Peak internet 1.0:

I have Navigator 1.0 on a disk in my basement. Its my precious.

Ok, going to scream into the abyss here...

I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can't recall... You get the picture.

Everyone I've told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated "N" on would freeze and if you didn't move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.

You'll think I'm crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.

I have used the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase, and heritage, for nearly a third of a century, now.

NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape -> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

I now hew more to alternates such as LibreWolf and Floorp, but I still run Firefox EME-Free as my default.

Yes, of course. We also had a notebook (these paper-based thingies, not a digital one) in the terminal room where we collected interesting web site addresses back then before Altavista and bookmarks.

The URL about:mozilla was always full of fun :)

You can download all the old Netscapes here - http://home.mcom.com/archives/

I found Mosaic 1 here - https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1

I sure remember the HOURS it took me to download that sucker on my 14.4kb modem. I was blessed by the gods with a parent in the computer industry even then so we had a 2nd phone line that I could monopolize for a day of agonizingly watching and praying not to lose connection again.

14.4k baud modem download.. yes.. I also plastered this on old wepages.. hahahaha

No, I remember Opera 7/8 though. Well... the one with ads.

It had the best loading animation with the comets flying by. Much better than IE rotating and becoming the planet earth. This was back when you actually had to wait for pages to load.

I remember using Mosaic.

Apparently yes.

Yes.

I even remember using Gopher which was the closest there was to HTTP and Browsers before they were invented.

(Also, don't get me started on FTPmail).

And no, even with the enshittification of the last decade or so, I would still not call those "the good old days".

Now, get out of my lawn you wipper snappers!

I remember walking into the college library in late 94, seeing all the real computer geeks standing around one of the newer 486s, they were installing Navigator Beta 1.1.

We had been using FTP, Gopher and Telnet for a while, but this was the first time that any of us had actually used a web browser.

Of course, there was no search yet, so while sites did exist, it took them a little time to dig through enough IRC and Usenet to find things to visit.

https://isp.netscape.com/

Not this specific version, but NN in general, as a kid I sure do.

I seem to remember there being yellow…

Yes, on top of trumpet winsock.

It's all so much better now.

I was never a fan of Netscape. For whatever reason, it always felt like it was so much slower than ie and web pages would often be broken.

people who remembered college days upon seeing this, please queue here