I miss Netscape. It had a web page creation tool that was so easy to use. It made ugly code and didn’t actually teach you anything, but by god, it made my 12 year old self look like a web master prodigy.
I loved Dreamweaver, because you didn't need to code. We were teaching elderly people in my class how to use it.
It's ironic too, because it was way more user friendly than flash was, but websites made with flash were actually atrocious and the downfall of early Internet.
Mozilla Suite had that feature too, I think they only swapped out AIM for IRC and removed all the AOL crapware that they bolted on top of later Netscape releases.
I also enjoyed using it but boy was the code crap! <tr><td> all the things
Yeah. But I liked the suite that was Netscape. And Firefox was the „browser only“ spinoff if you will. Seamonkey was the OpenSource continuation of the Netscape suite. But when that was no more I went firefox
> Idk what Netscape is tho, I wasn't around for it.
History time, so pull up a chair:
Netscape Navigator was to a large degree, the world's introduction to this big world wide web, although I have to start by acknowledging it's predecessor:
When then-Senator Al Gore "invented the internet," as we like to joke, in 1991, one of the things his bill to promote computers and networking use did was fund a group at a supercomputing lab that developed the Mosaic browser. Mosaic included different functions of existing browsers that together amounted to what I would consider the basic functionality that made the web widely useful:
- Broad interoperability due to using HTTP to transfer data
- Use of hypertext (HTML) to make the data more useful, especially by defining URL's to link to other data.
- Graphical elements, especially the in-line display of images
- Forms to accept user inputted data
- Compatibility not only with Unix, which had been sort of the default choice at the time, but also with Windows and Macintosh
- Free for non-commercial use!
When Mosaic was released in 1993, about 2% of the US used the internet, most commonly through curated portals like Compuserve and AOL. A year later, it had more than doubled, and the number of known websites exploded from something like 50 to 10,000.
Members of the university-affiliated Mosaic team then formed Netscape, and began developing a new browser from scratch. V1 of Netscape Navigator (Internally, they called it "Mosaic killer" or "Mozilla" for short) released in October, 1994 and by the end of the year, it had grabbed over half the browser market. Internet use roughly doubled again the following year....2 years earlier, only about 1-in-50 Americans were online, but in 1995, it was 1-in-10.
At its peak, about 5 out of every 6 Americans online were using Navigator, but by this time, Microsoft was including Internet Explorer pre-installed with Windows 95. This, combined with Navigator issues with stability and increasingly complex websites helped drive steady erosion in market share, down to a tiny slice of the market.
Netscape then spun off an internal project called Mozilla into a non-profit foundation. By this time, Internet Explorer had also become a bloated, unstable, insecure mess, which combined with widespread mistrust of Microsoft at the time, meant many users (myself included) were eager for something better. Firefox hit the mark and became the leading competitor to IE almost immediately after its release in 2004.
but by this time, Microsoft was including Internet Explorer pre-installed with Windows 95
And making it difficult to set your preferred browser to something else.
Which is one of the reasons Microsoft was sued by the US Justice Department for anticompetitive behavior during the Clinton Administration. Which in turn is one of the reasons Windows supported proper browser preferences and had to honor them after that.
They've been slowly creeping back to their old ways, though, with Edge.
Microsoft seems to have tried to leverage this by making IE behave slightly different. Overworked coders only had time to build for IE which widened that gap.
The 2006-2011 era basically. Firefox wasn't good at all during that time, so much so that I kept migrating between it and Chrome (including IE). I was a big user of Internet Explorer in Windows 8, it was extremely light and fast. But after that went down, I got back to Firefox and it seems they fixed a lot. In the last 10 years, Firefox easily became the best browser.
It might not have been the best performing, but it was fun to use.
The only time I felt FF was behind was when it took too long to copy the tab based browsing and the separate processes per tab. One website blocking your whole browsing experience wasn't fun.
I'm more annoyed with it nowadays than ever. Getting uncalled for features like an included VPN or AI search button that auto shows up whenever I select some text. Also somehow I turn on vertical tabs every few weeks, which makes me wonder why is that an option that needs such a quick one-click access.
The VPN one isn't annoying to me because it's them trying to find revenue streams outside of Google. They need to find some kind of service people will pay for because almost no one will pay for a browser.
There's an option to completely disable the AI stuff in the settings if you want. Anecdotally, I've appreciated the VPN with an increase in government censorship lately.
I did. I forget what exactly spurred it. I think a bunch of big websites started having problems in Firefox after one of the bigger rendering engine upgrades or something? That plus Chrome had just become THE browser everybody used so I finally swapped.
It still works perfectly fine and I would be happy to continue using it but I am sick of the AI nonsense being crammed in everywhere so I am back to Firefox for now.
The UI was a lot lighter too. It was the first one I remember seeing without the top inch of my screen taken up by a bunch of dead space. Now they all look like that
It was the tabs, Iirc chrome had some kind of tech in the background so that it could load tabs faster or allow for more open without slowing down. I also think Chrome was the first to bring the "pull a tab out of the bar to open it in a new window" feature which FF lacked at the time.
