What is Netscape?
I have three kids, all boys. They are all internet savy, especially the eldest.
His name is Ivan, and he is 15 years old. He basically uses the computer and the internet around the clock. Ivan knows his way around the technology, but he is not the programmer type. I consider him to be a superuser.
Ivan’s big interests are movies and music, and he uses the Internet to interact with like minded friends. He plays at a youth theater, submits movies to YouTube and plays the guitar. He writes a lot of movie reviews, and posts them at Metropolis, a Norwegian social site for movie enthusiasts.
One day I asked him if he wanted to write about movies on his own blog, or perhaps start his own social site for movies. I suggested that he try Ning.
He asked what it was, and I explained that it was a web based tool for creating social networks, co-founded by the creator of Netscape, Marc Andreessen.
Ivan showed some curiosity and interest, but the question took me by complete surprise:
- What is Netscape?
Netscape is already forgotten!
I’ve tried asking several teenagers about Netscape afterwards, and they all reply with the same question.
The teenagers of today spend more time on the internet than anyone else, and for them Netscape is already ancient history. It’s almost a bit frightening. History is made and forgotten in an unprecedented pace at the Internet.
AOL ended the support and further development of the Netscape browser, but version 9 is still available for download here. This also means that the Norwegian browser from Opera Software is the world’s oldest continuously maintained browser.
Tags: browser, Marc Andreessen, Netscape, Opera
April 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Well yes and no. If you talk about which browser is the oldest, you have to admit that Firefox is nothing but a rebranded Netscape, so you could still count it as Netscape, the source is essentially the same.
Mac OS X for example is also conisdered a direct decendant of NeXTSTEP despite the different name. So just tell your kids that Firefox used to be called Netscape, when a company with the same name was still mainly developing it.