13 years ago, the internet was a very different place. The World Wide Web was just beginning to pique the interests of Americans, and the “Dot Com” era was beginning. Yahoo was tops when it came to search engines, e-mail, and pretty much everything else. Google didn’t even exist yet. There was no Amazon, Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, or even I Can Has Cheezburger. At this time, one browser reigned supreme: Netscape Navigator. It is with a mix of emotions both positive and negative that I found out that Netscape will cease all development and support on February 1, 2008.
The life of Netscape is a bittersweet Cinderella-turned-horribly-disfigured-hooker story, filled with high times and extreme low points. Besides being the first real web browser that actually caught on and revolutionized what we call “surfing the web”, it was also the flagship product of what many consider to be the first company to ring in the Dot Com era. In 1994, Netscape was what Google is today: unbelievably successful, hiring only the best engineers and making them (and all of their investors) millions of dollars. There was even a documentary about Netscape’s millionaire engineers, called Code Rush.
Unfortunately, over the last seven years or so, Netscape has gone from being at the forefront of browser usage to slipping to only having 0.6% of the worldwide browser share. Compare that to IE at over 75% and Firefox at over 15%, and you can see that the world has really abandoned Netscape – and with good reason. Netscape 4, which was the last truly popular version of the browser, was poorly written and didn’t obey a lot of the standards and practices suggested by the W3C (although it should be noted that most browsers don’t adhere to all of the W3C’s standards, but most are a lot better today than they were 5 years ago).
Netscape 4 was used as the baseline a few years ago as the browser that everyone tested against for the absolutely lowest common denominator when they were building a website. That was because it was so bad, so buggy, so terrible at rendering things. If you developed a page using Netscape 4 to test, it would almost surely look different in IE. A lot of companies and federal agencies wrote their website style guides and design standards around IE 5.5 and Netscape 4, which held back a lot of the beautiful design elements we see so commonly today.
On the other hand, the poor quality of Netscape 4’s Document Object Model was part of the inspiration that started the Web Standards movement, which has been a true boon for website design and architecture. Still, ever since then, Netscape has never been able to recover from its poor architecture, bad business choices (like when they were acquired by AOL), and the absolutely tanking of its stock. Needless to say, Google should take heed of the hard lessons learned by Netscape, lest they follow a similar path.
So, it is with both a heavy heart and a sense of relief that I bid Netscape adieu. Thank you for being there first. Thank you for influencing positive change in the industry. Thank God you’re finally going away.