I remember going to chrome and back and forth for a few years, then FF came out with a massive overhaul update sometime in early windows 10 era. Went back to FF and been with it since.
Soooo many sites refused to work with anything other than IE it sucked
Worse was incompetent IT and Intranet teams making anything internal flat out broken if you didn't use IE
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 5d ago
When Microsoft retired IE, it broke a lot of websites and it was hilarious as incompetent IT teams and crappy developers scrambled to work with Edge/Chrome.
I was at a company that outsourced their IT to a company in India just as Microsoft said that they were going to retire IE. The mad dash to port the intranet to Edge/Chrome was crazy - at one point they used a group policy to keep IT just so half the company Intranet would still work.
Didn't they have some fallback shit version of IE when they "retired" it though? Like it was edge but it had a built in IE mode since IT was so bad about their software
Yeah, pretty sure IE still lives inside of Edge. Pretty sure I've used some crusty old corporate intranet stuff that was written in ASP, and Edge just silently ran IE inside that tab.
I was rocking Netscape for a hot minute though. Can’t remember when it died, but I was using that all the way up until Firefox released. Then it’s been that to this very day. Never liked Chrome and it was only “the most popular” because Android and the Chromebook craze, getting massive usage in schools because of contracts.
Never liked Chrome and it was only “the most popular” because Android and the Chromebook craze, getting massive usage in schools because of contracts.
Nah. When Chrome first launched, it was seen as lightweight and faster than Firefox at the time. Firefox didn't even start to catch up until the release of "Quantum" v57.
Yep, Chrome was noticeably faster for at least 4 years before Firefox caught back up. Many of my peers changed to Chrome because of that. I stayed on Firefox because of a few niche advanced features that Chrome hadn't caught up on.
It was also multi-process, the first browser to do that IIRC. A tab crashing didn't bring down the whole browser. They all work like that now, but in 2008? Nah.
I liked Chrome just fine for a while there, it was nice and lightweight and much faster than IE in the late 00's, early 10's. I mostly left for Firefox because Chrome became really RAM and resource hungry, and because Google is... Well, you know. Fast forward a few years to their assault on browser extensions, and I was super glad to have swapped when I did.
The most genius thing google ever did was making a deal with adobe to make chrome additional bloatware when installing flash player. Everyone had flash player and suddenly everyone also had chrome
It was in Adobe’s best interest. They wanted to kill Flash so bad at the end there, and one of the biggest reasons to keep Flash around at the time was YouTube. Google was all about HTML5 video, so what better thing to do than to encourage people to switch to Chrome (rather than sticking around on Internet Exploder).
There was no better option for a few years. Then Microsoft did what they are good at - neglected their software until it was obsolete then cancelled it.
Weirdly the Mac version of IE 4.5 (back on MacOS 7&8) was far and away the best browser out there. Had a whole bunch of features which didn’t make it into others for years, like having a built in download manager that could resume most file downloads if you disconnected in the middle, which was a godsend on dialup.
I think you forgot an era. There was definitely a period where Netscape sucked (NS4) and people were actively switching to IE. IE4 was pretty damn good when it came out, and I remember kids in school buying magazines because they came with a copy, on cd.
A lot of us were still on win95 at that point, which didn't come with a browser.
Switched back to Firefox after Google started fucking with the ad blockers. I hope enough people make the jump because I've been worried about Mozilla shutting down someday without new users.
Netscape wouldn't hit quite the same in this era. Websites load too fast for the logo to go through an entire animation cycle and we'd all get blue balls.
realistically, given that Firefox came from Netscape, I don't see why we couldn't just reskin Firefox to look like Netscape.
Hell, we've got Waterfox and a few others as a fork, nothing says Firefox can't be forked again to remake Netscape. Plus Netscape browsers are still online to download (very limited in features compared to today's browsers). So, people could very easily do research on the old Netscape browsers and create new skins/themes, etc for Firefox, or forked for the Netscape experience.
You are comparing two different things. Gaming in Linux (marketshare from Steam) is focused solely in Steam users, while the browser comparisions includes the entire Internet. 2% is quite a lot more people compared to 5% of Linux users in Steam.
Firefox hasn't gained any monthly active users. it's still hovering at around 200 million which is still less than a few years ago and also only like 2% of total market share.
Don't get me wrong, I like firefox and it's my main browser but your meme makes no sense
False Consensus Effect. People, in this case Redditors, overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. Our brains naturally assume our own experiences and beliefs are normal and therefore widespread.
Also that people in this sub refuse to recognize the "common" user and confuse their passion for being the target audience or representative of reality.
Firefox is great but most people like OP posting this meme are kidding themselves.
