We call it browsing now, Grandma
We call it browsing now, Grandma
We call it browsing now, Grandma
I even think she didn't navigate, but websurfed on the information highway
Information superhighway
This is me when I go to somebody's house and they don't have Firefox as I refuse to touch anything Chromium-based /s
For real though, if anyone's old enough to remember using Netscape Navigator, they are definitely old enough to have had a grandchild by now.
I was about to get pissed off but then I remembered I'm 41, so yeah, if I had a kid at 20 and they had a kid at 20...
Guess I'll go sit back down in my rocking chair and take my nap.
I guess, technically, if I had had a kid at 18-20 and my kid had done the same, maybe it would be possible. Then again, a younger step-sibling is already a grandmother.
We were still supporting navigator and/or communicator when I was working in my first IT job doing tech support for a dial-up provider.
To be fair, if you worked in the government (including the military), old apps and programs could last a long time. I wasn't THAT old when I used Netscape in the Army. Plus, there's precocious kids who do stuff like use browser and command line stuff (and even code) before their age is in the double digits.
Facts. I remember using Netscape and using MSDOS as a kid, and I'm in my early 30s, not quite old enough to have grandchildren lol
It really says a lot about how far the web has come (good or bad). We used to navigate it, these days we browse it.
Netscape Navigator was the one and only reasonable choice in opposition to the standards-threatening, anticompetitive deployment of Internet Explorer for a good chunk of time. Have some respect, and be glad it existed, especially if you are a Windows user.
shakes cane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetscapeNavigator
From the Wikipedia article you linked:
It also talks about how while Internet Explorer was using a lot of proprietary HTML tags that made its sites incompatible with Netscape, Netscape was also doing the same thing.
I've always had confusion when it comes to hearing people talking about Netscape vs Microsoft because (and maybe this is just hindsight) iirc the biggest complaint Netscape had was that Microsoft was bundling IE with windows for free. However that's such an obvious thing to do. You make an operating system. The internet is taking off. Your users are going to want some way of interacting with the internet that doesn't require going to a computer store and buying a floppy disk or CD to access it. Obvious solution: bundle a browser with your OS.
It wasn't just bundled, it was tightly integrated. You could not easily remove it for a period of time, especially if you were the average user.
And, dusting off some old complaints, I seem to recall it was part of a strategy to control not just the browsing experience but also the hosting and serving of web pages. https://www.howtogeek.com/717016/remembering-activex-controls-the-webs-biggest-mistake/
It was all about locking you into Microsoft in any possible way. (sounds familiar)
Netscape did not have, and never was anywhere close to having, the sort of weight MS did to throw around.
MS has always been about doing whatever they can do to lock you tightly to their ecosystem, ethics be damned. Before they applied EEE to Linux, they first tried applying it to the web and a bunch of other stuff.
The bigger problem was that IE was involved in a lot of things and uninstalling it could break a lot. IIRC some versions would not even allow actual removal.