Netscape Turns 10

Ten years ago, Netscape launched their Navigator Web browser. c|net is celebrating with special coverage.

I remember my first Web browser, back in 1995, was the Internet Chameleon, which apparently many early ISPs distributed to their customers. Chameleon supported standard HTML (back in the day when it was an infantile 2.0 that, for the record, I did use to create Web pages); however, it did not support colors or the FONT tag, so for a while I didn’t know that pages could have any background color other than the default gray. Soon, though, I found Netscape Navigator 2.0 and began using a nice, colorful and easy-to-use browser.

So, I’m a Netscape user of eight years, now—or, I should say, I’m a Firefox user. In 2003, Time Warner helped launch the Mozilla Foundation, which continues the development of the browser engine.

I always find it interesting to find old press releases and early Web pages on the Web. It’s sort of fun because I can say, “I remember when the page looked like that,” or, “I remember when that came out.” In keeping with this sense of nostalgia, take a look at the original Netscape Navigator press release from October 1994, and take a glipse through the eyes of the Wayback Machine at the Netscape Web site as it appeared in 1996 (the earliest version available).