Where are Netscape's pioneers today?

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How the world has changed

Back in those early days, I had to get my own software more up to date in order to take advantage of new technologies such as MIME. It was nice to be able to communicate with people such as Jamie Zawinski back then, and actually get my email answered and get useful feedback.

I can't imagine writing to the developers of Outlook to discuss my ideas on email any more than I could imagine getting George Bush on the phone to discuss my ideas on Iraq.

Back then, there was not only a lot of talent, but there were a lot of new ideas. Since web browsers came out of nowhere and did little at first, it was possible to come up with amazing ideas that made a big difference. These days, we don't hear many people saying, "If only a web browser could support xxx, I'd be able to put my system on the web." So instead of coming up with real improvements, we see a lot of game playing.

For anybody who did not use a web browser before Netscape, here's what it looked like: The browsers were not multi-threaded. That meant that images loaded one at a time, and not until after the text was loaded. You could not scroll down while the page was still loading. You could not click on a link or copy text or anything else for that matter until the page loaded. But waiting for images to load was not necessarily a problem. For many images, you may have had to click on them to launch an external application that could display them. You could not necessarily see them in-line.

Web browsers did not support tables at first, so basic formatting was extremely difficult. Putting up a simple form was a challenge. There were no frames either. It was an all or nothing proposition.

We did have hyperlinks, so it was truly like a web. There were no commercial search engines, and few pages were commercial. You would typically find a page by finding a link on another page, and part of designing a page was the general understanding that it would include links to relevant pages. You would work your way through this web of links, with no inherent hierarchical or relational structure, until you found something relevant. You "surfed" the web, and it was understood that this intertangled collection of pages was truly like a web. Having sites without external links was an almost foreign concept. Many people actually bought books that listed useful sites just as the Yellow Pages lists phone numbers.

These days, there is no more web. We have a world wide hierarchy. You start off at the search engine, and work your way through a home page, and other pages that relate almost exclusively to that particular site. And when you do so, your browser does amazing things that you take for granted. It loads images simultaneously. It supports plug-ins (also thanks to Netscape) so that you can run all sorts of things. It supports Java applets, and JavaScript can be used to build the page as it's needed, or check the entries for the form you just filled in, or change one picture to another simply because your mouse moved over it. You can even have pages that update their content by themselves as needed. All this came out of Netscape and so much more.

Netscape changed the world in phenomenal ways, and had it not come along, it's not clear if the Internet would have become more than an academic tool at the time it became big news. People now see other browsers, and some have a small handful of innovation, but everything big came out of Netscape.

Posted by: wresnick   Posted on: 10/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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