Netscape

Today, the life of Netscape Navigator oficially comes to an end. This posting is my tribute to this icon of the internet's dawn.

Though its real death came about in the late 90s, after loosing the browser wars to Microsoft's IE, it was given a new lease in life when it was acquired by AOL, though its market share continued to decline, and faded into irrelevance at the turn of the millenium. While Netscape was a better browser in the beginning, IE's eventual superiority became irrelevant in the face of its strategic advantage: IE was pre-installed on all new Windows PCs.

In the early years of the web, Netscape soon attained dominance over Mosaic, and was the first browser for most people back then. For those of us who lived immersed in the emerging web, it was like exploring a new world. There were no commercial websites, just individual pages with all kinds of weird content. Forget about media-rich pages, with neatly laid-out content designed by web-design firms. Back then, my idea of multi-media was colored text. The occasional GIF (picture) was a slow-loading event, at 9.6 kilobits per second on a dial-up connection. Every new release of Netscape seemed to introduce a whole new dimmension to the web. Tables, text alignment, the web-shattering support of JPG images... Every conversaton included rumours about how the next Netscape release -never more than a few weeks away- might change the web's landscape. It was hard not to see Netscape as the brave startup company that brought us the Web.

When I realized its days were numbered, sometime in '98, I couldn't help but to feel a little sad, not unlike parting ways with a travel companion, in the middle of an interesting journey.

So long, Netescape.