Netscape Navigator also simply known as Netscape was once the most widely used web browser software. It effectively brought the Internet to millions of people, many of whom were by no means computer specialists. By 2002 this software had virtually disappeared, supplanted by Internet Explorer and to a lesser degree Mozilla Firefox. While Netscape is no longer with us, the changes that it brought to computers and the Internet ever present. Let's take a closer look at this magnificent software's history and the changes it brought.

By the early 1990s the Internet had been around for decades but remained unavailable to the general public. Simply put, accessing the Internet was expensive, complicated, and not very much fun. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet could now store hypertext pages accessible by browsers on a network. Two programming giants, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first graphics-based web browser Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic was very short lived. Andreessen and others founded Netscape Communications whose flagship software was Netscape Navigator.

This browser became available at the end of 1994. It was originally slated to be free for all non-commercial users. A few months later company policy changed and only
educational and non-profit institutions could use Netscape without charge. Shortly after its release Netscape became very, very popular. One of its special features was the ability to display web pages on the fly. Text and graphics started displaying on the user's computer screen immediately; competitive browsers would only display a page after loading all the graphics. Given the slow connections that were then the norm the difference was striking. Netscape users could work with the downloaded web pages. Users of competitive browsers had to be content staring at a blank screen, perhaps for a few minutes. Small wonder that Netscape was such a big hit.

Netscape worked on a wide variety of computer systems. What's more it looked and worked virtually the same on all of them. This browser also rapidly adopted many technical functions even if they were controversial such as cookies, said to attack personal privacy. Netscape experimented with delivering computer services via the web browser rather than via the operating system. As you might well imagine, Microsoft was unhappy with this perspective. It belatedly entered the browser wars with Internet Explorer, also an offshoot of Mosaic. By 1996 Internet Explorer caught up with Netscape, by 1999 Internet Explorer had clearly won the battle.

Why did Microsoft win? Here are several reasons. Netscape was a small company with a single major product while Microsoft was a giant. Netscape's revenue never equaled the interest paid on Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft had over 90% of the operating system market and had no trouble tying Internet Explorer into the operating system. This meant Windows users had immediate access to IE and many saw no need to download Netscape. Internet Explorer did have some technical advantages such as greater speed. I can't really cry over the Netscape owners, near the end of the millennium America Online purchased the company for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer peaked at about 95% web browser usage. It has since declined sharply while remaining number 1.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1941839

 

You can display the contents of a folder on your computer in your browser window. Arrange your screen so you can see your Netscape Navigator (or other browser) window and the contents of your hard drive. On a Macintosh double click the hard drive and view by name. On a Windows 95 computer right-click the My Computer shortcut and choose explore.

Click on the plus sign beside the C drive icon to display the contents of that drive. When you have found the folder you want to display, click on the folder icon, hold the mouse button down and drag the folder into the browser window. Release the mouse button and the contents of you folder will be displayed. Click on a document, folder, or image icon to display the selected item. This is especially helpful if you have been saving images from your web surfing sessions. Click on the back button to get back to the Netscape window you were in before displaying the folder.

Source: http://www.internet4classrooms.com/net_tips.htm#netm31598

Netscape Navigator also simply known as Netscape was once the most widely used web browser software. It effectively brought the Internet to millions of people, many of whom were by no means computer specialists. By 2002 this software had virtually disappeared, supplanted by Internet Explorer and to a lesser degree Mozilla Firefox. While Netscape is no longer with us, the changes that it brought to computers and the Internet ever present. Let's take a closer look at this magnificent software's history and the changes it brought.

By the early 1990s the Internet had been around for decades but remained unavailable to the general public. Simply put, accessing the Internet was expensive, complicated, and not very much fun. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet could now store hypertext pages accessible by browsers on a network. Two programming giants, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first graphics-based web browser Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic was very short lived. Andreessen and others founded Netscape Communications whose flagship software was Netscape Navigator.

This browser became available at the end of 1994. It was originally slated to be free for all non-commercial users. A few months later company policy changed and only
educational and non-profit institutions could use Netscape without charge. Shortly after its release Netscape became very, very popular. One of its special features was the ability to display web pages on the fly. Text and graphics started displaying on the user's computer screen immediately; competitive browsers would only display a page after loading all the graphics. Given the slow connections that were then the norm the difference was striking. Netscape users could work with the downloaded web pages. Users of competitive browsers had to be content staring at a blank screen, perhaps for a few minutes. Small wonder that Netscape was such a big hit.

Netscape worked on a wide variety of computer systems. What's more it looked and worked virtually the same on all of them. This browser also rapidly adopted many technical functions even if they were controversial such as cookies, said to attack personal privacy. Netscape experimented with delivering computer services via the web browser rather than via the operating system. As you might well imagine, Microsoft was unhappy with this perspective. It belatedly entered the browser wars with Internet Explorer, also an offshoot of Mosaic. By 1996 Internet Explorer caught up with Netscape, by 1999 Internet Explorer had clearly won the battle.

