The time of Netscape

An old 1995 article from Fast Company:

Can You Work in Netscape Time? (archived link) reminisce about the time where Netscape was the hot startup that would change the world in 1994, and how it was to work there.

The culture seems to be very much Silicon Valley: work very hard and maybe you’ll get rich. It seems to have worked well for pre-IPO Netscape employees, better than for Spyglass, who at the time was the direct competitor building a web browser out of Mosaic.

It’s hard to see how things would have gone without Netscape, but surely Netscape Navigator triggered a chain of events into turning the web to the ubiquitous technology that it is, chain that likely started at NCSA. JavaScript also was invented Netscape, so did the infamous <blink> tag.

Netscape demise, caused by Microsoft ruthless dominant position abuse, led to the creation of the Mozilla project. Mozilla¹ led the charge helping to take the web back from Microsoft Internet Explorer dominance. But then Google showed up, and we have a New Internet Explorer: Google Chrome.

Afterwards, being swallowed by AOL, Netscape has just been brand necrophilia, or worse, and forgotten.

If you want to read the story of Netscape up to 1998, there is Speeding the Net: the inside story of Netscape and how it challenged Microsoft on the Internet Archive lending library.