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The lasting influence of Netscape Time

thehistoryoftheweb.com

99 pointszdw31 comments

Jamie Zawinski at the end of the Code Rush doco:

We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's going to go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that.

While you may say it's not television because we have content creators now, most of the mainstream consumption is on closed platforms owned by companies with the highest valuations ever seen in history.

Side note: It's great to see Jamie's nightclub has become a success as well becoming more of a live music venue which is even more impressive in the face of Live Nation buying every venue in sight.

The DNA Lounge compound consists of five rooms, two stages, four dance floors with independent sound systems, seven full bars, plus our attached full-service pizza restaurant and cafe.

Sort of amazing that it caused the shift the other way - the internet became centralised, but television (video content) became decentralized

> Jamie's nightclub has become a success

If you've read his blog, it is always on the verge of catastrophe.

Success is a relative term. If you follow his blog ( https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/ ), it's been a slog in many ways. If it's not Live Nation, it's the municipal/state government, NIMBYs, etc. The retail/entertainment industry is also full of terrible and/or expensive companies that do everything from PoS/inventory down to suppliers being monopolies themselves. He's definitely a curmudgeon, but DNA lounge has been a struggle. He's even had to resort to setting up donations.

He's made it abundantly clear that while he's rich, he doesn't have infinite money.

Keeping that bar open is a testimony to obsession.

Sound, sidewalks, toilets, pizza, overreach, the story is full of tragedy and perseverance.

> While you may say it's not television because we have content creators now

What's the difference? There are hundreds of millions of people watching a relatively small number of wealthy creators who need to cater to advertisers and follow strict platform rules or else they get the boot. We even have celebrity gossip and controversies surrounding them.

We've recreated the exact thing we've been fighting.

I don't know how much "we" recreated it as opposed to small number of platforms creators are stuck using. Youtube sure didn't start out that way.

I remember when Phoenix was born because of Mozilla -ex Netscape- bloat. Now Firefox uses far more resources than Seamonkey itself even with all the bundled functionality.

True, though the reason to remove all that functionality was to get something maintainable that could grow from there.

Building the SVN Aviary Mozilla branch by Blake. Good old time.

I watched Code Rush tens of times. That was my time, I just had my degree in Computer Science in Milan, Italy. Before Mosaic and then Netscape, the only way to get access to information was through an Ampex terminal using tools like Gopher and Veronica. Internet connection was rare and hard to get, and the first browser changed my life forever. Soon after, the first ISPs emerged, and in an instant, access to information became available, even from my 10,000-person town. Netscape is how I became aware of Silicon Valley, and it took me almost 15 years to get there. It has been a lot of fun and excitement; I knew something big was happening, but nobody believed me or even understood me. When Code Rush finally became available on YouTube, it was like being part of the pirate crew from my small town for the first time. I still watch it once a year. It changed everything.

Just discovered the documentary, and it's such an interesting time capsule. That period simultaneously feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

One of my favorite documentaries, also because it captures so much personal reality and feeling of what it must have been like, it really inspires me.

I'm standing behind the camera in one of the scenes. At the time I didn't realize they were making a movie. I was just trying to get to lunch.

Also, if you're intrigued by fly-on-the-wall documentaries about historical tech efforts, check out: https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/

One interesting aspect that I remember about this is the internal NNTP server with a newsgroup known as "Bad Attitude" where frustrations with the products, culture, structure, and other elements of Netscape were shared.

IIRC, "Bad Attitude" was eventually terminated, then a private group known as "Really Bad Attitude" was launched to a chosen few.

Microsoft managed to obtain all of these discussion histories in the discovery phase of its various lawsuits.

https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

He's redirecting requests coming from hn to a photo of a hairy ball in an egg holder with some mildly insulting text, and setting a cookie so the redirect happens outside of hn links as well. The text even comes with a tone of the moral high ground, so you know he's not being an asshole, just "being honest".

It's fair to say he's not interested in having his views known to readers here.

https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png

https://web.archive.org/web/20260512201857/https://cdn.jwz.o...

Netscape is such a cautionary tale. Probably the biggest tech fumble of all time. There were dozens of ways Netscape could have been as big as Microsoft or Google, but missed all of them.

Netscape will always hold a special place for me. It was with Netscape, that I constructed my very first webpage in college back in the '90s. It was crude by today's standards, but I was "out there"!

its weirdly endearing in the age of LLMs to see a word like company misspelled in a blog post

We have spellchecker for 30+ years, and we still misspell things all the time. So?

I remember jwz posting on slashdot about open sourcing the browser. The whole Netscape story is sad.

Netscape thought that open sourcing their code will save them but it didn't.

I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.

Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing?

Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.

Not my product, but I believe I've been in this argument before, and went to check the Firefox source code, and found files that were in the original Netscape code base. So I'm going to say: no it wasn't a from-scratch re-write even for the Firefox fork. The actual 1998 open source event was totally the Netscape code, fwiw, with some stuff removed to comply with commercial licenses, build process decoupled from the corporate network and so on.

There is absolutely no way it was from scratch. Phoenix and Firefox both had XUL. It was a derivative of Gecko from Mozilla.

This sounds totally ridiculous now, but at the time there was a lot of hype about Linux / open source, a sense/possibility that it could overcome microsoft/sun/ibm/hp etc, some big IPOs like VA Linux Systems. Keep in mind that IE was a second-rate browser then, no chrome or serious rivals to Netscape/Mozilla at the time.

Looking back, it was a bit reminiscent of the bitcoin / ai bubbles, where every company desperately rushes to jump on the bandwagon.

Anybody know what it was that JWZ was saying "this is bad" about?

https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=1577

> This is bad.

> What's that?

> Um, well, so I connected to the, uh... The machine that- that controls the FTP push, is like, not answering.

Spoiler: he had the wrong hostname.

> Mm... oh. Duh!

> By the end of the documentary he is seen in retirement, spending time with his family and reflecting on the time he had missed with them. Thankful for the opportunity but wistful for what could have been.

Does anyone know if there's ever been any sort of proper retrospective why the forestry policies of many countries have been so disruptive. Ie supposedly the most organized, high trust, low corruption and scientific societies in the world like Finland and Japan have done some very drastic and unnatural forestry measures that cause effects to this day. It is different than some countries where rampant illegal logging has just destroyed the land, sure. But it's been terrible in other ways. Destruction of biodiversity, destruction of water. In Finland at least the policies have been absolutely forced by law and have sent people to prison and mental institutions. And the land and future generations will suffer for a thousand years. And now some of the policies have been completely reversed - as if nothing had happened. It's this completely parallel bizarre world.

Could we at least look at these tragedies honestly and openly, and learn something from them.

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