The Evolution of Netscape and Mozilla

Learn about how Netscape was created, Netscape 2 and it's Javascript,  Netscape 3 and it's Java, and the IE challenge and how 4 failed to meet it. More coming soon! 6, 7, 8, Moz, and corporate. See bottom of page for more info.

When the Web first came into being around 1991, it was text based. Browsers were usually serverside, which means that this was the common relationship between computer and Web (pardon the crude drawing:)

Then came PPP and similiar connection mechanisims. PPP was a way to make your computer a "node" on the 'net, while still connecting via the phone line. It was now easy to develop a browser that took advantage of the GUIs becoming common on the computers of the day. (Side Note: This was more difficult to do earlier on, because computers had to emulate terminals to go on the web, and terminals only support plain text, not graphics or mouse movement. Thus, the GUI would have to be on your side, but connect via terminals to systems that could feed the raw binary data from the 'Net to your computer. Something like this was done using AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, but they mostly ignored the Internet.)

Around 1994, Mosaic came out. It was a GUI-based browser that could understand "IMG" tags, and display GIF images inline with text.
[insert Mosaic pic]
Mosaic, however, had several disadvantages:

• It was rather slow, because of the images.
• To make things worse, Mosaic was not very supportive of the then-new 14.4k modems. It could not download both the images and the page simultaenously, instead downloading one after another.
• Mosaic could not render the then-new (you'll hear that a lot) JPEG image format, which was better for photos.
• Mosaic was inconsistent between platforms.
• It's UI was not great.
  

Netscape was created by Mosaic Comm. Corp. (now Netscape Corp.) to rectify those and other issues. The first public version, 0.9, was already faster and had more features then Mosaic. By version 0.96, they had to change their logo and name to Netscape for legal reasons. For more info on 0.9x, look at my 1.x info; they're very similar.

Netscape 1.x 

[insert 1.x pic]
Netscape 1.x had a number of great features; including full HTML 1.0 and partial HTML 2.0 support; support for Netscape extensions to HTML (more on those later,) mail sending, FTP, Gopher, and Newsgroup support, and more.

A complete solution

Many have argued that Netscape was, from versions 1-3, a standalone application and had no big and bulky focus. But that is simply not true. Netscape may not have had as as much stuff as it does now, but it always had more then usual for it's day. In Netscape 1's case, just having Gopher and FTP was a lot, much less Newsgroups and Mail sending, which it's often forgotten have been in Netscape since the start. Here's the data; note how much gunk Netscape has always had:
Netscape 1: Send mail, Newsgroups, Gopher, FTP
Netscape 2, 3: Same as 1 + full Mail
Netscape 3 Gold: Same as 3 + Composer
Netscape 4: Same as 3 Gold + Address Book + Netcaster + Collabra + Calendar.
Netscape 4.5-4.8: Same as 4.0x - Netcaster - Calendar - Collabra + AIM.
Netscape 6-7: Same as 4.5-4.8.
Netscape 8: Same as 1 - Send Mail and newsgroups.

The tags

Netscape supports all the main tags, but in an interesting move, added their own. <IMG LOWSRC=whatever.jpg SRC=whatever.gif> is well-remembered these days, but it was Netscape, not the W3C, who originally added LOWSRC to the IMG tag. They also added WIDTH and HEIGHT, as well as creating the despised all-new tag, <BLINK>. Some other tags and attributes were also added. Was this the right thing to do? Probably not. Netscape competitors had a hard time working with every site, and when IE got common enough that it began having propiertary tags too, you usually had to decide: did you want to target your site's advanced features at IE or Netscape users? That's Bad. Netscape 1.x also supported tables, which were leading edge at the time. On Windows only, <EMBED> was supported. <EMBED> is used to embed flash anime, movies, sounds, etc. on pages. However, it is rather unfortunate they chose to include it; <EMBED>, although still nonstandard, has become the de facto standard for embedding media in a web page.

