from Hacker News

Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

by artogahr on 10/14/22, 10:02 AM with 275 comments

  • by badsectoracula on 10/14/22, 10:40 AM

    Considering all the discussions about JavaScript and sites with primarily text requiring it, this looks like the more things change, the more they remain the same :-P. Also see Wirth's Plea for Lean Software[0] from 1995 for another "timeless" issue.

    I did find this bit interesting too...

    > Apart from this practical reason, there's a principal one: The first time I invoked Netscape, it said that it is obsolete and refuses to work. I don't use software that thinks it knows better than I when I should stop using it.

    ...considering the modern trend for autoupdating software. The author (after this paragraph) also considers availability, but another issue is if the software is something one would like to use even if it is available - for instance, personally i never liked using a version of Paint Shop Pro after version 7 since i found all of them a degradation. I can use PSP7 just fine though (even on Linux via Wine) - imagine if the software decided by itself that it is too old to run or to replace itself with a new version against my wishes (this is something a lot of software does nowadays).

    From a user's perspective this also has implications on preserving backwards compatibility for foundational functionality programs rely on.

    [0] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

  • by forgotmypw17 on 10/14/22, 12:03 PM

    I still use this strategy, though these days, I primarily use Mosaic and Netscape for testing.

    I tend to browse without JavaScript enabled, except for places I already trust to not abuse it. And if there is anything blocking me from accessing the page, such as a modal dialog, a cookie notice, a survey, a prompt to sign up for the newsletter, I close the tab.

    Over time, I have found that type of rude lack of consideration for the reader's cognitive load and ability to correlate highly with low-quality content that is a waste of my time to read, so this practice also saves me a lot of reading time.

    And every day, my Internet gets better and better.

    I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

  • by mrtksn on 10/14/22, 10:54 AM

    So the "movement" against modern browser features is not a movement and has nothing to do with these features but its simply a version of "kids these days lost their ways" thinking. A version of conservatism, I guess. "Everything was better in the good old days" and "The new generation is horrible, the humanity is doomed" kind of thoughts are probably a manifestation of fading youth.

  • by NotYourLawyer on 10/14/22, 10:28 AM

    My modern version of this is browsing with JavaScript disabled. Most of the sites that don’t work weren’t worth my time anyway.

  • by Tepix on 10/14/22, 11:36 AM

    Still relevant today. Sites that break with adblockers are usually shit.

    Why? Well probably because if the site developers themselves don't have adblockers, they are clueless.

  • by somecommit on 10/14/22, 12:20 PM

    Need some max-width to whatever the average screen was back in 1999.

    True story, I re-uploaded a website that I wrote in 1999, only now I discover that my header was never centered, if was just floating left. It's the only thing that look off, everything else is working perfectly. HMTL/CSS/JS is really a stable stack for the computer field.

  • by 0xbadcafebee on 10/14/22, 2:00 PM

    The Phoenix browser was the best I've ever used. From v0.1 to v0.5 it continually shrank in size, as improvements were just on speed, size, and the user experience. At v0.5 it was six-and-a-half megabytes. But by 0.6 it was getting bigger again. It already had enough of an HTML engine to render 95% of the web... but people just wanted more and more and more features, and refused to put them anywhere other than in the browser, defeating the point of the whole project.

  • by _greim_ on 10/14/22, 3:54 PM

    It's interesting that the author would associate "frames, tables, and other fancy features" with a lack of interesting content. I assume tables are included because they were widely misused at the time, not because tabular data wasn't interesting.

    I have a button in my toolbar called "dammit" which strips away every iframe, embed, object, audio, and video from the page, multiple times per second. These are considered foundational elements in the web platform and yet, when they disappear, pages seem to magically collapse into something readable.

  • by controversial97 on 10/14/22, 11:26 AM

    Around 1996 or 1997, I saw netscape showing an small animated gif. Every cycle, the memory use of netscape went up by the size of the gif. On a machine with 4MB of RAM it did not take long to stop working.

  • by YesThatTom2 on 10/14/22, 10:40 AM

    I was at a startup from 2000-2003 where the chief scientist was a security wonk and demanded that our product worked with and without JavaScript enabled.

    No wonder the startup failed. Imagine trying to make a useful product with one hand tied behind your back!

