Netscape Turns 10

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks ten years since the first public beta of Netscape Navigator was released. Both CNet News.com and MozillaZine have full coverage, with the former revealing that AOL is planning to release a new version Netscape in the New Year (thankfully separate from the IE-based version of AOL's browser). Even the Netscape portal (which never mentions the Netscape browser) is celebrating the anniversary. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last decade (especially since AOL bought Netscape) and the baton has now passed onto the Netscape alumni-filled Mozilla Foundation, but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser), but twice (by being the first major commercial program to go open source)."

How can it be 10?

Didn't it die when it was 5?

Re:How can it be 10?

Couldn't have, it never even was 5. Somehow it went from 4.* to 6. So I guess now its really like 11 or something.

Re:How can it be 10?

Our browser goes to 11.

Cool, cool, cool

Hard to believe it's been 10 years. Time flies when your having fun! I don't remember which version of Netscape I used first, but I remeber downloading the code when it became available. That was one cool day for me.

Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

98% advertising, 2 % content
why anyone would visit it by choice is a mystery

Re:Netscape portal is like a domain squatters

Hi! I'm an AOL user Where can I download it from?

Safari startpage URL for non Safari users

http://apple.netscape.com/apple.adp [netscape.com]
Apparently Apple will be switching to this page:
http://www.apple.com/startpage/ [apple.com]

The old netscape

I remember the old Netscape. Really bulky and yet I still ran it over IE. Took what seemed like forever to load with 16(?) MB of RAM.

Props to how far Mozilla has come. I guess the increased computing power helped them a tad :) Salute to our pioneers as well.

Re:The old netscape

BAH!

When I was your age I had to paint the web page on cardboard with watercolors using my fingers...uphill--BOTH WAYS!!

Young whippersnappers!

Re:The old netscape

Dad?

Is that you?

Re:The old netscape

"Dad?

Is that you?"

Asking somebody on Slashdot if they're your father... That raises some interesting questions about your mom.

Re:The old netscape

Ehh, If you are talking the same time as IE, you are not thinking old enough. Once Netscape 3.x came out (which, if I remember correctly, was about the time IE was first released), it was pretty bulky.

Back when you were able to get just Netscape Navigator (the stand-alone browser without the HTML editor, mail client, and so on), it was pretty smooth. I remember running 2.2N on my Mac for a long time (up until about Netscape 4.1.7 or so)

Of course, that was some time after Netscape hit the scene. I remember downloading Mosaic for the first time sometime around Christmas break of 1993-1994. Netscape 0.9 was sometime after that.

I liked to tell my students (when I was working in a high school) that there used to be a page called "What is new on the Internet" that would list all new pages to go up.

Netscape started out a good browser, but the 3.x bloat really slowed progress down. That was back when Netscape seemed on top of the world, though. Portal, web server, web browser, mail client, news client, you name it. For the briefest amount of time, before Microsoft woke up, they seemed to control the Internet.

It is interesting to see projects like Firefox finally getting back to the simplicity of the original Netscape browsers.

Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

I'm serious, why on Earth does AOL even bother with Netscape when they, despite being perfectly able to, not just put Netscape into their flagship AOL software? There's already a million browsers that use the IE rendering engine, so why not do something new for a change!

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

Remember that when AOL and MS made this agreement, Mozilla wasn't very good (Slow, bloated, buggy-- but I still used it).

Today we have a very different situation. Firefox rocks my world. My 60 year old father switched a few months ago ON HIS OWN ACCORD. He actually said "Hey Son, you should try out Firefox, it's pretty cool".

The MS/AOL decision might be different if it happened a year from now, when Firefox is even better.

Re:Still why not base AOL on Netscape?

Because by shipping/using IE, AOL becomes one of their "premier partners" or whatever it is called.

A company I once worked for reaped the benefits of choosing to distribute IE over Netscape. While the Netscape people wanted $45 a copy from us per customer, Microsoft agreed to give us their browser for free and entered into an advertising partnership which reaped us millions in revenue. I can only imagine how well this works out for a company of AOL's size. Amazingly, our technical support costs went down. The statistics we gathered of our 700,000 customers showed both Mac and PC systems had less trouble with IE than Netscape. Less calls to suppport equates to saving lots of money for the company.