Why did Microsoft win? Here are several reasons. Netscape was a small company with a single major product while Microsoft was a giant. Netscape's revenue never equaled the interest paid on Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft had over 90% of the operating system market and had no trouble tying Internet Explorer into the operating system. This meant Windows users had immediate access to IE and many saw no need to download Netscape. Internet Explorer did have some technical advantages such as greater speed. I can't really cry over the Netscape owners, near the end of the millennium America Online purchased the company for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer peaked at about 95% web browser usage. It has since declined sharply while remaining number 1.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1941839

One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that "evaluation copies" of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.

The term "browser wars" is the name given to the competition for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is most commonly used to refer to two specific periods of time: the particularly intense struggle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator during the late 1990s, from 2004 Mozilla came out with Firefox which became a growing threat for IE and eat into its market share, however it was Google's browser Chrome which came later and has today become the dominate browser in the market.

In 1995, the world wide web began to receive a great deal of attention, and netscape navigator was the dominant web browser but microsoft had just launched internet explorer, and included it in windows 95 and by then a browser war had begun. Over the years new versions of both internet explorer and netscape navigator were releasing at a rapid pace. With internet explorer 4, things changed as it offered much more then netscape and was a lot faster. Than internet explorer had dominated the web browser market, while netscape faded out. however things have changed recently as both Firefox and Chrome are the consumers choice today while chrome edges out Firefox as its a lot faster and its market share is growing everyday.

Source: http://goo.gl/Kg7ph

For a long time now Microsoft's Internet Explorer has ruled as 'King of Internet browsers'. Like many of Microsoft's products an initially brutal marketing campaign pushed Internet Explorer into the mainstream's consciousness and from then on it was the logical, default choice. It's free with the operating system, works well, loads any page and is easy to use. Other web browsers soon faded into obscurity and sometimes even died in the shadow of the new king of the pack. Netscape Navigator, the former 'King of the browsers', has now ceased commercial operations and has been taken over by the fan base. Opera is fading into obscurity and Mozilla was facing a similar fate, until recently.

Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) is probably the largest threat that IE has faced in recent times. Currently, according to http://www.w3schools.com, IE is the browser used by 69.9% of Internet users and Firefox is used by 19.1%. This might not seem like much, but according to [http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/] an educated guess at the number of people that use the Internet is somewhere around 605,600,000 users (or was in 2002, the number will have increased substantially by now). That means that (after some erroneous math) a rough stab at guessing the number of people using Firefox is probably over 115,064,000, which isn't a bad user base at all.

When a friend of mine from university first tried to convince me to switch to Firefox I wasn't particularly interested. Basically, IE has done everything that I've wanted in a web browser. He went on at great lengths about the security aspects, the in-built popup blockers, download managers and so on, but I'd spent a fairly large amount of time and money on anti-virus programs, firewalls, spyware removers, and my browser was secure enough. I also have a download manager that I'm very happy with and refuse to change from. After much cajoling I finally agreed to try this newfangled software. I'm glad I did too, because now I have no desire to go back.

Firefox is very easy to install and use. There's nothing complicated, you simply download (for free) and run the install file and then when you run the browser for the first time you get presented with the option of importing your IE favourites (a nice feature, with the click of a button everything is moved across to ease your transition) and also the option of making Firefox your default browser. My initial reaction was fairly apathetic; Firefox seemed pretty much the same as IE and in essence, it is. It has all the basic features of IE, but then I discovered it adds so much more.

The first feature to really grab me is the tabbed browsing. Many alternative browsers and even IE plugins support tabbed browsing (where the new pages can be opened in a tab in the one window, instead of filling the task bar with buttons) but Firefox seems to make it so easy and useful. All you do is click a link with the middle button on your mouse (most newer mice have three buttons, the third often being placed under the scroll wheel) and a new tab opens up containing the page requested. Middle clicking on any tab in the window will close it, without having to actually go to the tab and click close. Ctrl-T will open a new blank tab, and Ctrl-Tab will cycle through them (similar in fashion to Alt-Tab cycling through the open programs). What this all leads to is a much neater Internet experience, with you being able to group certain pages into browser windows, leaving the start bar much cleaner and easier to navigate.

The next feature that caught my attention was the search bar built into the browser. It's small, sleek and simple, built into the right-hand side of the main toolbar beside the address box. You can add many different sites to the search bar and then select the site you wish to search from a drop-down menu. Then it's simply a matter of typing your query in and hitting enter to be taken directly to that page and your search results. This makes searching Ebay, Google, Internet Movie DataBase, Amazon etc. very quick and easy as you can simply type in the desired search criteria as you think of it and get the results back fast. You can get search bar plugins for IE but they tend to take up lots of room, contain ads, and you can usually only have one site per search bar.

Source: http://goo.gl/hqxFC