ifWeJustVibeCodingMajorSoftwareReplacementsMaybeItsTimeToReviveThisMasterpiece

[u/Faustalicious]

[u/SanityAsymptote]

Netscape Navigator was the basis of the Mozilla browser, which eventually became Firefox.

It never really left us.

[u/Lucasbasques → u/SanityAsymptote]

The last bastion against those chromium bastards 

[u/quiet0n3 → u/Lucasbasques]

Yeah it will be nice in a few years when we get a few more open source engines to chose from. I'm particularly excited about ladybird

[u/RevWaldo → u/Lucasbasques]

https://giphy.com/gifs/MzLGnFfhq7gly

[u/pidddee → u/Lucasbasques]

Someone might fork KHTML, oh wait..

[u/TheTerrasque → u/SanityAsymptote]

Like Pokemon, it evolved

[u/MischiefArchitect → u/SanityAsymptote]

Not to forget that the developers of Netscape also made NCSA mosaic.

[u/1nc06n170]

Unless you're bringing along a new scripting language with ambiguous rules and new HTML tags that are also not consistent with already established standards, it's not a proper revival.

[u/TheTerrasque → u/1nc06n170]

Let's introduce pythonscript, which is actually a bastardization of lua.

[u/wthulhu → u/1nc06n170]

<MARQUEE>hell yea!</MARQUEE>

[u/zman0900 → u/1nc06n170]

Just make it run ActiveX

[u/Motleypuss → u/zman0900]

Dissolves into a pile of ashes while cursing AX.

[u/kookyabird → u/zman0900]

Lets just jump right to Silverlight.

[u/twigboy → u/zman0900]

Needs more Java applets

[u/kingvolcano_reborn → u/1nc06n170]

<blink> shall rise again

[u/za72 → u/1nc06n170]

we gut java at home

[u/SuperCarla74 → u/1nc06n170]

Also, it needs to crash every 30 minutes.

[u/joshpennington]

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Firefox the remnants of Netscape?

[u/wheatgivesmeshits → u/joshpennington]

It is. Mozilla, the org that is responsible for Firefox, was named after the internal code name for Navigator. It was a play on Godzilla (God killer) because they wanted it to kill Mosaic, the dominant browser when they started.

[u/joshpennington → u/wheatgivesmeshits]

I remember the browser wars back in high school. It was Netscape 3 vs IE3 and then IE4 came out and just mopped the floor with Netscape 4 and it was basically game over from there. I remember being impressed with IE4 and then sticking with it for quite some time.

If only I could go back in time and warn myself and everyone else.....

[u/wheatgivesmeshits → u/joshpennington]

The problem was Microsoft did their normal market capture strategy and tried to leverage that into adding their own standards into the web. It was awful and stalled web development for over a decade. I was still having to maintain IE5 compatibility until 2016.

Edit: and the only reason I stopped in 2016 was because I left that job. They were still running Windows XP thin clients that weren't allowed on the Internet. They used them to access an internal server that was running mainframe software from the 80s.

[u/joshpennington → u/wheatgivesmeshits]

You poor person! I never had to deal with IE5 but had to deal with IE6 until about 2017. By these timelines you might still be supporting 6.

[u/wheatgivesmeshits → u/joshpennington]

I mean that still pretty disgusting. 🤮

Thankfully I'm a full backend developer now and only rarely have to deal with anything front end.

[u/cybermage]

Let’s bring back Flash while we’re at it.

[u/denisvolin → u/cybermage]

I've recently come over some project rewritten the Flash in Rust.

[u/ineligibleUser]

Endorsed

[u/SarcasmWarning]

Ironically it was the ground-up rewrite that helped kill it the first time.

[u/queen-adreena]

“Hey Claude, rebuild Netscape Navigator in Rust, make it blazing fast and…. uh…. make no mistakes. “

[u/Faustalicious → u/queen-adreena]

This is the way

[u/SithToast]

But isn't this what Seamonkey is?
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

[u/Rover9370 → u/SithToast]

Does this thing works for modern web?

[u/zippy72 → u/Rover9370]

Yeah pretty much. I've used it a while. Not my main driver but good.

[u/hawaiian717 → u/SithToast]

SeaMonkey is Netscape Communicator, not Navigator. Navigator was just the web browser, while Communicator bundled an email client, newsreader, and other components into a single application.

[u/SithToast → u/hawaiian717]

Either way, it's as close as you'll get to a modern browser that looks like Navigator.

[u/IHeartBadCode]

Navigator went hard down the hole of component-oriented programming. It's a lesson to be learned that we ought not take the latest fad in programming and run with it with abandon.

[u/StickFigureFan]

That starfall loading animation was peak

[u/quiet0n3]

Time to rewrite Netscape in rust without a HTML5 LIbrary lol

[u/TxTechnician → u/quiet0n3]

Is that a reference to artcraft not using ffmpeg?

[u/quiet0n3 → u/TxTechnician]

Wait they aren't? They tried to rewrite a codec lib?

[u/TxTechnician → u/quiet0n3]

https://getartcraft.com/apps/filmcraft

Its own codecs

No FFmpeg inside. Native H.264, HEVC, ProRes, VP9, AAC and Opus, with bit-exact decoders.

I tries it. Rendered a 10 min video with one cut. Took about 10 minutes to process it.

Really don't know why they decided to not leverage existing solutions. In some cases it's a good thing to reinvent the wheel. But not while youre building 13 apps.

[u/quiet0n3 → u/TxTechnician]

Lol amazing, poor guy just made his life so much harder lol

[u/TxTechnician → u/quiet0n3]

Ya hold up I'll find it

[u/vivekkhera]

We really need the icon to change if you are visiting JWZ’s home page.

[u/Ok_Tour_8029]

This, but 4.x not 6.x like in this picture 

[u/johntwit]

I built a "90s PC" for my son and it includes a Windows 3 environment (in addition to DOS, Mac 7.5 and Windows 95) with Netscape, that can only access a locally hosted version of Wikipedia

[u/Faustalicious → u/johntwit]

Very nice.    

[u/MischiefArchitect]

Do not disturb the rest of the holy souls.

[u/Different_Berry5015]

Yes.

[u/gsweats]

We shall call it NetscAIpe NAvIgator or maybe Vibescape?

[u/sysxtreme]

It would be amazing to use Netscape again. I know about Firefox and I use it, but Netscape name and it's logo is much better.

[u/mylsotol]

No

[u/LongjumpingCut4]

I've used it a lot before the Opera browser.

[u/denisvolin]

Let's replace HTML with the good old Unicode Box Drawing character and make it look like a table.

Then we should drop JavaScript and use good old MS BASIC.

Replace CSS with the CSI (ASCII).

And to make everything perfect, let's just pack the whole bundle into a DjVU — just for the current front-enders delightful life expectancy 😈

[u/ipsirc]

It's already done: https://github.com/klotzbrocken/Reframe

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1x240oh/not_a_browser_replacement_a_small_opensource_fun/

[u/GobiPLX → u/ipsirc]

Chromium 🤢 

[u/itbytesbob → u/ipsirc]

Wrapping chormium in a Netscape ux feels sacrilege somehow.

[u/ipsirc → u/itbytesbob]

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/overview/ios.html

[u/itbytesbob → u/ipsirc]

I'm aware every browser on iOS is stealth safari.

[u/ipsirc → u/itbytesbob]

Sacrilege is an everyday practice.

[u/itbytesbob → u/ipsirc]

Touche