Rest in peace Netscape

I started using NCSA Mosaic back in 1994, when the web was young, strange and mostly populated by academics, geeks and people who thought a grey background was perfectly acceptable design.

Mosaic had first appeared in November 1993 and became the first graphical browser to achieve widespread popularity. One of its developers, Marc Andreessen, soon left to start a company called Netscape. The resulting browser, Netscape Navigator, arrived in 1994 and quickly became the de facto way of wandering around this peculiar new thing called the World Wide Web.

For a while, Netscape owned the place. Then Microsoft arrived.

Another extinct thing I found at American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic, dressed it up as Internet Explorer and proceeded to do what Microsoft did particularly well in the 1990s: enter somebody else’s party late, bring an enormous amount of money, rearrange the furniture and eventually own the building.

Thus began the Browser Wars. For web developers, this was less a war than an extended campaign of psychological abuse. Pages worked in Netscape but broke in Internet Explorer. Or worked in Internet Explorer and looked like the aftermath of a small industrial accident in Netscape. We wrote browser-specific code, cursed proprietary extensions and learned far more about table layouts than any healthy adult should ever know.

Eventually Microsoft won. Netscape was bought by AOL, while much of its technology lived on as open source through the Mozilla project. Netscape itself refused to die quietly, however. New versions continued appearing, with Netscape Navigator 9 arriving just a few months ago, a little like discovering that an aging rock band you assumed had broken up years ago was still touring provincial casinos.

But now the encore is finally over. AOL has announced that support for Netscape Navigator will end on February 1st this year. And despite everything, that feels strangely sad.

Netscape, I called you terrible things over the years. Some of them were deserved. You mangled layouts, interpreted standards creatively and occasionally made web development feel like trying to perform dentistry on an angry crocodile. But you were there at the beginning. Before Chrome. Before Firefox. Before tabs became something we casually kept 73 of open at once. Before the web became shopping malls, social networks, surveillance capitalism and people shouting at strangers in comment sections.

Back then, opening Netscape felt like opening a door into somewhere genuinely unknown. So long, old friend. You were occasionally magnificent, frequently infuriating and absolutely part of the adventure. Rest in peace.