[HN Gopher] NetScape: A Sneak Preview of the shape of WWW Browse...
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NetScape: A Sneak Preview of the shape of WWW Browsers to come
(1994)
Author : Lammy
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-05-31 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| Lammy wrote:
| Meta: the submitted title isn't visible in the article itself but
| can be seen on the TOC of Urban Desires Vol 1 Issue 1:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961102083247/http://desires.co...
|
| e: whoops, I linked to the wrong thing. This is the link I
| intended to submit:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961102091029/http://desires.co...
| hising wrote:
| Every time I read about NetScape I start to have nightmares about
| stuff like
|
| document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document.layers[0].document
| .write("Hello World")
|
| Came later on (Netscape 4 I think, but I still get shivers from
| it)
| hising wrote:
| DynAPI helped out back then
|
| https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/index.html
| grishka wrote:
| > Maybe one day we'll all be connected through our nice fat cable
| TV lines, but that's a long way off and most of us aren't going
| to wait.
|
| And these days DOCSIS, the thing that runs over a coaxial TV
| antenna cable, is on the low end of internet access technologies,
| at least where I'm from. It's fun to see how times change.
| kloch wrote:
| It's pretty amazing that we all carry around a device in our
| pocket with more wireless Internet bandwidth than anyone had
| (in any media) in 1994.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I still use Motif Window Manager & X/Motif when writing native
| linux apps because I miss those big blocky buttons.
| bitwize wrote:
| Ah, good old Netscape. With its hardcoded buttons going to
| hardcoded URLs to give you a starting point for "surfing" the
| World Wide Web. And the "throbber"... they could have put up the
| system's hourglass cursor, but they used the throbber animation
| to signal to the user that the network, not the machine itself,
| was busy. UIs had a much clearer vocabulary back then, the money
| was in the user having situational awareness and making informed
| decisions about what to do, not in blind "engagement".
| blihp wrote:
| The money was in blind banner ads back then. (to the extent
| there was serious money in ads back then... I don't recall the
| flood of banner ads until 95/96 or so)
| pupppet wrote:
| I still love that throbber animation, when I see it I remember
| how navigating to a new page was a fun, almost mysterious
| little adventure.
| coldpie wrote:
| Many a minute spent watching those comets drift by...
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif
| kloch wrote:
| comets and supernova
| unhammer wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=throbber&...
| aww, was hoping for a nostalgic addon to bring it back
| jd3 wrote:
| I wrote a userChrome.css which repurposes the hamburger
| button w/ the jwz throbber.
|
| There are no browser chrome class changes when a tab is
| loading in modern ff, so it sadly doesn't animate on load,
| but it does animate when you hover over it!
|
| https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820894#30823413
| postalrat wrote:
| "Graphical User Interface, or "gooey" in nerdspeak"
|
| Now it's almost reversed. "Graphical User Interface" is the
| nerdspeak.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| One thing from that era that the web hasn't fully jettisoned is
| the completely unnecessary and redundant use of the www domain
| name prefix for web servers.
|
| I expect it'll still be there in the year 2525.
| bawolff wrote:
| At the time it probably was more neccesary. Http wasn't the
| only game in town.
|
| But don't underestimate the value of branding either.
| rollcat wrote:
| It's not completely redundant. You can't make a naked CNAME
| record (technically you can, but things will break in
| mysterious ways), and there's no standardised means of
| dynamically updating an A/AAAA record e.g. to match a
| virtualised load balancer (e.g. AWS ELB). Vendors have non-
| standard extensions to work around this, e.g. Route53 has the
| ALIAS virtual type (which presents itself as an A/AAAA to the
| clients); I wrote some cron+dig hacks in the past when that
| wasn't available (e.g. with ChinaCache).
| 0des wrote:
| also reminds me of folks who went with web.* instead of www.* a
| while back when we thought thats how things would go. still
| cant remember the full reason behind it.
