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Twenty years ago today (13 October 1994), Mosaic Communications Corporation released the Mosaic Navigator, the first commercial browser for the World Wide Web. This was just six months after the company was founded by ex-Silicon Graphics CEO Jim Clark, and Marc Andreesen, a recent computer science graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Andreesen had co-developed the Mosaic Web browser while working for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), on UIUC's campus; Clark, who had been losing a power struggle at Silicon Graphics, the company he'd founded, was restless and looking for an adventure and revenge. Andreesen quickly convinced the band of programmers from UIUC he'd worked with on Mosaic and web server development, to relocate to Silicon Valley.
Both the company and the browser were re-branded 'Netscape' a month after the product was released, settling a lawsuit by the UIUC, who regarded Mosaic as intellectual property belonging to the university.
Andreessen and Netscape moved fast, even by the standards of the personal computing business at the time. After Microsoft entered the game (they jump started development by buying rights to a web browser created by Spyglass), Netscape pumped out Navigator 2.0 a little more than a year later, unveiling JavaScript, frames, cookies, plug-ins, SSL (2.0, the first released version), and integrated mail and news readers. Oh, and client-side integration with a mysterious new language called Java.
Bill Gates broadcast his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo to the troops at Microsoft in May 1995. Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in August 1995; future versions of IE were bundled with Windows 95, as Microsoft tried (rather successfully) to "cut off Netscape's air supply", as Microsoft Vice President Paul Maritz is alleged to have ranted at the time. Microsoft's actions against Netscape and numerous other competitors in the software industry became the subject of an antitrust suit brought by the US Department of Justice.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 14 2014, @04:02PM
1. There are lots of people with the attention span of roughly a 5-year-old who simply don't want to read information.
2. Apple made a ton of money with their mindset. A lot of people want to make a ton of money, so they try to imitate Apple.
3. The guys who make "THESE SITES ARE GREAT DESIGNS!" websites are basically graphic artists. Therefor, they look at sites like artists rather than like people who actually want information.
4. Business people see blank space and think "Great, we could totally put ads there!" They see lack of content and think "Good, we don't have to pay people to write a lot of stuff!" They see "shiny" as "Great, we can pull in those eyeballs!"
So while it's possible to use the Internet for intelligent discussion and information-sharing, most people are looking instead for cat videos, pr0n, or reinforcement of their political beliefs so they can feel a bit happier about their likely-pathetic existence.
Also, platforms like Twitter function almost as well as Newspeak for limiting the kinds of thoughts that people are able to express.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday October 14 2014, @04:56PM
1. Legitimate concern but can be accommodated without being devoid of content. It's what I meant about quick identification and intuitive navigation, and isn't mutually exclusive with providing useful information.
2. You're right about the logic. Of course, imitation without understanding is why that's a problem, and why I criticised it the way I did. You also see something similar with UI design, where people try to copy OS X interface conventions (like Canonical moving window controls to left randomly between versions, or a lot of dock copycats, or just general look-and-feel imitators) blindly and then make something inferior.
3. Which makes for great advertisements and horrible websites. It's possible to create, and appreciate, a site for being useful and impressive at the same time. It still happens sometimes and it's nice to see when it does.
4. That reminds me of a lot of TV and newspaper sites since forever. Some things never change.
Some people still get it, at least. Not every site is useless. Sometimes you find a site, with actual content even, that pleasantly presented. Who knows, maybe it will eventually make its way down to the copycats, too.