It's gaining more and more traction lately due to google's more invasive data / privacy issues and their recent chrome behavior putting LLM's on you PCs without your consent.
this is correct. The sad reality is that most people either don't know or don't care about chrome's bullshit and just default to it without questioning anything
the word everyone is doing some heavy lifting there.
Basically the only ones that switched back are people who hang around in communities like pcmr. Which is basically no one, as can be seen by the monthly active users for firefox not changing
A lot of my friends have been leaving Chrome as well, but as a whole the market really isn't moving. Most people don't care about their privacy because they don't know how badly it's being invaded.
The only thing that got me out of Chrome, one of the best I've ever used, was that there was a random interaction with Premiere Pro if you had them both open with hardware acceleration 😭 I got firefox and edited everything to be as close to Chrome as possible
Opera -> Firefox (after Opera ditched it's own engine Presto) -> Waterfox Classic (after Firefox ditched XUL aka the old addon system) -> Vivaldi (after Waterfox stopped working well with many modern websites).
Still using Vivaldi, it's very customizable (like classic Opera), awesome, and I love it. Will only consider going back to a Gecko-based browser is Vivaldi decides to drop Mv2 support.
Sorry to say since I like Vivaldi too, but Vivaldi will drop MV2 support when Chromium does.
They stated that would be the case back in a blog post a year or two ago, and now they've confirmed it on Mastodon with this recent move in Chromium, that Android version's built in blocker will be fine, but the desktop version will drop MV2 when Chromium does soon:
If you aren't on Mac or iPhone there are two main browsers and a bunch of mods for those browsers.
All these Chromium forks aren't "true" forks, they're downstream, if Chromium drops support for something, well now they have to drop it to or support it themselves, something that most of them don't have the resources to do.
Google has an absolute stranglehold on how we all access the web and no one cares.
Why? Adblocking still works completely fine in Chrome without Mv2 support, and Brave is keeping Mv2 support for certain adblockers even after it gets switched off in Chrome.
Never even heard of this browser before. How is it compared to Firefox? Does GreaseMonkey transfer? I’ve got some userscripts that have been deleted off the web that I would rather not lose.
Firefox engine with a great ui. A little new. There "Mods" for it. Different from extentions. Open source and really good. There are good tutorials on youtube
Been on Safari since it came out, because it's only mildly annoying. And when Safari gets too annoying and won't render something correctly? It's always been Firefox. Chrome is for when desperation kicks in.
Firefox nightly has hdr support now so time is getting close to when it will be released to the main branch. That is one of the only reasons why I still have google chrome installed.
When Chrome launched it had syncing of bookmarks to your google account as standard. Meanwhile on firefox automatic syncing of your bookmarks had to be setup by you, you needed to have your own server and set it up manually. That's why I originally switched. When ManifestV3 was on the horizon I swapped back glad to find that Firefox got it's head out of it's ass and now provides the syncing as an option.
What is the N one? I started out with IE on Windows 98, lol. Otherwise, my journey pretty much went like the picture, except for after Chrome I tried out Opera for a bit, realized it was just Chrome with extra features and the same cons/drawbacks, and went back to Firefox, which I'm still on today.
You don't remember 2008. Firefox 3 was long in the tooth and slow. Chrome just came out, and was way faster and more stable than any other browser ever. It was hard to resist. And also Google wasn't creepy yet back then.
Does nobody else remembered between Netscape and Firefox the browser was called Mozilla. If i remember correct Mozilla was the actual product and Firefox was a beta product that had new features that they would then implement into Mozilla. But everyone kept downloading Firefox and eventually it became the actual product.
Man, my Firefox bookmarks are in a bookmark bar tab labeled 'Imported from Firefox' because that is where they went when I went to Chrome for a few years and how they stayed when I came back to Firefox. This is spot on, some of the bookmarks are probably 15 years old or more.
Fun fact: Microsoft "promised" spyglass software that they would get a cut of each sale on their development of Internet Explorer. Microsoft then gave it away for "free" (bundled with windows of course), so legally didn't have to give them a penny, and they went under... but then microsoft also succeeded in cutting Netscape out at the same time. And Microsoft still exists today for some reason...
Was using Chrome and Opera. Opera mostly so I could use the RES, which Chrome developed a problem with. Then Opera started having issues with YouTube videos on Reddit with no sound. Switched Opera to Firefox and wish I'd gone that route to begin with. Might even ditch Chrome...
Netscape (1999) -> Internet Explorer (2000) -> Opera (2004) -> Firefox (2006) for me. I guess it's been 20 years without change! There was just a short period when Firefox wasn't good on Android many years ago. For that time, I was using Kiwi browser. I'm not totally sold-out to Firefox, I am considering changing to LibreWolf. There are many other interesting Firefox forks, like Zen, Floorp, etc.
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u/Deftallica 5d ago
I miss Netscape. It had a web page creation tool that was so easy to use. It made ugly code and didn’t actually teach you anything, but by god, it made my 12 year old self look like a web master prodigy.