Netscape 2 announced

Article from 1995 is good for a laugh!

[Hester]

Whilst moving some ancient magazines today I came across Issue 14 of Internet Today, sadly now defunct. This was dated December 1995 and a headline on the cover grabbed my eye:

Netscape 2
Frames, Java and Plug-ins
- it's the second coming

Firstly, the idea of people using Netscape 1 was odd enough but a new version allowing frames and Java? What a laugh!

The article reveals how Netscape 2 will support progessive JPEGs, client-side image maps, complete mail and news facilities, along with a 'Gold' version aimed at authoring web pages.

Another new feature is the ability to control the colour of the font tag, rather than the entire document!

On top of this is the new 'DIV' and 'P' tags (which enable the justification of text to either left, right or center)...

You mean Netscape 1 didn't have a paragraph tag?!

I now have to quote from the box at the end which definitely didn't turn out to be true!

All of this would suggest that browsers such as Microsoft's 'Internet Explorer' are likely to live short and (hopefully) painful lives as it seems unlikely that even the mighty Microsoft could possibly keep up with the pace of Netscape's development. Another factor in Netscape's favour is their 'open' policy towards standards, which essentially means that Netscape will happily publish their standards documents so that other parties can produce technology that complies with Netscape's guidelines. All of this should help to secure their status at the zenith of Internet application development, and will hopefully lead to some well needed egg in the face of Microsoft.

But is the pendulum about to swing back? I refer to the 'death' of IE6 and IE5/Mac and the continued rise of alternative browsers.

This article is a far cry from the one in Issue 122 of PC Answers (August 2003), which is entitled "Netscape Bites The Dust?". It shows an illustration of a tombstone for Netscape haunted by the spectre of Bill Gates. The magazine claims "The browser wars have ended - and while the winners may be AOL and Microsoft, it's hard not to feel like one of the losers".

The article questions how much longer Netscape will be available. I find this premature though coming days after the release of Netscape 7.1! Who knows what will happen in the future?

[tedster]

We've both been crawling down memory lane. I became fascinated with the early history of both HTML and Browsers recently and did some reading about HTML 1.0, HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.0 (which was quickly trash-canned).

The wild and woolly development back then was decidedly non-standard with Netscape introducing "Netscape extensions" right and left -- and then the W3C took root. David Raggett helped churn out HTML 3.2 and the slow march towards standards finally began.

Netscape 2 features [desires.com]
An HTML 1.0 page [tron-x.com] (looks like useit, doesn't it?)
The HTML 2.0 standard [ietf.org] - Tim Berners-Lee in 1995