Then you have to look at what is to gain by an ISP/content provider to spend enormous time and resources developing their own browser in house. It isn't like they would make any money with it. This, I think, has a lot to do with the status of mozilla source. They threw it to the open source community, now it is us to make it better.

sigh..

It's kind of sad that the name "netscape" has become synonymous with "out of date" with most people though. 4.7 just hung around way to long I guess.

The First Netscape was revolutionary

While the older versions of Netscape is the butt of many a joke, nothing beats the electricity I felt when I first started browsing the web with Netscape. I mean, back then, browsing with Netscape, I knew that the web was going to be something huge (I remember playing silly games on Nintendo's web site). Netscape had a huge hand in creating that and the web as we know it. There were browsers before (not to mention IRC, Gopher, etc.) but Netscape helped bring the WWW and the Internet to the masses.

More power to Netscape's heir, Firefox, which is set to take the web crown back and help perfect the web experience Netscape pioneered.

Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary

Yeah, reminds me of the line from JWZ's website [jwz.org] -

When we started this company [Netscape], we were out to change the world. And we did that. Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But we were the ones who actually did it. When you see URLs on grocery bags, on billboards, on the sides of trucks, at the end of movie credits just after the studio logos -- that was us, we did that. We put the Internet in the hands of normal people. We kick-started a new communications medium. We changed the world.

Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses.

The old logo

Call me nostalgic but sometimes I miss the old netscape logo...ya know, the N that would rise and fall as the page loaded. Happy b-day netscape! -d

First?!?

...but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser)...

What was wrong with Mosaic [uiuc.edu]?

Re:First?!?

NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen, who, of course, created Netscape Communications, so I guess it's all in the family.

Re:First?!?

Apparently nothing as far as Microsoft was concerned. IE was originally a customized version of Spry Mosaic, as a part of one of the most monumental fleecings of all time (Altamira notwithstanding.) Microsoft promised to pay a portion of their profits to Spry in return for the browser code, and then gave it (IE) away. Any percent of zero is of course still zero.

To answer your question though, I do remember Netscape having far more rendering features than Mosaic. I seem to recall that background images especially were more interesting in Netscape. A fair amount of the features were non-standard in the same manner as IE's MSHTML extensions though. Many a webmaster would say that we're still recovering from Netscape-specific tags.

Re:First?!?

Apparently nothing as far as Microsoft was concerned. IE was originally a customized version of Spry Mosaic, as a part of one of the most monumental fleecings of all time (Altamira notwithstanding.) Microsoft promised to pay a portion of their profits to Spry in return for the browser code, and then gave it (IE) away. Any percent of zero is of course still zero.

It was Spyglass Mosaic, rather than Spry Mosaic that licensed their code to Microsoft.

It is a shame that they settled with Microsoft (for $8M) in 1997, becuse MS started claiming that IE was an intrinsic part of Windows soon afterwards, so Spyglass would have had a case that they deserved royalties from all copies of Windows sold.

Re:First?!?

What was wrong with Mosaic?

The single biggest problem with Mosaic was that it wouldn't display any of the page until it had downloaded every single image and worked out what size they were. IIRC it also only used one network connection to do the image downloads. The big thing that made people say "wow" about Netscape was it showing you the page and then filling in the images, reflowing the page as necessary. That resulted in people dropping Mosaic real quick.

Mosaic was also most at home on Unix. That was all fine for people like me who used Sun Workstations at work, but most didn't have that. The Windows and Mac versions lagged the Unix version, and had to have a lot of different code due to OS differences (those were the days of Win16 for example).

IIRC Netscape was also the first browser to implement tables and do a decent job of it. Within a month or less of the first release of Netscape, I didn't know anyone who used Mosaic any more. There were some more releases of Mosaic by uiuc, but most of their browser and server people had gone to Netscape.

Re:First?!?

Actually, Netscape didn't reflow the page as needed. Instead, it started simultaneous downloads and would put an appropriate sized box in place once it knew the size of the image.

Try it for yourself, this behaviour was still present in Netscape 4.

