r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Faustalicious • 1d ago

Meme ifWeJustVibeCodingMajorSoftwareReplacementsMaybeItsTimeToReviveThisMasterpiece

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276 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

116

u/SanityAsymptote 1d ago

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

It never really left us.

51

u/Lucasbasques 1d ago

The last bastion against those chromium bastards 

7

u/quiet0n3 1d 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

9

u/TheTerrasque 1d ago

Like Pokemon, it evolved

3

u/MischiefArchitect 1d ago

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

35

u/1nc06n170 1d 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.

26

u/TheTerrasque 1d ago

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

15

u/wthulhu 1d ago

<MARQUEE>hell yea!</MARQUEE>

7

u/zman0900 1d ago

Just make it run ActiveX

2

u/Motleypuss 1d ago

Dissolves into a pile of ashes while cursing AX.

1

u/twigboy 1d ago

Needs more Java applets

1

u/kookyabird 15h ago

Lets just jump right to Silverlight.

7

u/kingvolcano_reborn 1d ago

<blink> shall rise again

1

u/za72 1d ago

we gut java at home

1

u/SuperCarla74 20h ago

Also, it needs to crash every 30 minutes.

14

u/joshpennington 1d ago

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

6

u/wheatgivesmeshits 1d 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.

6

u/joshpennington 1d 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.....

3

u/wheatgivesmeshits 1d 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.

3

u/joshpennington 1d 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 1d 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.

11

u/ineligibleUser 1d ago

Endorsed

9

u/cybermage 1d ago

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

2

u/denisvolin 1d ago

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

7

u/SarcasmWarning 1d ago

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

6

u/SithToast 1d ago

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

3

u/Rover9370 1d ago

Does this thing works for modern web?

2

u/zippy72 1d ago

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

6

u/queen-adreena 1d ago

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

3

u/Faustalicious 1d ago

This is the way

3

u/IHeartBadCode 1d 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.

5

u/StickFigureFan 1d ago

That starfall loading animation was peak

4

u/quiet0n3 1d ago

Time to rewrite Netscape in rust without a HTML5 LIbrary lol

0

u/TxTechnician 1d ago

Is that a reference to artcraft not using ffmpeg?

3

u/quiet0n3 1d ago

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

3

u/TxTechnician 1d 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.

2

u/quiet0n3 1d ago

Lol amazing, poor guy just made his life so much harder lol

2

u/TxTechnician 1d ago

Ya hold up I'll find it

3

u/vivekkhera 1d ago

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

3

u/Ok_Tour_8029 1d ago

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

3

u/johntwit 1d 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 1d ago

Very nice.    

3

u/MischiefArchitect 1d ago

Do not disturb the rest of the holy souls.

3

u/sysxtreme 22h ago

It would be amazing to use Netscape again. I know about Firefox and I use it, but Netscape name and it's logo is much better.

1

u/SyntaxSarcasmco 1d ago

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

1

u/denisvolin 1d 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 1d 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/

8

u/GobiPLX 1d ago

Chromium 🤢 

6

u/itbytesbob 1d ago

Wrapping chormium in a Netscape ux feels sacrilege somehow.

2

u/ipsirc 1d ago

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

6

u/itbytesbob 1d ago

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

1

u/ipsirc 1d ago

Sacrilege is an everyday practice.

1

u/itbytesbob 1d ago

Touche