This version introduced a number of new features:
- Plugins! This was the first time a web page could make sound, via RealAudio.
- Incremental display of progressive JPEGs on slow dialup connections (which I demoed a few years back.)
- Animated GIFs that were actually useful. Our support for GIF89a meant inter-frame timing, transparency, and the ability for animations to loop -- a Netscape extension present in every animGIF to this day: Application Block "NETSCAPE2.0"!
- HTML frames.
- JavaScript! That wasn't my fault, but you still have my apologies. In our defense, if we hadn't done it, MICROS~1 would have done something far, far worse.
- And of course my baby, the first release of Netscape Mail and News.
Importantly, all of these features existed identically on Mac, Windows, and nine flavors of Unix, and were released simultaneously. This was basically unheard of at the time.
Terry and I got to push Netscape Mail out to something like 4 million users in those first few weeks, most of them new to the internet, so for a huge number of people it was their introduction to email. It didn't have some power-user features found in Eudora, but it was light years ahead of AOL.
Also it was almost certainly the first mail reader that allowed you to send HTML email. You had to compose them separately and then attach the files, but it worked. So HTML email is probably my fault. You're welcome.
It was also a USENET reader. You will not believe (or probably you will) the hate I got for this from people whose thought this was an abomination, because their ideas about user interface design told them that a mail reader and a USENET reader have nothing to do with each other and should have no UI components in common. It's not like they display lists of messages and allow you to reply to them. They certainly don't do that. That's just science.
Anyway this also meant it was the first easy-to-use program that let you post HTML to USENET. Again, you're welcome. Oh and also MIME-encoded attachments rather than uuencode, and it would also display those attachments inline -- so again, for all the porn, you're welcome.
The wild popularity and success of Netscape Mail indirectly helped kill the company.
We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that my boss (now capo of noted criminal enterprise Andreessen-Horowitz-Whorfin-Lizardo, and a noted murder enthusiast and fascist in his own right, but I digress) saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "Since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to 'The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"
To do this, Netscape bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. By which I mean: they had like 20 or more engineers and over several years had built a Windows-only mail reader that did did like 3/4ths of what Terry and I had built in 6 months, and had completely face-planted in the market. So Netscape bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. And like a chestburster, somehow Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape, as if Netscape had been acquired instead of the other way around.
Anyway, since they won the startup-acquisition lottery, they then they went off into the weeds with Second System Syndrome so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". Netscape "3.0" was the bugfix patch-release for 2.0, because it had been intended to be called "2.1" all along.
And "4.0" was the beginning of the long death spiral.
(I mean, the fact that Microsoft illegally used their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to destroy an existing market (web browsers) by driving the market price for browsers to zero, instantaneously eliminating something like 60% of Netscape's revenue, didn't help. We were stabbed in the front and the back at the same time.)
I would say that Netscape 3.2 is the canonical, best version of the original browser. But 2.0 was pretty fuckin' good.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
