Posted 10/13/09 at 07:23:15 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Internet was just beginning to find a mainstream audience in 1994. It could be said that the introduction of Netscape Navigator on October 13th of that year had a lot to do with increasing internet adoption. Netscape was a huge leap forward, easily leapfrogging other graphical browsers. It supported colored backgrounds, text styling, JavaScript, and media embedding. In many ways, it was the first modern web browser.

By 1996, Netscape had captured 80% market share. Development was rapid, seeing the incorporation of CSS and table layout features as time passed. Microsoft put out the first version of Internet Explorer a year after Netscape, but found little success.

The good times couldn’t last forever, though. Microsoft released IE 4 in 1998. Thanks to some advanced features, IE captured the number one spot in only 12 months. A series of poor decisions left the Netscape browser in the hands of AOL, and we all know how that went. Development slowed, and the once great browser languished. Support was finally completely dropped in 2008.

Amid all the dark times, one great thing did happen with Netscape. The browser code was open-sourced in February 1998. It wouldn’t become apparent until years later how well that worked out for the web. From Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation built Firefox. Many feel that the Firefox browser is the best available, and it enjoys a healthy 27% market share. Let’s all have a moment of silence to remember Netscape on, this, its 15th birthday. Was Netscape your first browser? Any fond memories of those dial-up days?

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Posted 10/08/09 at 08:05:17 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Developers of the Firefox Add-on, SkipScreen, had a bit of a rude awakening recently when Mozilla said they’d received a takedown request. The request was made by file hosting site, MediaFire. They claimed that SkipScreen violated their terms of use. To their credit, Mozilla asked the SkipScreen devs to respond before they’d pull the add-on down. Mediafire contends that SkipScreen “bypasses the MediaFire website and steals costly bandwidth”. They also claimed that SkipScreen displays content from other pages.

SkipScreen allows users to bypass the tedious wait times on sharing sites like MediaFire and Rapidshare. This ingenious little add-on will automatically click through whatever hoops necessary to get to the actual download page. Then it will extract and execute the code for the download link. This is how it bypasses those screens that force you to wait ‘X’ seconds, unless you register. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote SkipScreen’s response. They rightly pointed out that the add-on doesn’t technically bypass any screens. It just automates the process of finding a download link. The EFF also pointed out that SkipScreen does not present content from another site. MediaFire has probably just brought more attention to SkipScreen by going through with this complaint. Apparently, they’ve never heard of the Streisand Effect. So… the add-on is still available on the Mozilla site, get it here.

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Posted 09/29/09 at 09:21:55 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Steve Ballmer recently sat down with Techcrunch to wax philosophical about browsers and their connection to the operating system. Ballmer was asked about the legal disputes over Internet Explorer bundling. Without missing a beat, he called the notion that operating systems can be independent of internet access “not a sensible concept”.

Ballmer went on to take a few swings at the upcoming Chrome OS, saying, “If you remember, [Marc Andreessen] said something like, Windows will just be a poorly debugged set of device drivers running Netscape… Now, that’s kind of basically the attitude expressed in Chrome Browser, Chrome OS.” He also called Chrome’s browser market share a “rounding error”, but noted that Firefox is having a real impact. Ouch for Chrome.

When asked about how Microsoft will fare against the continued onslaught of competitors, he answered like he’d been thinking about it a lot. Ballmer explained that Macs attack from the top of the market, and PC sales have gained a bit on Macs in the last year as people shied away from more expensive options. He went on to say that Netbooks were going to continue to be a big part of the Windows strategy.

Ballmer clearly lays out a world in which competitors are sometimes operating systems, sometimes browsers, and in the future may even be both. Even with all these new threats, he seems pretty sure Microsoft will stay on top. What do you think?

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Posted 09/14/09 at 08:04:58 PM by Ryan Whitwam

A big WebGL patch has recently been released, bringing us a step closer to 3D gaming in the browser. WebGL is a project attempting to bring a few new features to HTML5 allowing JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0. When complete, this could mean fairly complex 3D games running in a WebKit browser with no plugins required.

It may even be possible to see support for WebGL in native WebKit browsers in as little as 6 months. Safari and Chrome are probably on the forefront of this technology, as they are based on WebKit. Firefox, while based on the Gecko engine, has an extension capable of displaying a WebGL 3D canvas. As for Internet Explorer, don’t hold your breath. Microsoft still has yet to implement HTML5, let alone upcoming technologies.

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Posted 06/13/08 at 04:54:17 PM by Paul Lilly

Force unsupported FF3 extensions to download, see what questions surround Mac OS X 10.6, Comcast increases upload speeds, and much more!

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Posted 04/04/08 at 08:59:01 PM by Mark Soper

Adobe revises its terms of service for Photoshop Express, Firefox rolls another beta of version 3 with lots of improvements, and Microsoft puts out more information about XP Service Pack 3.

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