By Lou Dolinar
Second in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Remember Netscape Navigator? If anyone wants to write a soap opera about a program, this is the one.

It was originally developed as a public domain program, Mosaic, with federal funds at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. As the Internet heated up in mid-1994, the NCSA developers left, reworked the code into the first generation Netscape browser, and raised a gazillion dollars in venture capital and public stock offerings.

Netscape quickly became number one in browsing, and as everyone’s gateway to the Internet, Netscape stood to make a fortune. Not only that, but its founders hinted darkly that they would be able to use a browser to run software, thus directly challenging Microsoft monopoly on operating systems and Office style applications.

Microsoft took great umbrage at this and 1995 produced its own browser, Internet Explorer, also based on Mosaic (who said the government never does anything useful?). Everyone who bought Windows got a free copy of IE, which was inextricably intertwined with Windows, e.g. you can’t delete it.

With successive releases of Windows, more and more computers were equipped with IE. Somewhat oddly, this is about the time I noticed Netscape was crashing with increasing frequency. Netscape’s market share plummeted, and what was left of the company was bought up by AOL. However, AOL continued to use IE as its web browser of choice, and Netscape development languished.

But the soap opera doesn’t end there. In 1998, AOL placed Netscape code in the public domain and set up open source development, hoping to harness the legions of volunteer programmers and Microsoft haters who have made Linux such a big hit. The whole effort seemed to go underground in June 2002, when Netscape was resurrected at Mozilla 1.0 to near universal acclaim by reviewers. And AOL tweaked the open source Mozilla to serve as the base for its newest release of Netscape and various marketing ploys.

So here’s the family tree:

-- Netscape Browser 8.1, from AOL via www.netscape.com. It does not include a mail client or web page (html) editor. Various promotional gimmicks are part of the deal, which makes this a little too commercial for our taste. There’s also a $9.95 per month Netscape dialup service. Runs only under Windows

--Mozilla Suite 1.7.12, from The Mozilla Foundation, (www.mozilla.org). They’re not trying to sell you anything. Same underlying programming and features as Netscape, but there’s also a HTML editor and mail client, just like the old Netscape Communicator suite. Instead of the AOL chat client, you get Internet Relay Chat. For Windows, Mac, Linux and various Unix based operating systems. The HTML editor is suitable for light web design and updating, with a built in ftp client, and is the main reason to get this one.

-- Firefox 1.5. at www.mozilla.com. Just a browser, no addons. Smaller, faster and more feature rich than Internet Explorer.

As we noted last week with Opera, the greatest advantage of all these browsers is what they aren’t, which is to say, Microsoft technology. In the case of Netscape et al, the ironies are particularly rich because the most frequently exploited securities flaws lurk in the software that Microsoft deliberately engineered to kill Netscape and extend its monopolies.

IE is tightly intergrated with Windows, and thus an entrée to hacking it; Netscape ain’t and ain’t. VBScript and ActiveX, proprietary to Microsoft, were designed to crowd out Sun’s Java, which was to serve as the base for application programming for Netscape. Microsoft’s own version of Java, meanwhile, has been another chronic security problem. The net result here is that while the Netscape family of browsers won’t completely banish spy ware and adware, your potential exposure is reduced dramatically. All incorporate popup blockers, and none are susceptible to web sites that download rogue software to your PC without permission. They’re free, and tech support is available for a fee.

Features? Other differences among the three, and between them and Internet Explorer, are hardly life-altering.

Tabbed browsing is useful. In all three you can keep a series of web pages open, and even designate a group of pages as your “home page” You then click on the labeled tabs, which sit above the pages, to switch views.

If you want to play with creating web pages, Mozilla’s WYSIWYG HTML editor is fast, simple, and just the trick for amateurs. Firefox has the cleanest user interface. The best feature of Firefox is a drop down search window to which you can customized with your choice of dozens of search engines. There’s also a simple, one-button privacy control that wipes out all trace of what you’ve done in your last session.

Any downside? You’ll occasionally run into a page that Mozilla won’t render correctly, though these are relatively scarce since most developers test their pages with the Mozilla engine as well as IE’s.

Next week we’ll look at the free alternative to Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works, the Open Office suite of software.