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.
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.
…well? You can’t just not share the sites?
I left it in the terminal room when I left university decades ago. Maybe it is still there.
That’s really cool. Many of them are still there–some of them unchanged.
Yeah, I noticed that too! It would be cool to make a more easily accessible collection of these kinds of things.
That one text file what was a copy paste of all the neat things we’d read on the internet and wanted to save.
Was there porn ?
Of course. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - not an internet address in case you wonder, but a NNTP group. Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
We did have plenty of usenet trolls and usenet wars.
Yea, but most of them were rather harmless, especially if you contacted the network administrator of the site he came from.
We had killfiles back then. And clients that sorted/threaded conversations the way we wanted. And upstream operators that could often physically visit the offenders to tell them to knock if off. Those were the days …
Online porn existed before the internet
Do we count Bulletin Boards as pre Internet?
Most bulletin boards like fidonet existed in parallel with the internet, and even used internet bridges to transfer mail and files across long distances where a dialup connection could not be used.
NNTP actally was quite network agnostic, the messages did not care about the means of transport. I actually handled a NNTP link back then via floppy disk.
people who remembered college days upon seeing this, please queue here
I remember walking into the college library in late 94, seeing all the real computer geeks standing around one of the newer 486s, they were installing Navigator Beta 1.1.
We had been using FTP, Gopher and Telnet for a while, but this was the first time that any of us had actually used a web browser.
Of course, there was no search yet, so while sites did exist, it took them a little time to dig through enough IRC and Usenet to find things to visit.
It had the best loading animation with the comets flying by. Much better than IE rotating and becoming the planet earth. This was back when you actually had to wait for pages to load.
No, I remember Opera 7/8 though. Well… the one with ads.
Yes.
I even remember using Gopher which was the closest there was to HTTP and Browsers before they were invented.
(Also, don’t get me started on FTPmail).
And no, even with the enshittification of the last decade or so, I would still not call those “the good old days”.
Now, get out of my lawn you wipper snappers!
I was introduced to the web by a friend who told me about this new, gopher-like thing with hypertext.
I actually used NN to read stuff from Tim Barners-Lee’s original NeXT cube server at CERN.
Wow, gopher. There’s something I haven’t heard in many many years. It must have been around 95-96 the last time I used that. You sure know how to make a guy feel old.
I was never a fan of Netscape. For whatever reason, it always felt like it was so much slower than ie and web pages would often be broken.
Well, that was way later when ie existed. NN is way older than ie.
Yes, on top of trumpet winsock.
It’s all so much better now.
We had Hummingbird TCP/IP on the machine I used as a mail gateway. It felt odd to have not only have to install a TCP stack, but also have to pay for it.
2.2? I only remember 1.9 and before.
I seem to remember there being yellow…
You’re thinking of Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0
I worked at a company pre-internet that had an Arpanet connection. I started working there as a Cobol programmer and thought this was magic. I later got to set up a dial -up uucp network to customer sites. I think I still have some 300 baud rabbit ears I used to monitor systems from home.
this gives me goosebumps
Peak internet 1.0:
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.
The fake named porn videos could be way worse.
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.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.
Peak Internet is when Mozilla (the kaiju mascot) showed up in the loading animation near the end of Netscape’s lifespan
For some reason this gif gives me nostalgia of listening to artbell.com on Netscape - Good times.
I still find listening to old Coast to Coast episodes cozy.
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.
Normal people say hourglass yeah even when it’s not a hourglass yeah even when they design them yeah even when they can be confused and the reason is not that throbber would be a useful word, it’s that it’s extremely sexual and now I get to feel sexual too for saying it back and have to take a shower
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.
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!
