Thursday, March 13, 2008

End of Netscape - browsers I've used.

With the demise of Navigator last week I got to thinking about the various browsers I've used over the last fifteen years - I'll stop short of 2002 - there are reviews aplenty online regarding IE5, IE6, FireFox and Safari.

  • Lynx was the first browser I used back in the 1992/93 - I used to have to dial into work (BBC Television News) and then telnet into one of the PDP-11 machines that ran the Baysys network. I could then run the text-only browser where all the links were numerically annotated (this was under DOS v.5 so no mouse!). Happy days!

  • Netmanage Chameleon came as part of the Planet Internet suite - the ISP I was using in 1994. I bypassed Mosaic because Netmanage was so usable - I'm amazed that it didn't make more a of splash because it wasn't until Navigator v.2 or IE3 that I thought there was a reason to not use it.

  • Netscape v.2 was the browser I started using in 1995 when Planet Internet went bust and I starting using Force9 as my ISP. At the time I was still using Windows 3.11 at home and IE2 was still inferior.

  • IE3 corresponded with me jumping to Windows 95 at home and NT4 at work in '96 - at that point I thought IE was a nicer browser than Netscape.
After that it's a clear run from IE3 to IE6 and then some pre-v1 FireFox after 2003. As I've blogged about before I love FireFox - so much better than IE6 or 7 and definitely more enjoyable than Safari.

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