|
 Netscape
Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that
was popular during the 1990s. Once the flagship product of Netscape
Communications Corporation and the dominant browser in terms of usage
share, its user base had almost completely evaporated by 2002 partly due
to the inclusion of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser with the
Windows operating system, but also due to lack of significant innovation
after the late 1990s. Netscape's demise was a central component of
Microsoft's antitrust trial, where the court ruled (among other things)
that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was an illegal monopolistic
business practice.
The Navigator browser was superseded by the Netscape Communicator
internet suite. History and
development The creation
One of the central figures in the Netscape story is Marc Andreessen
cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
After his graduation from Illinois in 1993, Andreessen moved to
California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies. Andreessen
then met with Jim Clark, the recently-departed founder of Silicon
Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial
possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications
Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California, with
Andreessen appointed as a vice-president. The University of Illinois was
unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, so "Mosaic
Communications Corporation" changed its name to Netscape Communications
(thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and its flagship web
browser was the Netscape Navigator.
The first few releases of the product were made available in
"commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and
version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to
the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay
for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were
satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year
of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to
be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on
floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone
support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or
two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name
Mozilla, which became the name of a Godzilla-like cartoon dragon mascot
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also
used as the User-Agent in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web
browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML,
and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that
web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape
browsers. A competitor's unauthorized use of a trademarked name could
have been grounds for a lawsuit, but that possibility was left
unexplored. Mozilla is now a generic name for matters related to the
open source successor to Netscape Communicator.
The rise of Netscape When the consumer Internet
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well
positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an
attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial
purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto standard,
particularly on the Windows platform. Internet service providers and
computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the
on-the-fly display of webpages, where text and graphics appeared on the
screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not
display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network
connection; this made a user often have to stare at a blank page for as
long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up connections
could begin reading the text of a webpage within seconds of entering a
web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished
downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the
technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included
cookies, frames (in version 2.0), and JavaScript (in version 2.0).
Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of
the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often
viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more
interested in bending the web to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing
standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition)
than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates
were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using
them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference.
Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage
share. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating
systems, including Windows (Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT), Macintosh, Linux,
OS/2, and many versions of Unix including DEC, Sun Solaris, BSDI, IRIX,
AIX, and HP-UX, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of
them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based
system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to
access and edit his files anywhere across a network no matter what
computer or operating system he happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of
connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed,
would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run
within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity
to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing,
and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other
software and service markets.
The fall of Netscape Microsoft saw Netscape's success as
a clear threat to the dominant status of the Microsoft Windows operating
system. It began a wide-reaching campaign to establish control over the
browser market. Browser market share, it was reasoned, leads to control
over internet standards, and that in turn would provide the opportunity
to sell software and services. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code
from Spyglass, Inc., an offshoot of the University of Illinois, and
turned it into Internet Explorer.
The resulting battle between the two companies became known as the
browser wars. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of IE were markedly inferior to
contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator; IE 3.0 (1996) began to
catch up to its competition; IE 4.0 (1997) was the first version that
looked to have Netscape beaten, and IE 5.0 (1998) with many bug fixes
and stability improvements saw Navigator's marketshare plummet below IE
for the first time.
Netscape Navigator 3.0 came in two versions, Standard Edition and Gold
Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with mail and
news readers and a web page WYSIWYG composition tool integrated into it.
The extra functionality only made the software program larger, slower,
and more prone to crashes, and the decision to integrate all these
features together was widely criticized. But this integrated version
became the only version when it was renamed Netscape Communicator in
version 4.0; the product's name change (Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
insisted that Communicator was a general-purpose client application
which contained the Navigator browser) diluted its name recognition and
confused users.
The aging Communicator 4.x code could not keep up with Internet Explorer
5.0. Typical web pages had become graphics-heavy, often
JavaScript-intensive, and were constructed with increasingly complex
HTML code that used features designed for specific narrow purposes but
redeployed them as global layout tools (in particular this applied to
HTML tables, which Communicator struggled to render). The Netscape
browser, once regarded as a reasonably solid product, came to be seen as
crash-prone and buggy. It didn't help that some versions of it tended to
re-download an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window
was resized, a considerable burden to dial-up users. In addition, the
browser's somewhat dated-looking interface didn't have the modern
appearance of Internet Explorer.
By the end of the decade, Netscape's web browser had unquestionably lost
its former dominance on the Windows platform. Even on other platforms it
was threatened, both by the gradual rise of open source browsers and by
the August 1997 agreement that resulted in an investment of $150,000,000
by Microsoft in Apple, which included a requirement that Apple switch
the default browser in new installations of Mac OS from Netscape to
Internet Explorer. Of greatest significance, though, was Microsoft's
massive and ultimately successful campaign to get ISPs and PC vendors to
distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape.
This was helped in part by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable,
such that it was a quick operation to create a customized version of IE.
Also, web developers increasingly used proprietary, Microsoft-only
extensions in the web pages they wrote (see also embrace, extend and
extinguish.)
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Communicator
under an open source license. The product named Netscape 5, which was
intended to be the result, was never released, as managers decided that
the code needed a complete rewrite. This product, taking growing
contributions from the open-source community, was dubbed Mozilla, once
the codename of the original Netscape Navigator. Netscape programmers
gave Mozilla a different GUI and released it as Netscape 6 and later
Netscape 7. After a lengthy public beta, Mozilla 1.0 was released on
June 5, 2002. The same code base, most notably the Gecko layout engine,
became the basis of several standalone applications, including Firefox
and Thunderbird.
These products, however, came too late for Netscape as a business.
Eventually Netscape was defeated in the browser wars (but Explorer faced
new competition), and was acquired in 1999 by AOL.
Criticism Netscape Navigator has mostly been criticized
for implementing non-standard HTML markup extensions such as the BLINK
tag, which is sometimes referred to as a symbol for Netscape's urge to
develop extensions not standardized by the W3C, and even mentioned in
the fictional Book of Mozilla. Netscape has also been criticized for
following actual web standards poorly, often lagging behind or
supporting them very poorly or even incorrectly. This criticism wasn't
very loud during the days of its popularity as web masters then often
simply developed for Netscape Navigator, but came to be an increasing
annoyance to webmasters who wish to provide backward compatibility, most
often with Netscape Navigator 4 and Netscape Communicator, to their web
sites. Today, many web masters simply do not choose to support these old
versions, due to their poor and invalid web standard implementations.
However, Netscape's own "contributions" to the web of this sort hasn't
always been of frustration to web developers. JavaScript (which,
confusingly, has little to nothing to do with Java) was for example
submitted as a new standard to Ecma International, resulting in the
ECMAScript specification. This move allowed it to be easier supported by
multiple web browsers and is today an established cross-browser
scripting language, long after Netscape Navigator itself has dropped in
popularity. Another example is the FRAME tag, that is also widely
supported today, and even ended up becoming incorporated into official
web standards such as the "HTML 4.01 Frameset" specification. |
