The Hanover Collaboration

Oh Netscape, it’s sad to see it’s come to this. I remember when you were new and fantastic and way cooler than Kermit or TurboGopher or even Mosaic. It was through you that I learned about awesome things like jpgs and gifs.

You were totally sweet back when, but after version 4 you really started to suck because all you wanted to do was add more features to yourself. You even changed your name to “Communicator”. It was really a big turn-off that you were so self-centered. You made me setup user accounts, which was annoying, and you crashed like it was your job. But I stuck with you because the alternative was worse.

It really sucks that Exploader had to steal your marketshare. You really were better, if not by all that much. I mean, people should have known that they could download you for free on the Internet, but I guess they were all just too dumb or too lazy. Then again, you didn’t really do much to set yourself apart. That probably would have helped.

Still, even after the writing was on the wall, AOL paid 4.2 billion dollars for you. That’s crazy. You should be psyched about that, even if it drove anyone who’d ever used the Internet away from you because AOL is totally lame. And man, did they ever lame you.

They lamed you so hard that from like 1999 on, I was using two browsers on my machine. I had to because you never knew what would display correctly, or what would crash. It was like forcing a pair of one-legged guys to lean on each other so they could hobble around the Internet.

By 2002 you were so outsized that I just couldn’t deal. Plus you didn’t have an OS X version for months after the release. Like I was going to run your bloated ass in Classic? There was a dark period, almost two years, where I used Exploader. I’m not proud of it, but you know what? It worked. And more importantly, it worked better than you.

Now look at you – just an afterthought in the BBC new feed. I wish I could feel bad for you, but honestly, you brought it upon yourself. The best parts of you left a long time ago, and formed a quirky little thing called “Mozilla”. It was fast and stable, but didn’t display a lot of pages correctly, so it was a while before I really got into it.

That Mozilla browser turned out to be alright, after a time. It’s called Firefox these days, and in countries full of people who know what they’re doing, it’s the most popular browser. I was into Safari for a little bit, but it’s proprietary and used to be unable to render Gmail. Now I use Camino. It too is Mozilla based.

I bet you’d like to take credit for that, Netscape, but the truth is, the reason these new browsers are so awesome is specifically because they aren’t you or your evil copycat, Exploader. You are indeed responsible for their successes, but not in the way you’d like to think.

Well, Netscape, it was nice bumping into you one last time, but I think it’s time to go now. I hope you enjoy retirement, and don’t feel bad: Retro-nerds will continue to run you (v4.08) on PowerMac 7300’s until the end of time.