Misc. and Summary

Netscape was originally a for-charge browser, costing about $30-40. However, it had an unlimited demo, which many people exploited. It also was free for students, edu, and certain other markets. For a while (Netscape 1.0-1.11) Netscape attached an "N" to the free, for-download demo of Netscape's version number, i.e. Netscape 1.1N. Netscape stopped this practice around 1.12. The betas of Netscape, 0.9-0.96, had no fee, but expired after a certain date.
Netscape 1.x set a standard for how good browsers should be made, and also was the first browser to become popular with non-geeks, although the way Netscape was programmed, some fairly obvious geeky portions show through, especially in the early versions; this is rather similiar to Eudora.

Netscape 2.x and 3.x

[insert 2.x shot]
Netscape 2.x was released with much fanfare on [insert date]. It boasted many improved or all new features, such as frames, JavaScript, <EMBED> support on all platforms, partial HTML 3.2 support, and mail.

Frame me up, Scotty

Netscape 2.x was the first Netscape with frame support. Frames are a way to view more then one page in a single window. They do this by having the "page" be a special frameset document that lines up the frames properly, names them, and manages links from one frame to another.
Frames are now part of the W3C standards, but when Netscape added them they were not. Frames have a number of advantages including making navigation menus and decorative banners easy, and making sites faster to load, but sites with frames usually don't work at all on browsers that don't support frames. So text-based and terminal-using users are locked out, as Lynx doesn't recgonize frames, as are searchbots, so your site isn't indexed, as well as old browsers. So think carefully before using frames on your site. Also, in Netscape 2.x, clicking the back button while in a framed site will go back to the last URL, not frame. Plus, it's hard to bookmark or link to pages deep inside a framed site.

Mail?

One of the more interesting announcements about Netscape 2.x was that it would have mail sending and recieving built-in. This is the first major step towards Netscape 4-ish clunkiness. The mail client in Netscape 2 and 3 was very simple and nothing like Netscape 4's or Eudora, but still it was an interesting development.

JavaScript

Summary and onto 3.0

So Netscape 2.0 was a great browser, and the first one almost capable of browsing today's web. It was the browser that started exploding into the mainstream. It got Netscape really popular, and and made their stock soar.
But there was more on the horizon. Java was the new thing; Java was cool. Java was (and still is) a cross-platform programming language. If JavaScript isn't enough, Java is what you need. Java is not just used in web browsers; it's also could be good for things like office suites or games or even a web browser itself. However, due to startup time and slowness, Java is mostly used for little things, on the Web. Java was fully supported in Netscape 3. Netscape 3 also added many other features, such as more and more tag support.

Go gold

Netscape also decided that they should start offering more to paying customers, so they unvieled Netscape 3 Gold, with a built-in web page editor. I can't say much about the editor, as I've never used it.

The IE Challenge

• They needed to include a Web browser with their Windows 95 OS anyway.
• They were afraid Web apps, built with JavaScript, Java, etc. would remove the market for Win16/32 apps.

So they released IE 1 around the time Netscape 2 was released. IE 1 had few features and wasn't worth much, plus it wouldn't run on Macs or the then still-common Windows 3.1. IE 2 was next, with enough features that as a light, nonbloated browser, it was OK, but it still lacked JavaScript. IE 3 was the first truly good version, with JavaScript (MS's implementation, to prevent web apps from being too common, was different and called JScript) as well as CSS support, although only the text styling. It was a mandatory, unremovable (easily) part of Win95 OSR2, plus it was availiable for Win95, Win3.1, and Macintosh. Because of its state as default browser in Windows, it's lightness, and it's unremovability in OSR2, IE began to gain marketshare. Worse, MS was planning on releasing IE 4, a more-or-less rewritten version of IE that integrated into the OS and became the file system navigator, and bundle it with Windows 98, then make it unremovable (easily,) which ended up landing them in court. Despite the downside of being integrated, IE 4 showed potential as a fairly good browser with much more CSS support then either Netscape 4 (discsussed later) or IE 3, plus Java support (MS's own screwed up Java, this also landed them in court, and they were ordered to fix it for version 5,) a superb Mac edition, and more. So Netscape decided to compete - hard - with Netscape 4.

