Before the Firefox, Opera, web browsers there was Netscape

21 October 2024

Jamie Zawinski, one of the original creators of the erstwhile Netscape browser, recalls the day the first version, Netscape 0.9, was shipped thirty-years ago, last week:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded.

I started using Netscape, by then known as Netscape Navigator, when I bought my own computer in 1996, meaning I could choose the software I wanted to install.

That was a Windows 95 box, and would have had a version of Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s then web browser offering. But Netscape was all anyone could talk about, so I soon migrated there. I’ve never been a fan of IE, or any Microsoft browser, for that matter. The browser wars of the late nineties left me with a distinct distain for their stuff. I took to using Firefox almost the day it was released, and it remains my default browser to this day.