Its leading figures, Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News once observed, seemed “right out of central casting.” Netscape was, as I write in my forthcoming book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, “an immensely interesting company” as well. It’ll keep getting bigger for the rest of your life.’” Netscape said: ‘Here you go, here’s a door to a brand-new place in the existence of the universe. Halfway through, the Internet became a thing. “I entered college in 1993 and graduated in 1997.
The novelist Charles Yu recalled in a brief essay published last year his introduction to Netscape: The Navigator browser brought the Internet to untold millions of people, and I’d wager that many of those mid-1990s first-time users still think fondly of Netscape and the funky, outer-space logo that lit up with what looked to be comets or shooting stars when the browser was making a connection. “‘Netscape,'” he wrote, effectively “announced that the frontier was open for exploration and habitation.” He added: “To say Netscape did not ‘change history’ is to say Napoleon (even though he failed - twice!) did not change history.”īut Eich may have been too modest he might well have expanded his discussion to address how Netscape was critically important to the early Web in ways less tangible than JavaScript and SSL.įor starters, there was the evocative name: “Netscape” was perfect for the early Web, suggesting that the online world was, as Steve Silberman once wrote, much more than “a display, a tool, an application, an e-anything, but a place - a newly discovered, unmapped infinitude.” Both, as Eich noted, are “ still fundamental to the Web and ecommerce today.” His comments were technical, pointing to JavaScript and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol as “two things Netscape created.”īoth indeed were important innovations which, respectively, helped animate the Web and helped make Internet transactions more secure. Netscape, the mid-1990s maker of Navigator, the first widely popular browser, was critically important to the technology, the culture, and the perceptions of the early Web.Įich’s post at the online information site Quora was in response to the question: “How important was Netscape?”
Technologist Brendan Eich, the developer of JavaScript programming language and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation, asserted in a blog post the other day that Netscape “changed history” - and it’s futile to mount a credible argument to the contrary.