it's animated: https://i.imgur.com/pqvhlsz.png

So, you spent a lot of time finding the “correct” and “original” version, and then proceeded to change it yourself? Why? Those pixels were red and orange originally, and that might have been the artist’s intention.

I would love to have a web tool that lets you replace the "N" with a different letter so you can make your own avatar with the first letter of your name.

I used to have a lot of fun making replacement Netscape "throbbers" (as they were called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber ). I made a color changing dragon, the USS Enterprise flying by, Xena animations, etc. Good times.

This used to exist. There was a whole ecosystem of silly Netscape animation replacements available.

I remember one with the Mozilla lizard.

about:mozilla

deep sigh That brings back memories... I remember downloading Netscape 4.0 over an ISDN line, took at least an hour. Fun times...

ISDN!!! royalty over here

64 kilobits of fury, or 128 if you could get a bonded connection.

I remember the joy of being able to stream a 112kbps MP3. Pure amazement

That also meant you had to pay for two connections at once, and it was not universally supported among ISPs (AFAIR, at least).

I had business connection over a 128Kbit ISDN upstream to UUNET which cost $500CAD/mo.

Within five years you could get a 1Mbit cable connection for basically $100CAD/mo.

ISDN had a brief but glorious reign!

I got a call from an ISDN salesman desperate to makes sales. The place I worked didn't want an ISDN line but I sure did. My place in Brooklyn barely had phone service but I got I think 2 64kbit channels and a 9.6kbit a channel for an around $100. The a channel couldn't be used but the b channels each represented a single phone number. Digital TeleMedia was the one ISP in NYC trying to offer static IPs over ISDN lines. We used Ascend Pipeline 50s and I was using MailShare from Glenn Anderson and Chuck Shotton's Webster.

See that Glenns project died just a couple of years ago which is sad if I had Known it existed I would bought a license. I just checked and I'm happy to report Chuck Shotton is sill at MacHTTP.

Now someone just needs to make a Netscape theme (userChrome.css?) for Firefox. I really liked the old Netscape 4.5-4.8 aesthetic.

https://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/557401/pictures-visual-h...

There used to be themes like that but over time they became broken due to changes to the Firefox UI architecture changes. I would pay for a good userchrome.css that still worked to to implement a classic Netscape theme on modern firefox!

Just a few comments above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985178

Oh this and the communicator throbber bring back such memories. I would wait some amount of time and then hit stop. This would render the page if you hit it just right, fail to load if you didn't have the data yet, and hit an error page if you waited too long and hit a timeout.

What a terrible way to live: 14.4 kilobits per second.

I still have a version of Netscape I purchased on CD somewhere.

Imagine buying a physical copy of a web browser these days.

You will have a monthly subscription for your browser "app" and you will like it.

I remember all the easter eggs:

    about:mozilla
    about:1994
    about:authors
    
    about:<name>  -> http://people.netscape.com/<name>

Fun nostalgia but weird post? Detailing a "quest" to find an "original" GIF? Like, how do we know what sizes were around at the time? Finding the largest "original" version of a graphic and that's it?

The small sizes are what was around at the time, leave it at that. And obviously there's a billion copies of it and the 80x25 banners and what not everywhere. Nostalgia abounds!

I remember the glitch well. And I did wonder why they wouldn't fix it.

(Is there a story behind this?)

I was devastated as a child by the plight of the 'lowercase n' and jubilant at its ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btVGz294X0w

What did Mosaic use? It was some kind of cable in an S-shape I believe?

An S with a globe in the middle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic_Browser_Scree...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/NCSA_Mos...

That brings back serious flashbacks for me. Compiling Mosaic and demoing it to my boss on his windows PC which was running some kind of X server. Just as a comet smashed into Jupiter.

I understand why we don't have this anymore, but also I wish there was an option for browsers to still have some kind of cool loading animation.

We do, in a way. There's a throbber on the tab on the tab bar while the page loads.

But yeah … it lacks the personality of the Netscape meteor shower.

I'd be cool with one, esp. if it continued to animate while AJAX were pending … would reveal how many sites are just loading and loading and loading …

Just waiting for some dipshit to upscale this to 8K.

Tangentially related: The intro to Star Trek Voyager upscaled to 4K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sns1Xj6L-Qc

Both are about space objects and both might bring about waves of nostalgia...

Not upscaled, recreated

Done this search myself at one point so can relate to this.

Really beautiful bit of branding, dripping with soul and artfulness.

I wonder if there was ever a dither-free version in a different format?

It's a GIF, so unless the source artwork is still around, probably not. Aggressive dithering was very much an early web thing due to the early color limitations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors).

I love this little deep dive!

A fun project for someone would be to run this through Midjourney to get an un-pixelated, huge animation.

Was thinking the same thing.

Thank you for finding this!

Here's a 400x400 image

http://artfcity.com/2014/11/07/gif-of-the-day-netscape-navig...

Is that the one OP writes about?

> I started out doing some web searches that turned up several versions. One was promising but far too big: 400×400 px. Worse, after some shoddy resize attempts, the “pixels” had become rectangular.

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