April 22nd marks the 10th anniversary for Mosaic, the original web browser. To usher in this special day in geekdom, News.com put together a multi-part series discussing, describing and otherwise reflecting upon the bumpy twisted road of browser evolution.
If you're really bored and/or adventurous, test drive Mosaic -- grab it here (and tell me what you think). Notice what you can and cannot view, where images are rendered (if they're rendered at all) and ponder the advances in browserdom.
I switched from Netscape to IE around the time Netscape 4.5 came out, probably late '98. I'm currently using IE 6.0, but am eyeing Mozilla once more.
I've also used Opera, which at the time was hyped much like Be was. The friends of mine that use it still enjoy it, but many of the features (like tabbed browsing) have found their way into Mozilla (or Phoenix or Firebird or Sábado Gigante or whatever they'll call it next month). Additionally, Opera, like many commercial developers, is on the losing end of the open-source battle. Even though they do a great job of integrating W3C standards into their browser, all of the neat bells and whistles can be copied into Mozilla (or Safari) in a matter of weeks (assuming you have 3 Russian programmers).
Although they are not as dependent on selling the browser as Netscape was, switching to a services and support model as MySQL AB and Red Hat have popularized, could lengthen their lifespan as a company.
Oh, and if you really want to play around, try out Lynx, it's the text-based browser.
Posted by Tim at April 16, 2003 04:05 AM | TrackBack