  • by r90t on 10/14/22, 11:26 AM

    Its a great experience to open HN website which is not overloaded w/ javascript. And even greater to go to another website which is even more lightweight. This feels like a good and friendly internet

  • by tannhaeuser on 10/14/22, 10:24 AM

    > Featurism is usually inverse proportional to content, and those who have content generally value being readable.

    (as related to features such as HTML frames and tables)

    Thanks for this quote attributed to Bernd Paysan I can now cite rather than formulating this over and over (for CSS grids, subgrids, columns, flexbox, functions, variables/custom properties and whatnot).

  • by protomikron on 10/14/22, 11:03 AM

    On-topic: It's true, basic design often correlates with better content.

    Off-topic: The author is one of the orignal authors of Gforth, one of the main Forth implementations.

  • by olalonde on 10/14/22, 11:20 AM

    A good reminder that techies are often completely out of touch with what the average Joe wants.

  • by xtracto on 10/14/22, 6:06 PM

    Oh my, the mention of DJ Delorie brought me back memories: That's the famous DJGPP C/C++ compiler which along with Allegro library was the bomb to develop MSDOS games back in the day!

  • by dave84 on 10/14/22, 10:38 AM

    The timestamp on the downloads provided on the install page are March 5 1999, and March 6 2000 which may give an indication as to this articles age.

  • by djohnston on 10/17/22, 12:01 AM

    > Die Featuritis ist meist umgekehrt proportional zum Inhalt, und wer Inhalt hat, legt in der Regel Wert darauf, auch gelesen werden zu koennen. (Featurism is usually inverse proportional to content, and those who have content generally value being readable)

    Too long for a tattoo but damn do I believe in this!

  • by incanus77 on 10/14/22, 4:07 PM

    Unrelated to this content (I think), tuwien.ac.at is a domain I have not seen nor thought of in decades. I see that there’s new stuff there too, but does anyone recall why this might have been a well-known domain in the 90s? I feel like I used to regularly read some content or download software from there, probably UNIX stuff.

  • by tiborsaas on 10/14/22, 10:38 AM

    Also known as ideology driven browsing.

  • by rvieira on 10/14/22, 10:57 AM

    Side note, the links took me to the Delorie page and DJGPP. That was a blast from the past.

  • by martyvis on 10/14/22, 11:41 AM

  • by jussij on 10/14/22, 2:02 PM

    For anyone who was actually around at that time you need to remember Windows was Windows 95 and that meant a badly behaved application generally required a reboot.

    From what I remember of that time, Windows Explorer seemed a little faster, but most importantly it also seemed to require fewer reboots.

  • by BaudouinVH on 10/14/22, 2:06 PM

    Not Mosaic but worth browsing : the capsules in the Geminiverse ( https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ ) have no modern browser gimmick at all and a very good signal-to-noise ration. #my2cents

  • by casey2 on 10/14/22, 12:51 PM

    Imagine a world where it's common to cd into a directory and anywhere from 1-10 awk scripts start running and possibly your image viewer and media player. Would you think you had malware installed?

  • by tomlin on 10/14/22, 1:28 PM

    Today a website doesn’t even load without JavaScript. So, there’s that.

  • by makach on 10/14/22, 8:35 PM

    Insight! Good points still valid today. Although I wonder if the author has changed his opinion on browser.

  • by rrwo on 10/14/22, 10:37 AM

    This aged well.

  • by cptskippy on 10/14/22, 6:47 PM

    > those who have content generally value being readable

    I find it ironic that his website looks like hot garbage on a modern ultrawide display.

    I realize that it's over 20 years old and it still looks bad at 1280x1024 which was the resolution I was using back then as a poor college student with a second hand 19" Sony Trinitron that had a dodgy VGA cable you had to hold up just right with a coat hanger.

  • by jagger27 on 10/14/22, 4:16 PM

    The source code of that page is beautiful.

  • by frou_dh on 10/14/22, 11:12 AM

    How do you know that someone chooses to disable JavaScript in their browser?

    Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you about it.

  • by derane on 10/14/22, 10:33 AM

    wie kommt das hier hoch ? 16 Points ?

  • by standardUser on 10/14/22, 6:34 PM

    "If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content"

    Crazy wild assumptions given that the web was brand-spanking-new and changing rapidly and unpredictably by the day. I'll never understand these needlessly-minimalist perspectives on interacting with the internet (yeah, I'm talking to you no-JavaScript folks). That approach only result in you missing out on things, and that was even more true in the 90's.