Netscape, every mention

The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired Feb 15, 2022 · 40 mentions

• ▶ 10:48 Brendan Eich So I think even in 1996, some of us, Lou Montulli at Netscape did the cookie, and there was a concern that it was being used for third party tracking or could be used.
• ▶ 12:40 Ben Gilbert Even before Netscape, before JavaScript, you joined Silicon Graphics.
• ▶ 14:35 Brendan Eich It was before, I think, because early on, Jim realized he wasn't CEO, so Ed McCracken was running it, and Jim was on the board, but I think at some point, Jim had trouble as founder keeping control, as usual, due to dilution, and so by 94,…
• ▶ 15:14 Brendan Eich And I could see why Clark left when I heard he was doing Netscape.
• ▶ 15:17 Ben Gilbert Okay, so how did you find your way to Netscape then?
• ▶ 16:53 Ben Gilbert So did a big crew of those folks leave to go to Netscape or was that you on your own?
• ▶ 16:59 Brendan Eich and I jumped to Netscape within the same week.
• ▶ 17:27 Brendan Eich To me, a little bit scandalous, because in the eighties, SGI had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO, whereas Netscape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples, and it was not profitable.
• ▶ 17:45 Brendan Eich Well, so the browser was charged for in commercial settings, and Netscape used the IPO to buy a bunch of server side companies and projects
• ▶ 18:07 Brendan Eich The Netscape version was called Electrical Fire, and it was being developed by this super brain from MIT, Walter Moore Horwath.
• ▶ 18:14 Brendan Eich But Netscape couldn't pull it off, and Sun was going to win with Hotspot.
• ▶ 18:26 David Rosenthal So AOL comes in, they buy Netscape.
• ▶ 18:40 Brendan Eich Microsoft had simply killed Netscape by bundling IE, which it copied and sort of acquired pieces of through Spyglass.
• ▶ 19:31 Brendan Eich Compact Shift Netscape as the default browser was illegal, and they got convicted for it.
• ▶ 19:36 Brendan Eich But it was too late to save Netscape, and yet a few executives, Mark and Eric Hahn and others, wanted to save something through open source.
• ▶ 19:48 Brendan Eich People were excited about the idea of doing a commercial open source project out of the remains of Netscape, at least in the browser team.
• ▶ 20:34 Brendan Eich Yeah, I mean, initially, Netscape was closed.
• ▶ 20:43 Brendan Eich They'd been sort of messing up Netscape for Mail News, and they, they didn't like open source.
• ▶ 21:05 Brendan Eich Yes, and the Mozilla Suite was pretty much the un-Netscape, to use un-Googled as an analogy, the un-Netscape version of the code, and this actually started winning users because AOL bought Netscape and started festooning Netscape with
• ▶ 21:05 Brendan Eich Yes, and the Mozilla Suite was pretty much the un-Netscape, to use un-Googled as an analogy, the un-Netscape version of the code, and this actually started winning users because AOL bought Netscape and started festooning Netscape with
• ▶ 21:40 Ben Gilbert You've taken the code out of Netscape.
• ▶ 22:36 Brendan Eich I think Netscape made a mistake in 96 when they bought a company to go after Lotus Notes, because it didn't work.
• ▶ 22:42 Brendan Eich And they took the Netscape two and three, a mail reader and newsreader, which Jamie and Terry Weissman, who I've mentioned, worked on and did a pretty good job on in very short time.
• ▶ 23:04 Brendan Eich But that did not help Netscape.
• ▶ 23:17 Brendan Eich And in fact, as AOL ingested Netscape, which at first didn't involve any
• ▶ 23:26 Brendan Eich Uh, they started wondering what they bought and why, and so for the first two years, I think, 99 and 2000, the head of Netscape division was decapitated, and somebody I liked, a nice guy I mentioned, took their place, but it didn't go well…
• ▶ 24:01 Brendan Eich So a lot of the job in the early days was trying to build up the mostly volunteer community to countervail the Netscape employees who were not all top notch at that point.
• ▶ 25:10 Brendan Eich Kind of shamed and threatened Netscape, but Netscape was also getting these annual decapitations.
• ▶ 25:17 Brendan Eich And so by 2003, we learned through our IBM friends that there was going to be curtains for the Netscape division.
• ▶ 26:05 Brendan Eich Netscape management
• ▶ 26:26 Brendan Eich So, you know, the Netscape management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth at this point.
• ▶ 26:33 Brendan Eich They couldn't decapitate it as the Netscape division had its head taken off annually.
• ▶ 26:39 Brendan Eich But when we learned AOL was going to shut down Netscape, Ted, to his credit, asked Mitch what to do.
• ▶ 28:59 Brendan Eich It was just a small pirate ship within Netscape.
• ▶ 29:23 Brendan Eich I had to recruit Ben Goodger out of Netscape to take over for Blake, and that went from Firefox, 0.6 on to one oh, and Ben did a lot of the important work on add-ons and search integration and making it really sing on Windows.
• ▶ 30:10 Ben Gilbert Whereas everyone who was stuck inside of Netscape at AOL had sort of lost the fire.
• ▶ 30:38 Brendan Eich Kind of sassing Netscape management for their foolish bloated suite, and also making great tools and things that Hewitt worked on, Firebug and the autocomplete stuff, and that led to early adopters loving it so much more than all the other…
• ▶ 32:12 Brendan Eich Eventually, that led to WebKit being forked from KHTML in 2005, but getting Dave at Apple was quite a coup for Don Melton, the manager at the time of Safari, who was also ex Netscape.
• ▶ 1:02:42 Brendan Eich I knew how to do 10 people out of AOL with the Netscape Mozilla codebase because I'd worked on that codebase with hundreds of engineers at
• ▶ 1:02:51 Brendan Eich You know, Netscape AOL.