SSL and JavaScript

...two things introduced by Nutscrape. These were a huge boost for the Web, particularly commercial applications like online shopping.

Go Gopher!

Netscape? World Wide Web. Bleah. I remember the good old days when Gopher was king. That was perfect -- none of this graphical mumbo jumbo and "tags". No Septembers that never ended.

for nostagic purposes...

is there an netscape archive of all the netscape versions released? it would be interesting to run the old version for memory sakes...

Re:for nostagic purposes...

Check it out. [evolt.org]

A lot more than just Netscape in there. Very, very fascinating.

To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

perhaps we could all encapsulate our websites with the <blink> tag?

Re:To commemorate Netscape's 10 year anniversary

Actually, there is one valid use of the Blink tag..

Schroedinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.

Netscape Gold

Remind me those good old days with Netscape Gold... I just hang with it till it drops...

I forget if we're supposed to hate them

Is Netscape evil or saintly? I can't keep it straight. They broke W3C standards and are owned by AOL, but Mozilla doesn't suck anymore.

If only Slashdot could tell me what to think.

the old days

ahh the old days.
I remember running the .9X betas on my SS2 running 4.1.3U1. The best part was having to modify libc to support DNS lookups, as sun out of the box supported yp (nis) and hosts.

obligatory: In my day we didnt need no stinking nsswitch.conf.

-- C

DevEdge is offline

Just in time for DevEdge to be shutdown too...

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article =5 381

Whats up with that?

Found the original program

For those who haven't seen it, or those who want to relive it, I found Netscape 0.9 beta (from 10-27-1994) here [riverbbs.net].

I haven't actually tried running running it, but the links seems to be working.

I wonder if slashdot is renderable under Netscape 0.9...

Re:Found the original program

Might want to link [wetnet.net] to [ds-webtools.de] a [mirror.ac.uk] few [evolt.org] mirrors [nyud.net].

Screenshots and a Mirror

Screenshots: 1 [muohio.edu] 2 [muohio.edu] 3 [muohio.edu]

Mirror: nscape09.zip [muohio.edu]

Ah, the good ol' days..

10 years, eh?

Perhaps its time I updated.

link?

Anyone have a link to download the first public beta?

Use that for a week, maybe i'd be thankful for what I have ;-)

The Giant Pulsing "N"

God I loved it! For me that was the Internet!

Feel the Original: Dejavu Emulator

For the youngins, you can use a Netscape emulator [dejavu.org] (and Mosaic and early IE) to feel what it was like. It's fun to see what sites do and see if they even load.

I'm probably /.'ing it with this, but it does say "Sorry, due to heavy load on the server, browsing is quite slow. On the positive side, it makes the experience even more authentic.."

I especially love "You probably forgot the "http://" part. Remember: the old browsers did not provide that service... Give it another try!" when you enter a URL without the http:// component.

Evil company...

AOL completely killed any glimpse of hope Netscape had to win the 'browser war'... imagine if Firefox came with AIM, ads that pop up everywhere, installed 2-3 advertising gimmicks, put links everywhere about itself... and didn't have any features over IE. I completely stopped using Netscape, which was by far my favorite browser at the time, when they released the AOL version (6 I think?).

Netscape is dead, long live Netscape! (in Firefox's form!)

We need to keep re-inventing the browser

Firefox is gaining some momentum - maybe enough to make web developers take note. The Mozilla project also has two other great Firefox-like (small single-purpose applications) initiatives, Sunbird [mozilla.org] and Thunderbird [mozilla.org].

The important thing right now is that we use this momentum, and that we continue to innovate. Here's some issues I believe are important:

• SVG support. It's incomplete - but I think it is unwise not to have at least some level of SVG support in mainline Firefox 1.0 builds. "Build it, and they will come": both web and Mozilla developers. SVG is really a key technology for next-generation web design based on open standards. As an example, Wikipedia has a nice extension called EasyTimeline [wikimedia.org] for rendering graphical timelines. These are currently ugly, non-zoomable PNGs -- SVG would be perfect here, as it would allow timelines with a changing level of detail as you zoom in. Much of the stuff that is currently being done with Flash can be done with SVG.
• Leverage XUL. Whenever I show people demos like MAB [mozdev.org] and Robin [sourceforge.net], they tend to be impressed: easy, powerful, instantly deployable web applications. In my opinion, XUL should get a lot more exposure within Firefox - both the product and the website. Make a promise to XUL developers: If you use XUL to write open source applications, and it meets our quality standards, we will add it to the default Firefox bookmarks, and promote it on our website.
• New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice, and some other cool navigation tools ("skip to next website from another domain than the current one" etc.). There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.
• Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

