Netscape Ruminator

Thought I wouldn’t write much this month, but here we are with yet another entry in the same month. Good things come in threes. Consider this one a bonus.

Remember Netscape? It wasn’t just a browser; it was an icon of the early Web of the late 90s. A time when we had to dial-up and have a modem scream to establish a connection to the Internet, wait minutes to download a single JPEG file, leave the computer on over night to download a few music tracks. Web pages had things blinking on them, and “marquees” scrolling like tickers across the screen, accompanied by little GIFs inviting you to email whoever made that site. The browser brought not only HTML, but JavaScript and CSS to the Web… (And uh, frames… But let’s not remember that part.) Netscape was a revolution, even if it had its bugs and problems. It allowed you to see the Web it was meant to be.

To go with the colourful plastic trend of which I reminisced earlier this week, let’s go back before that style came to be. Let’s take a moment to embrace all those little pixelated and low-res icons Netscape had to offer which I’ve extracted from Netscape Navigator 3.0 a few months ago.

The app icon and the one for the files opened by the browser.
Icons shown while loading images or when they couldn’t be loaded.
Images and files showed in directory listings.
The mouse pointers.
The status icons showing when you have mail or when the page is encrypted.
The various toolbars and buttons in the app.
The famous throbber animated while loading a page.

I’ll explore the Web of the 1990s and 2000s further another time—it’s what this site is all about. For now, I hope you enjoy these graphics from the past.

Happy new year! 🎉