Netscape got a serious case of Windows' forceful and illegal monopolisation of Internet Explorer.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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It became Firefox
Yeah I thought everyone knew this. Netscape became Mozilla Browser, which became Firefox.
TIL!
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I was there, 3000 years ago
I been using it for a while, it became Mozilla Firebird
bird?
For a short time.
Even short times can have an explosive finish
It was always my understanding that much of the core of Communicator eventually became early Firefox, but I've never really fact-checked that, just kind of read it here and there anecdotally on forums.
And Thunderbird for the email portion. Yes, web and email were in the same application.
Isn’t Netscape just Mozilla at this point? At least tech wise
Yes, but no.
The source code for Netscape Navigator was open-sourced and has become Mozilla Firefox. The company Netscape is now a mostly defunct brand while Mozilla is a non-profit, public benefit company in service to the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla community.
Now that splash screen, with its pixelated gradient of the 256 color palette brings back some nostalgic memories.
It's funny because we can see pixelated stuff today mostly in shitty jpeg artifacts, but those follow the jpeg algorithm for how to best conserve file size within their compression scheme, so they look different. This splash screen seemingly has every pixel meticulously chosen so that it's in the right place, and working with only the limits of the color space.
Dithering, it's a lost art. It always reminds me of Monkey Island.
Best game. You post like a dairy farmer!
Edit: got the lead up wrong.
In the Windows 3.1 days I made my own icons. Yes, a single pixel out of place or wrongly colored would throw it all off.
Oh shit.... core memory unlocked. I forgot I used to do this. I forgot there was a time you would do this otherwise everything just had the same icon.
Even better, that splash screen was only 16 colors.
Saved a lot of memory. Even though we had upgraded to 24mb in our Mac Performa at the time.
I used to download the source tarball for each new version and build it on the SGI Indy.
They became a poster child for why you should never “start over from scratch” even if your current codebase is awful. Because when you do that your competitors keep going, then they have years on your now stale product. Netscape lost all on their own…
Also: selling a browser? Man, the 90’s where wild.
Opera was a paid browser till it started going bad.
Never paid for it though, and started using it when it was free, so can't complain.
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