Now, if you really want a glimpse of the future, imagine, if you will, that a HTML textarea worked like SubEthaEdit [codingmonkeys.de] and allowed you to invite other users to edit with your collaboratively, in real-time, a wiki page or weblog entry. But even this really just scratches the surface. The point is, the browser is an immensely important platform. With Firefox, we now have the chance to give an incredible amount of real power to end users. It's not "just a browser" - it's one of the key components of future information and collaboration devices.

Congratulations to the Mozilla project for getting us where we are right now. We still have a long way to go. I hope in 10 years, open source technology will be used by virtually everyone to access the rapidly growing digital commons.

bridge out

There has been little water under Netscape's bridge since AOL bought it. (Insert Troll joke here.) When it was upsetting paradigms with its flawed, yet inspiring new paradigm, the water was flowing, pushing many a mill. But the water has been more and more stagnant for at least the past 4 or 5 years. Where's Jim Clark's desperate need for the next big thing when we need it? His new boat can't be that big, that it's somehow big enough.

Netscape Navigator 2.0

If memory serves, that release introduced the world to Java (browser integrated), JavaScript, plugins, frames, SSL, and cookies, all about a year and a half after the founding of the company.

Now *that* was a major feature release.

The funny thing is

When I go online in Windows at home (rare) I still use Netscape, even upgraded it to 7.1, because I'm a cantankerous old fart. At work or in Linux I always use Firefox, never liked IE, never thought Gates had the right to tell me what had to be on a box he didn't pay for, running on an electric bill he didn't pay. That feeling hasn't changed. The average user couldn't find a way to start it on my machine (XP). Hell, I used Lotus Smart suite for 8 years, just to avoid office, at less than half the price. Now? OO, no matter which OS is running, WinXP/RH9/Suse 9.1.

netscape page doesn't render in firefox?

Is it bad that the netscape page:
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/storymain.jsp?num ber=1 [cnn.com] doesn't render correctly in the latest firefox?

New "My Yahoo" page says Netscape recommended

Since the "My Yahoo" page has upgraded to use RSS, I am trying the beta version on a Mac OS 9.2.2 (sorry, I'm behind the times, I guess) with IE 5.1. My experience with the new "My Yahoo" page is that it has been very buggy. I would switch back to the old version if I could just figure out how.

Now, today, I started receiving the error message: "You are currently using Netscape UNKNOWN. For the best experience using Yahoo!, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version of Netscape. Get the latest version now." So it would seem that in order to use the new page properly they are requiring the latest Netscape.

aging process

for ten years old, it sure looks 30... good thing it has a firey grandson to carry on the legacy.

looking back..

I remember when I first time browse the Internet..
It was in 1995, using the Netscape Navigator I typed my first URL: www.yahoo.com. For some reason the front page of Y! was grey instead of white..
you could probably imagine how excited I was when i saw that light beaming across the N logo..
I thought to my self, what a wonderful world wide web... (okay that was exaggerated, but it was on the same level)!!
Happy Bday Mister Navigator!

Let us not forget CERN and NCSA Mosaic

Let us not forget CERN [web.cern.ch]'s early work with the www client and wwwd server. In particular, the work of Tim Berners-Lee [w3.org]. That link includes some web history.

Let us not also forget NCSA Mosaic [uiuc.edu], which became a "killer app" in the early/mid 1990s, before being spun off as SpyGlass.

My memory is faulty, but I believe more than half of the NCSA team left the project and formed NetScape. Can anyone correct this?

The web as we know it also owes a debt to previous research in hypertext systems dating back decades, as well as existing document-markup systems.

To those who keep Mozilla alive today:
I salute you, but do take too much pride in yourselves:
Never forget that you stand on the shoulders of giants.

