Tag Archives: netscape

A relic of computing lore: the General Protection Fault

Netscape 3.04 Gold chokes on jaredwsmith.com

Netscape 3.04 Gold choking very badly on jaredwsmith.com.

Netscape Navigator Gold was the lens through which I first saw the Internet. Thanks to my Windows 3.11 VM and evolt.org’s browser archive, I can attempt to re-see the Web as if it was 1996 all over again. The results are most certainly not pretty, with an abundance of JavaScript errors and, in the case of this very site, a General Protection Fault — remember those? (Interestingly, Internet Explorer 3.01 for Windows 3.x gracefully degraded, while its Windows 95 counterpart crashes with a stack fault.)

Netscape Navigator, 1994-2008

Netscape, 1994-2008

It’s the end of an era: On February 1, 2008, AOL’s Netscape division will pull the plug on Netscape Navigator browsers after several attempts to revive itself with branded versions of the Mozilla Seamonkey suite and later Firefox. AOL is recommending that current Netscape users jump over to the standard Firefox product — which, to be fair, is what people were switching to, anyway. Continue reading →