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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some point.

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We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the web happen.

A notable difference is that Netscape had a business model, namely, selling Navigator. Anyway, enjoy the ride.

Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They had one of several popular browsers, and one of several popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the web would still be just fine, and the customers of the ISP I ran at the time would have just used another browser.

Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty different. There was a fairly big gap between Mosaic and Internet Explorer that Netscape filled and it was the period that largely defined the web as it came to be.

Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape.

What other browsers of note were around in that period?

Netscape 0.9 was released in October '94. IE was released in August '95 and the first version was just a licensed rebrand of Spyglass Mosaic (which despite the licensed Mosaic name was not a version of Mosaic).

There was a number of browsers coming up at that time, and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early boom, as the most successful option that led to both Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.

Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source available, though not under an open source license) - there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g. AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with datatypes support)

Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding the text based ones, included:

* 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects, stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)

* 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga), Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)

* 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee); Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML, and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and images...)

* 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python; supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb (Mac)

* 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially); Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...; still updated as of two years ago...)

Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it not existed, sure, things would have looked different, but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started development before Netscape launched, and others were abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape. Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for many years.

There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I remember vividly the day the release with background image support spread across campus and every webpage looked garish for the next several years - but it was an advantage measured in months, and with competition heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started catching up.

A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At most things would have looked different, and maybe some things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess they left took years.

I remember that time and I too appreciate what the different browsers contributed feature-wise, but you’re missing the big picture.

In late 1995, Netscape released a browser that provided investors a comprehensive proof-of-concept online platform that was billed as the operating system for the Internet and they were being offered an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

JavaScript and CSS didn’t matter. Investors were looking at SSL for eCommerce, Java applets, plugins, VRML, RealAudio, etc.

Netscape stood out because nobody else was selling a comprehensive online platform with a compelling and plausible vision.

The World Wide Web became something because a crap load of money was invested into developing browsers.

It wouldn’t have happened on its own to this degree and none of those browsers were on their way to becoming a household name.

In late 1995 the market was even more crowded than when they launched in '94.

IE was already out. Opera was around the corner. Netscape was already close to its peak market share.

Plenty of people were selling alternatives, plenty of developers had funding. A lot of money had started flowing into browsers before Netscape. Had Netscape not soaked up the funding it did, more of that would just have flowed elsewhere.

The argument is not that Netscape were irrelevant, but they were one - big, sure, - player among many racing to commercialise features that already existed before Netscape.

> Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty different.

One can imagine a world without JavaScript...

Maybe I'm just being a hater, but the inspiration being a web browser that failed after being acquired by AOL at dot-com level stupid high prices, doesn't inspire confidence at all. Sure, it helped pave the way for Firefox, but Netscape itself never actually did anything.

Netscape created the first highly usable web browser, which introduced most people to the web. They also created SSL (TLS), JavaScript, the first high performance web server, and much more that that made the web go.

Oh yeah, I'm not denying that Netscape pioneered a lot of stuff. They also would have went out of business had they not been bought by AOL at a stupid, dot-com inflated price.

You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of Netscape?

They pioneered very little. Viola pioneered client side scripting, stylesheets and more. Netscape popularized a number of things, thanks to heaps of cash that let them market heavily, and in the process overtaking a bunch of competitors, and snuffing out many of them. They did have a great browser that was best for a period of a few years, but it's not like there weren't plenty of alternatives either out or right around the corner when they launched.

Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.

Perhaps Jake is saying that it is more important to make the world better right now than to have 100 year business plan. It sounds like Jake is willing to lead the charge for now and risk death later if it means that the concept succeeds under any flag.

Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.

What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.

Highly *used.

They may have done all those things and more.

How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?

They sold the browser until that market was yanked out from under them, and they leveraged control of the homepage into sales of their serverside packages, and then they sold out to AOL before their longevity was ever tested.

It was a rhetorical question.

This is an exaggeration. Yes, people flocked to Netscape.

Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.

And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.

They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.

E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].

"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.

[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/

Wow, all those VC's must have walked away very rich, considering how popular the web turned out to be!!!

Netscape didn't invent the web, its open protocol, or even the first browsers. They did not make the web happen.

Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)

Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.

Netscape did not start out an open source company -- quite the opposite. It was a saving throw once Explorer took away their dominance. And I wouldn't say it was a successful move.

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