Netscape 4.x

The browser wars were now in full steam. Netscape 4 decided to go in the messaging and communicating direction. "Push" services, content delilvered to your desktop, were also becoming a very temporary fad, and IE 4 had them. So Netscape also decided to create Netcaster, a component of Netscape 4.0x that read Push feeds. Netscape 4, unfortunately, was the bulkiest, clunkiest, most crash-prone browser around by 4.x.

The component direction

Netscape 4 marked a change from an all-in-one system to in all-in-one program, which, although, subtle, was significant. You could install only the components you wanted, for instantce, or you could just completely ignore the Composer component, say, if you never used it, as integration between components, although there, was usually mostly between non-browser components, i.e. the browser didn't really integrate with anything other then Mail. You still, however, could not tell Netscape 4 to use your default mail, web page editor, address book, etc.: it was determined to use its own components. It also meant a new component bar, and in early 4 releases, menu, to access each component, instead of the features being scattered around. Basically if you want to go all-in-one components are the way to go, but I don't think Netscape's all-in-one theme is right. Seperate applications are better, IMHO, because they are faster, integrate better with parts not made by the same brand (e.g. Firefox works well with Eudora,) smaller, and sometimes have less System Requirements then the all-in-one job.

Netscape also went in the direction of way too many components. Netscape 4.0x Pro had Calendar, Mail & News, Collabra, Composer, Address Book, Netcaster, and Browser. This was overload. At most you should have Browser, Mail & News, and Address Book. Netscape 4.5x-4.76 Pro had Calendar, Mail & News, Composer, Address Book, Browser, and AIM, but not Collabra or Netcaster. After Netscape 4.76 there was no Pro, and thus no Calendar.

A free lunch

Netscape 4 was the first free Netscape. Although a Pro edition exisisted, intended for corporations, the main version was completely free of charge, unless you needed support. Although this made it easier to compete against IE 4, it was probably the wrong direction for Netscape, as it eliminated their main revenue source, and their stocks began to fall. Simply making a really good browser would have been the better choice.

Tags

Netscape 4 added much support for new standards, but unfortunately all of it was extremely limited. There was CSS support (crappy, and even often made Netscape 4.0x especially crash when 3 wouldn't,) DOM support (near-non-exisitent,) and DHTML support (limited.) There was also support for many more advanced, properitary tags, plus properitary extensions to CSS. Netscape 4 was a bear to code for if you were/are trying to make 4th, 5th, or 6th gen pages, but it was easy for 3rd gen pages, spiced up with a tiny bit of modern stuff. Netscape 4.5-4.8 had slightly better CSS support, but that was it.

Netscape 4.5+

Netscape was already falling heavily in marketshare when they released Netscape 4.5, which attempted (and failed) to alleviate the problem. Netscape 4.5 marked a change in direction, not extradionairly significant new features. With Netscape 4.5, Collabra and Netcaster were taken away, soon to be replaced with AIM. The communications direction failed Netscape, so they tried again as just a plain web browser/mail thingamjig. They also adde better (still bad) CSS support, and made Netscape crash less. Although 4.5 was a milestone release, Netscape needed more then just a problem-fixing release to gain marketshare. They needed addicting new features.

In the future... (page info)

I need to get info up about the 5 attempt, how they managed to make 6 (and why 6.0 sucked,) dig some dirt on the 7.0 popup scandal (and the whitelist,) talk about how 7 suceeded, the fall in marketshare of Netscape, the AOL acquisition, the firing of employees, the Netscape ISP, and the new direction they're taking both the brand (with My Netscape and stuff) and the browser (with 8.0.) I also need to do the Mozilla thing and get screenshots for: M3, M10, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9, 1.4, and 1.7. Plus talk about Mozilla, the early days, the tabs in 0.9.5, the discontinuation of Moz, the startup of Firefox.

Plus I need a screenshot bag page.
Netscape 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8. Mozilla M3, M10, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9, 0.9.5, 1.0, 1.4, 1.7. Firefox 0.1, 0.6, 1.0. Thunderbird 0.2, 0.8. Plus Mosaic.

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