I have used the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase, and heritage, for nearly a third of a century, now.
NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape -> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
I now hew more to alternates such as LibreWolf and Floorp, but I still run Firefox EME-Free as my default.
Yes, of course. We also had a notebook (these paper-based thingies, not a digital one) in the terminal room where we collected interesting web site addresses back then before Altavista and bookmarks.
That one text file what was a copy paste of all the neat things we’d read on the internet and wanted to save.
I had a Popular Science magazine that included the 50 coolest websites you should visit. That was mine. I still get hit with so much nostalgia about it. They were legit so cool that they still put most websites I see nowadays to shame.
Was there porn ?
Online porn existed before the internet
Do we count Bulletin Boards as pre Internet?
No, I remember Opera 7/8 though. Well… the one with ads.
Ok, going to scream into the abyss here…
I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can’t recall… You get the picture.
Everyone I’ve told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated “N” on would freeze and if you didn’t move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.
You’ll think I’m crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.
I’m pretty sure I had that same mouse movement thing happen. That was a deeply buried memory until you mentioned it .
Ahh…. I was there my friend. Similar setup, 486 DX4 100, USRobotics modem. I had the IRQ conflict. Me and my friend figured out how to change the channels by reading the mainboard‘s manual. I had to change some jumpers around. It was my first modem and I had never connected to the internet before.
Were you by chance running a proxy, even on localhost? Here’s a good description of that issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539106
That thread also mentions the Windows 95 requirement for randomization on mouse movement. A page you visited regularly may have been using this.
On linux /dev/random will use inputs such as mouse movement to generate random data. If a program needs random data for something such as encryption it will seemingly hang whilst it generates enough. This isn’t good on servers without an active user so you configure it to use /dev/urandom instead. Perhaps windows had similar back in the day.
Peak internet 1.0:
Nah… Netscape Navigator Gold was peak. Netscape Communicator was too bloated and took forever to load. Sure it had an email client, HTML editor, etc. but these should have been separate programs, not all built into a single thing. The original mozilla browser was also this way until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox pulled a browser out of the bloated mess.For some reason this gif gives me nostalgia of listening to artbell.com on Netscape - Good times.
Ah yes web 2.0 was also a thing. I remember.
I’ll never forget watching pictures roll in line-by-line on dialup back in 1995 or so.
Agreed. 1999-2000 was also peak internet for me. Netscape, Napster, Neopets, Newgrounds, and Nick.com (and StarCraft multiplayer). It didn’t get any better than that.
Limewire… downloading all your favourite songs, wait no… typing in names of any song you could think of in hopes you’d find it. Then you did find it and it turned out to be the same damn song you can’t stand with the file misnamed. A whole generation grew up confused about who sang their favourite songs, and found constant frustration in waiting like 12min (on a great day) for Smells Like Teen Spirit to download, only to find they got Weird Al Yankovich’s parody instead… like 4 times in a row from four different files. Ahhhh memories.
I remember thinking Netscape was way cooler than IE based purely on the throbber animation
“Throbber” animation? 🤔
in case you didn’t know: the animated icon (usually the cursor) that indicates background processing is called a throbber.
I’ve seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that’s what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.
Maybe you’ve just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.
I seem to remember there being yellow…
this gives me goosebumps
Remember when we got excited about browser releases? What a time.
Going from Netscape 1 to Netscape 2 which supported animated gifs. What a day that was!
I have Navigator 1.0 on a disk in my basement. Its my precious.
“We hates the AOL!”
You can download all the old Netscapes here - http://home.mcom.com/archives/
I found Mosaic 1 here - https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1
The URL
about:mozillawas always full of fun :)Xul has entered the chat 👻
I sure remember the HOURS it took me to download that sucker on my 14.4kb modem. I was blessed by the gods with a parent in the computer industry even then so we had a 2nd phone line that I could monopolize for a day of agonizingly watching and praying not to lose connection again.
Yes, if all had been perfect it should have only taken about an hour but dialup internet was ditzy and unreliable so I spent a huge chunk of that weekend getting a full download.
14.4k baud modem download… yes… I also plastered this on old wepages… hahahaha
Apparently yes.
I remember using Mosaic.
Yep - me too. I had to go to our “mainframe room” where we had our only Sun workstation - the only thing that would run the first versions.
Mosaic and Lynx on Sun workstations was how I started as well. Back then, there was a ton of open ftp access as well, wild.
Oh yes, anonymous FTP and directories called “…” with interesting contents. Simpler times.
