The throne of browsers was not always Google Chrome. Not from Internet Explorer. Before Microsoft included its default (and not arguably) browser in the Windows 95 bundle, and certainly long before Firefox or Chrome was released, there was another king of Internet searches: Netscape, which emerged in the mid-90s. together about 80% of the market.

In his good years, his company rang a resounding bell on the Stock Exchange, amassed millions of dollars, and the press compared one of its most famous faces, Marc Andreessen, to Jim Morrison. As it seemed to him at the time, first big star from that new stone of the web.

Netscape has grown like foam.

It demonstrated the reach of the internet beyond Silicon Valley.

The network opened its doors to many.

And it went out with them.

Of course, before leaving a seed this continues today.

Perhaps the first big loser of the browser wars to this day, Netscape’s is one of the most exciting stories in the Net’s teen chronicle.

Somewhere in Illinois…

His short but intense biography began to be written at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s. There, in 1992, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) works, among others, the very young Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina.

there was the internet back then something very different As we know it today: websites were little more than dry text, a mess that was complicated to handle, unattractive, and the images were almost revolutionary. From his position at the NCSA, Andressen and his colleagues set out to turn all of this around. Purpose: cumbersome software applications used to improve then-existing browsers, view websites.

“I wanted people to have access to all this information at any time. From a computer, from anywhere, through a network”, Eric Bina recalled years later: Popular Mechanics. As a result of this effort, the NCSA gave birth Mosaic, an easy-to-use web browser with a practical design, released in 1993… And above all, more visually appealing. Its success – it continued for a decade – caught the attention of Jim Clark, who recently came out of Silicon Graphics, who at the time was looking for his own business project to bring together talent.

Andreessen and Clark got together and the result was Mosaic Communications Corporation, founded in April 1994. Their beginnings were somewhat rough: the University of Illinois, the new to start Mosaic confiscated their intellectual property, went to court, and forced Andressen, Clark and their team to rebrand themselves as Netscape and reshape their NCSA milestone. “We had to start from scratch and get ten times better,” Bina explains.

At the end of 1994, the group already had version 1.0 of Netscape Navigator, it has an unknown level of security that makes it convenient, practical and easy to use in business. Taste. victory. It attracted the attention of new blood and big investors who wanted to support this ship that went to sea.

In August 1995, the project matured enough. public offering and starred in one of the most notorious hits of the mid-90s. to start stepping on parquet for the first time can be a simple curiosity; But in the case of Netscape, it served to show the potential of the virtual arena: if the initial bid had been $28 per share, it hit 75 on the same day, closing the day at an insane valuation of close to 3,000 million.

Beyond the offices, the Wall Street rug, and the salmon pages of the economic papers, the tool was gaining popularity among users. The browser quickly achieved a 75% market share and its features have improved over the years.

But there is no empire that lasts a thousand years. And Netscape, make a difference. The same joys that spurred uncorking champagne bottles in the offices of the Andressen and Clark firm caught the attention of a giant more and more interested in getting his share of afternoon surfing… or straight up the whole cake: Microsoft.

In August 1995, when the US business class had not finished digesting the Netscape stock market bomb, Bill Gates’ company released Internet Explorer 1.0. If it is not easy to deal with the competition, it is not so easy to do it with a giant like Microsoft. Because of its size. But most of all because of the arsenal of resources he has at his fingertips.

There were Redmonds Powerful trick of Windows and it didn’t take long for them to take advantage of it: their package included Internet Explorer (IE) – version 3, for example, integrated into Windows 95 – and polished their browser to rival Netscape. as you remember Popular MechanicsThere’s a certain ironic twist in the history of IE: it was partially “fed” by the same original source as its rival. For its development, Microsoft licensed the software from a company, which in turn agreed with the University of Illinois to license Mosaic.

Explorer and Netscape went head-to-head for a while, and before the late 90’s users still saw various versions of Navigator and Communicator released. Even a spin on Netscape to capture more business profiles. It was of no use to him. In the fourth quarter of 1998, Explorer took the throne of the most used browsers from Netscape.

His fall, though not as rapid as his rise, was certainly just as pronounced. Despite the fact that AOL purchased Netscape for $4,200 million at the end of 1998 and versions 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the browser were released in the following years, the once-successful tool never managed to raise its head. AOL closed the Netscape division in 2003 and five years later, in early 2008, along with most of its staff. wrote the last line with its withdrawal.

End?

If it is true that there was no empire that lasted a thousand years, it is also true that there was no empire that passed without a trace. And Netscape was no exception. Before it fell into the hands of AOL and was even overtaken by Explorer, in early 1998 Netscape released the source code for Netscape Communicator, which sparked the Mozilla Project and planted the seed for Firefox.

Pictures | Michael Arrington (Flickr) and Marcin Wichary (Flickr)