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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday October 14 2014, @09:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the MAX-FORWARDS dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday October 14 2014, @04:56PM

    by Marand (1081) on Tuesday October 14 2014, @04:56PM (#106002) Journal

    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.

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