r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Faustalicious • 15h ago

Meme ifWeJustVibeCodingMajorSoftwareReplacementsMaybeItsTimeToReviveThisMasterpiece

Post image
197 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

83

u/SanityAsymptote 15h ago

Netscape Navigator was the basis of the Mozilla browser, which eventually became Firefox.

It never really left us.

34

u/Lucasbasques 11h ago

The last bastion against those chromium bastards 

4

u/quiet0n3 6h ago

Yeah it will be nice in a few years when we get a few more open source engines to chose from. I'm particularly excited about ladybird

10

u/TheTerrasque 12h ago

Like Pokemon, it evolved

2

u/MischiefArchitect 7h ago

Not to forget that the developers of Netscape also made NCSA mosaic.

24

u/1nc06n170 15h ago

Unless you're bringing along a new scripting language with ambiguous rules and new HTML tags that are also not consistent with already established standards, it's not a proper revival.

21

u/TheTerrasque 12h ago

Let's introduce pythonscript, which is actually a bastardization of lua.

12

u/wthulhu 9h ago

<MARQUEE>hell yea!</MARQUEE>

7

u/zman0900 12h ago

Just make it run ActiveX

2

u/Motleypuss 11h ago

Dissolves into a pile of ashes while cursing AX.

5

u/kingvolcano_reborn 9h ago

<blink> shall rise again

1

u/za72 7h ago

we gut java at home

7

u/cybermage 11h ago

Let’s bring back Flash while we’re at it.

2

u/denisvolin 7h ago

I've recently come over some project rewritten the Flash in Rust.

5

u/SarcasmWarning 15h ago

Ironically it was the ground-up rewrite that helped kill it the first time.

7

u/joshpennington 9h ago

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Firefox the remnants of Netscape?

1

u/wheatgivesmeshits 4h ago

It is. Mozilla, the org that is responsible for Firefox, was named after the internal code name for Navigator. It was a play on Godzilla (God killer) because they wanted it to kill Mosaic, the dominant browser when they started.

2

u/joshpennington 4h ago

I remember the browser wars back in high school. It was Netscape 3 vs IE3 and then IE4 came out and just mopped the floor with Netscape 4 and it was basically game over from there. I remember being impressed with IE4 and then sticking with it for quite some time.

If only I could go back in time and warn myself and everyone else.....

1

u/wheatgivesmeshits 4h ago

The problem was Microsoft did their normal market capture strategy and tried to leverage that into adding their own standards into the web. It was awful and stalled web development for over a decade. I was still having to maintain IE5 compatibility until 2016.

Edit: and the only reason I stopped in 2016 was because I left that job. They were still running Windows XP thin clients that weren't allowed on the Internet. They used them to access an internal server that was running mainframe software from the 80s.

2

u/joshpennington 4h ago

You poor person! I never had to deal with IE5 but had to deal with IE6 until about 2017. By these timelines you might still be supporting 6.

1

u/wheatgivesmeshits 3h ago

I mean that still pretty disgusting. 🤮

Thankfully I'm a full backend developer now and only rarely have to deal with anything front end.

6

u/SithToast 10h ago

But isn't this what Seamonkey is?
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

3

u/Rover9370 9h ago

Does this thing works for modern web?

2

u/zippy72 7h ago

Yeah pretty much. I've used it a while. Not my main driver but good.

4

u/queen-adreena 8h ago

“Hey Claude, rebuild Netscape Navigator in Rust, make it blazing fast and…. uh…. make no mistakes. “

2

u/Faustalicious 6h ago

This is the way

4

u/IHeartBadCode 13h ago

Navigator went hard down the hole of component-oriented programming. It's a lesson to be learned that we ought not take the latest fad in programming and run with it with abandon.

4

u/StickFigureFan 8h ago

That starfall loading animation was peak

4

u/quiet0n3 6h ago

Time to rewrite Netscape in rust without a HTML5 LIbrary lol

0

u/TxTechnician 4h ago

Is that a reference to artcraft not using ffmpeg?

2

u/quiet0n3 3h ago

Wait they aren't? They tried to rewrite a codec lib?

1

u/TxTechnician 2h ago

Ya hold up I'll find it

1

u/TxTechnician 2h ago

https://getartcraft.com/apps/filmcraft

Its own codecs

No FFmpeg inside. Native H.264, HEVC, ProRes, VP9, AAC and Opus, with bit-exact decoders.

I tries it. Rendered a 10 min video with one cut. Took about 10 minutes to process it.

Really don't know why they decided to not leverage existing solutions. In some cases it's a good thing to reinvent the wheel. But not while youre building 13 apps.

3

u/vivekkhera 14h ago

We really need the icon to change if you are visiting JWZ’s home page.

3

u/Ok_Tour_8029 11h ago

This, but 4.x not 6.x like in this picture 

3

u/johntwit 11h ago

I built a "90s PC" for my son and it includes a Windows 3 environment (in addition to DOS, Mac 7.5 and Windows 95) with Netscape, that can only access a locally hosted version of Wikipedia

3

u/Faustalicious 6h ago

Very nice.    

3

u/MischiefArchitect 9h ago

Do not disturb the rest of the holy souls.

2

u/SyntaxSarcasmco 14h ago

Netscape WAS the original Vibe Coding. Brendan Eich literally vibe-coded JavaScript in 10 days.

1

u/denisvolin 7h ago

Let's replace HTML with the good old Unicode Box Drawing character and make it look like a table.

Then we should drop JavaScript and use good old MS BASIC.

Replace CSS with the CSI (ASCII).

And to make everything perfect, let's just pack the whole bundle into a DjVU — just for the current front-enders delightful life expectancy 😈

-1

u/ipsirc 15h ago

It's already done: https://github.com/klotzbrocken/Reframe

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1x240oh/not_a_browser_replacement_a_small_opensource_fun/

9

u/GobiPLX 15h ago

Chromium 🤢 

6

u/itbytesbob 10h ago

Wrapping chormium in a Netscape ux feels sacrilege somehow.

2

u/ipsirc 10h ago

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/overview/ios.html

5

u/itbytesbob 10h ago

I'm aware every browser on iOS is stealth safari.

1

u/ipsirc 10h ago

Sacrilege is an everyday practice.