chickenmash

  Today it was announced that development of Netscape Navigator was officially over.. To be honest I thought Netscape had handed the torch over to Firefox a long time ago and that Firefox was actually the continuation of old Navvy old chum. Obviously not. Maybe someone can fill me in here.

It seems like a good opportunity to reminisce about first experiences with the internet, and a very early version of Navigator.

My Dad worked at University of Otago and there were some old Macs set up. The search engine of choice back then was Alta Vista. It was really slow… Who knows what the connection speed was but by default my browser was set not to display images in order to keep things ticking over. If you were really convinced one of those funny little image substitute icons was hiding something worthy you could wait 30 seconds or so for a speckly gif to load.

I think I was supposed to be working on an essay for art history class. I found a juicy site with the sort of layout you can only get when you haven’t yet figured out the code (or the will) to turn frame borders off, and repeated background textures with a selection of 256-bit colour pallette text were the in thing.

I hastily plagiarised a few paragraphs safe in the knowledge it was very unlikely my teacher had had a chance to play with this hyper inter web thingy yet, or possibly didn’t even know it existed. 

Not that I was even really that much of an early adopter, as some other much nerdier people will be able to spot. I’m sure someone will read this and scoff that their first memory was when it was called the ARPANET.

To be honest I wasn’t even that faithful to Netscape, for some stupid reason I preferred Internet Explorer on the Mac. I think it had prettier icons back then. I didn’t then fully understand the look of scorn from the department IT guy when I told him I didn’t like Netscape because it didn’t automatically submit my form when I hit “enter”, for some reason in Netscape on my computer I had to actually click the button instead.

I knew nothing then of the anguished experience of developers everywhere as they tried to negotiate Internet Explorer’s “differing opinions” on web standards. I had no idea back then that Internet Explorer did things like use its own special way of measuring the CSS box model. I didn’t know that it would stumble and trip on even the slightest bit of unclear or erroneous code where other browsers gracefully leapt. I didn’t know that Internet Explorer lacked support for handy web developments like png images with proper alpha channels. I didn’t know then how frustrating it was to have to accomodate and work around something so poorly made, so unelegantly patched together, so horribly disfunctional, simply because the majority of people used it and didn’t know otherwise.

Is it futile to hate a computer program so deeply? Probably. Of course I don’t just hate the program, I also hate the entire culture of dumbness that it originates from. It gives me great satisfaction to write in the footer of this blog the following message “ps. if you are looking at this in Internet Explorer and it sucks then bad luck for you… Use Firefox or suffer…”

I have spent a lot of time dicking around for the sake of IE in all its mutations, and will continue to have to do so. But here I really don’t feel the obligation. And sure, other browsers have their quirks and imperfections too, but we all know who the dunce of the class is, and they have Microsoft sewn into the elastic of their undies.

So thanks Netscape, I’m sorry if I didn’t properly appreciate you in the early days, but now I’m glad to know you were there and paved the way for better browsers come.. Alta la Vista baby… 

p.s. if you feel the same way as me I would suggest you visit the Netscape archive page, download the oldest version your system will run, and spend one minute waiting for it to load up in silence, at which point it will possibly crash and then you can talk again.     

p.p.s. It is of course unfair to use a very old program on a very new system.

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