Netscape Dorm

Don't forget this little jem: NSCP Dorm (Netscape Dorm) [jwz.org]. Jamie Zawinski kept a diary of sorts about Netscape starting up. Some off-topic but almost always interesting nonetheless.

Happy birthday Netscape!

I remember when you were [BUFFERING... BUFFERING...] Oh, wait. That's Real. Sorry, wrong joke.

Memories

Ah, the memories. I still remember installing Netscape 2.0 on floppy disk many, many years ago. I think I still have the box somewhere. It's funny how NS has changed over the years, going from commercial to open source, back to a commercial form of browser. It's also interesting how the "wheel" logo seems to have disappeared.

Mozilla was not the first.

GCC was free software and commercial software well before the Netscape browser was written. GCC predates the open source movement by many years and served as a means for some consultancies to have so much business they had waiting lists (according to Brad Kuhn when he visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and gave a talk on the free software movement). GCC qualifies as open source software, but since it was initially written by RMS (the founder of the free software movement) for the GNU project, I think it's fair to say it is a free software program.

Re:Mozilla was not the first.

GCC is not commercial. Netscape was owned by a commercial entity, which released the source. That was, AFAIK the first time that ever happened with a big profile product.

GCC may have provided other people with a living, but that doesn't make it "commercial", in the same sense Netscape was commercially owned.

Netscape / Mozilla

Netscape and mozilla are and have always been good browsers. Stability issues and java often plagued netscape 4.x but overall it was more secure and had less serious issues than IE.

I have NEVER been an IE user always using any alternative.. its good to know that there are more options now to use..

Best Netscape innovation

I remember beta testing Netscape 0.9. At the time, my college only had Mosaic, easiest to use on Unix terminals. Netscape brought better browsers to the Mac and PC, and also had a really novel innovation: the stop button. I remember how much it used to suck going to a website (using Mosaic), and having to wait for a massive page to load. With Netscape, I could click the stop button, and move about my business. That's what changed the web...!

only 10?

When I first read that title, I thought Only 10?? Seems like Netscape has been around longer than that. The Internet has become so integrated into our lives that it seems like it's always been there.

But if I think hard... yeah, 10 years ago would be when I was in college, I guess I do remember the time before Netscape. We were using Mosaic back then, and before that everything was text-based.

Not meaning to spoil the party, but ...

Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has come a long way, but IMHO Opera got there faster.

Not meaning to rant, but the permanent high-fiving of the Firefox crowd is getting on my nerves a bit. Every two months or so for the last years, I took Mozilla/Firefox version for a test drive, while at the same time using Opera as my main browser. Now - after ten years of development and admittedly some enormous achievements - I find that Firefox is a decent, though underpowered tool compared to the Opera browser. It has a great renderer, but there's more to a browser than that.

I know Opera isn't that popular with the /. crowd as it is closed-source, commercial software, but it had so many features before Mozilla & IE that make my life easier that the price seems ridiculous compared to the time it saved me: Mouse gestures, SDI/MDI browsing, customizable searches, customizable UI (menus, key combinations, mouse gestures - you name it), a very efficient cookie/password manager, the ability to re-open a session (set of pages) at any time, tools to filter links on a page, "predictive" browsing (Fast Forward), spational navigation (use Shift + Cursor Keys to reach links accorcing to their position), the ability to combine several user stylesheets on the fly, a 20% to 800% zoom feature including images and other objects on a page ... I could go on.

To me, the Mozilla/Firefox seems like a grass-roots effort to build a car - a Beetle, for example. After putting an emormous amount of manpower in it, the team got it right: a working, reliable product for the masses, and it's *free*. Opera in comparison is a very slick machine built by a small, dedicated company - more like a Ferrari. And in comparison to what my hardware and other software packages I'm using cost me, the price of $39 seems even more ridiculous.

I do not want to spoil the party. It is a good thing that Mozilla/Firefox exists. But as a tool for daily work, I prefer something with a little more power under the hood.

Netscape people take credit for Mozilla to?