| tpmx wrote:
| _... the most significant is the way it allows the user to go on
| browsing while it downloads items not immediately needed in the
| background. Rather than forcing you to wait for a graphic to
| load, Netscape, loads a page 's text first, allowing you to
| scroll down the page or jump ahead to another URL while that nice
| looking, but perhaps not immediately necessary graphic, loads a
| piece at a time and without the need to wait for the page to
| paginate._
|
| _This "continuous document streaming," combined with Netscape's
| ability to download several documents or images at the same time
| has the effect of dramatically reducing time devoted to waiting,
| and increasing the time spent exploring the Internet's
| bewilderingly diverse content. Coupled with an overall
| performance increase optimized for 14,400 kbs [sic] modems, this
| makes Netscape, by far the speediest Web browser currently
| available._
| pavlov wrote:
| Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a
| 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute.
|
| As the image crawled into view, you'd hope the top slice of the
| image would reveal whether it's worth waiting for or if you
| should move on. Progressive JPEG was invented to solve this
| frustration, but it wasn't always a great improvement when you
| were staring at a blobby first-pass rendering of the image
| trying to guess what it might be.
| pmontra wrote:
| Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately
| switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You
| can read the page before images load!" And click to the next
| one.
| tpmx wrote:
| Do you know/remember if the NCSA Mosaic 0.x/1.x (pre-
| Netscape) rendering/browsing process was non-async/blocking
| on X/Unix as well, and not just on Windows 3.x?
| pmontra wrote:
| It was blocking on all platforms. I was using a DEC Alpha
| and a Sun (some pizza box) to code and a Windows PC for
| Word and Mail. I think I didn't bother much with browsing
| on Windows. Too unstable and underpowered back then but
| it changed quickly. The Moore Law was strong at Intel in
| the 90s.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Would still be good to have for when a "web designer" saves a
| full-Res 5k-px on their Mac and then scales it using css
| width/height. Painful to watch the image slowly load on a
| less-than-50Mbps link.
| hinkley wrote:
| The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that
| NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was
| (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the
| form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries
| and threading.
|
| Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While
| more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage:
| Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB
| floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not
| have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that
| practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice
| as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for
| Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got
| infected with a virus.
| tpmx wrote:
| I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for
| Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0?
|
| https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k
| disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions
| needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s.
|
| The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov
| 10-11, 1993.
| hinkley wrote:
| That did not last long.
|
| November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new.
|
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwind
| ow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
| talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of
| 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and
| PPC versions of Windows NT.
| [deleted]
| chrisjc wrote:
| Somewhat related, but I listened to recent episode of the
| acquired podcast where they were interviewing Brendan Eich and
| there were some pretty interesting moments discussing the state
| of Mozilla/Firefox over the years.
|
| They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about at
| the time.
|
| On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very
| disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people involved
| in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a Firefox
| derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a chromium-based
| one instead.
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| When Firefox ditched XUL it lost one of its most useful
| extensions: Pentadactyl
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > "They even brought up XUL which I was extremely excited about
| at the time."
|
| Don't forget XAML.
|
| I too was excited for these two things as well ~20 years ago.
| chrisjc wrote:
| There is no data. There is only XUL!
| superkuh wrote:
| XUL still rules in Sea Monkey Classic and Pale Moon.
| 0des wrote:
| Interesting episode. I wonder why they seem to have removed it
| from their episode feed.. https://pod.link/acquiredlp
| gurumeditations wrote:
| It was very disheartening to hear that Brendan Eich is a
| homophobic piece of garbage who hates gay people so much that
| he donated thousands of dollars of his own money over multiple
| years to take what little rights gay people had gained away
| from us. Homophobia kills. Straight people like Brendan Eich
| are why gay kids kill themselves. Straight people are still
| happy to work with him though!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| He wasn't as bad as some, and it was common to oppose
| homosexual marriage in 2008. Still sad that he didn't back
| down even when the tide turned.
|
| As leader of a supposedly community driven project and corp
| one would hope he'd reconsider the rights of marginalized
| groups.
| rascul wrote:
| > On a side note, as a dedicated Firefox user it was very
| disheartening to hear that as one of the crucial people
| involved in Mozilla over the years he decided against using a
| Firefox derivative for his new browser, instead choosing a
| chromium-based one instead.
|
| I felt the same, and I may have done more than simply dismiss
| Brave if that were the case. Although I do understand that
| Gecko isn't exactly simple or easy for a third party to build
| off of.
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(page generated 2022-05-31 23:00 UTC)