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srvmshr | 9 months ago

For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version

https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )

It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.

By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1

Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories

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PopAlongKid|9 months ago

I was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more winding path from top to bottom.

Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02

[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.

james_chu|9 months ago

I am a new-generation user, and I'm curious whether "Netscape" can be installed on modern computers. If it can, how would it perform when accessing modern websites? I really want to know. Thank you again for sharing.