Gosh, these Netscape fanatics are wacked. Netscape is dead and I hope it finally stays that way. Mozilla rocks and Netscape has nothing on this product. History even dictates the diverging paths which is probably why Netscape flopped. Browser stats [w3schools.com] support this too, so don't get your underwear in a bunch trying to flame the assertation. Just because some joe from the Netscape building got a job over at Mozilla, doesn't mean that Netscape played any part in Mozilla's success. Give it up. Stop trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I for one am sick of hearing it.

Full coverage..

..of something getting 1 day older?

Must be a slow news day.

Isn't there some sort of pseudo-democracy thing we could be scrutinizing instead?

Fishtank?

Remember the Netscape fishtank?
I remember how cool I thought that was, back when I first started using Netscape (v. 2.02, I believe). Just a static image of the fishtank in their lobby that would be updated every 60 sec. or so, and not much to get excited about these days.

But it was a big change from what Gopher offered.

--Ribald
(I miss Gopher, too.)

Just nitpicking...

The Netscape portal has at least three links that will take you to the netscape browser. Under the Tools section, there's "Browser Central" and "Netscape 7.2", and in the links in the bottom bar, there's "Download Latest Netscape Browser". Yes, they could advertise it a little more strongly, but it is there.

All together now...

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear wholly owned subsidiary of AOL/Time Warner Incorporated . . .
Happy birthday to you

First major commercial product to go OSS?

This isn't true, or at least it depends how you look at it. Netscape had already lost relevance when they decided to open source the browser. It was a last ditch move. So it isn't quite the same as a huge, very relevant application like Flash or Photoshop going open source. And with that in mind, realize that the source code to major commercial products had been made available prior to this point, though purists will argue that the licensing terms aren't as purse as true OSS.

The source code to the hugely popular Wolfenstein 3D was released earlier than Netscape, for example. Going back further, you could get a printed code listing of the Atari 8-bit computer operating system from Atari for about the price of a book. For the same computer you could also buy a $12 book containing the *annotated* source code to Atari DOS. Both the Atari OS and Atari DOS were major commercial products at the time.

I'm sure there are other examples.

Netscape Communcator

They've come a long way.

For at least ten years now, they've managed to spell the name of their product right on their homepage...

(or does no-one else remember this?)

Netscape superior to Mosaic???

I used early Mosaic and Netscape and to be honest I didn't see much difference back then. This changed with Netscape 3, but until then it was a long way.

Oh, how we hated it!

We used to love to hate it, back in the early days of the Web.

It was awful. It was even less stable than Mosaic. It was slow, ugly and a memory hog that brought our multi-user Unix boxes to their knees, something which sucked mightily if you were trying to compile your assignments.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

HTML used to be a content-based markup language. It was there to tell the browser what the text meant and deciding how it looked was the job of the browser.

But Netscape went and added all of these formatting features to make the desktop publishing people more comfortable. In the process, they completely screwed things up for non-graphical browsers or, since the extensions were proprietary, pretty much any other browser as well.

And because Netscape was there just as people were getting onto the Web, it became synonymous with the Internet in the minds of the general public so everybody had it and most web designers used the Netscape-specific tags. It got to the point where all the non-Netscape user could see was the little blurb telling you you should switch to Netscape. They were well on the way to locking the entire Web into their proprietary standards.

Then, Microsoft noticed the Internet and showed everybody how it's done.

The End.

On the other hand, Firefox is pretty good.

Re:Hello

I will give them that -- JavaScript is an excellent scripting language with a cool prototype-based object system. It's a shame that the opensource world embraced things like Perl (outside of its domains) and PHP (anywhere) when there's been an distributable JavaScript implementaiton for years.

(Although JS was based on a Sun language called ... Self).

On the other hand, Netscape also gave us window.open() and netscape.com was the first site to use advertising popups.

Re:Next release

They can use this as an excuse to call the next release Netscape Navigator 10.

Or they can go with Netscape Navigator X or 2004.

Re:Yeah but...

Bout 2% of the time I click on any of the stories or topics all the text is shifted a whole screen off to the right, or they run into the border on the left. Hitting reload/refresh doesn't help, you have to back out a step and come back into the page.

Happens at my home and my work computer, with every version of Firefox i've used.