Our good buddy The Male Brain sent over a rather interesting article from the tech world a couple of weeks ago, about a company that seeks to bring back old-school Netscape Navigator-style all-in-one internet suites:
What goes around comes around. In fact, the 1990s called and want their browser suite back.
Vivaldi, one of the boutique browsers that fight for scraps left on the floor by Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge, has turned to a strategy reminiscent of Netscape Navigator, the world’s first dominant web browser.
Vivaldi 4.0, which launched earlier this month, added an email client, calendar, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader to the already-available browser, creating the 21st century version of Netscape Communicator, an all-in-one kitchen sink released in 1997. That collection ranged from the browser and email client (Netscape Messenger) to calendar and an HTML editor (Netscape Composer).
The successor to Netscape Communicator was, for those with long memories, the Mozilla Suite (later called the Mozilla Application Suite), which began with the former’s code base.
Vivaldi’s makers have to be hoping for a better ending than Netscape saw; that company not only lost its No. 1 spot to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but inside of a decade had effectively disappeared from the browser playing field.
I have not tried this suite out myself, so I cannot comment on its features or usability or anything related to the actual user experience. But I have to say, this is an interesting idea.
Currently, if you look for free, open-source, anti-Big Tech solutions, you have to choose from a wide variety of solutions. If you use Linux, especially, you have tremendous amounts of choice. And that’s great. I love that about Linux. You can download and use Brave browser as your primary browsing tool, and you can use Thunderbird as your fully integrated mail and calendar client. In a lot of ways, Thunderbird honestly works better than Microsoft’s latest version of Outlook. I have to use that for work, and… I HATE it.
The major thing that Outlook does better than Thunderbird – by quite some distance, actually – lies in integrating tasks and keeping the views and layout that you want. Thunderbird still has some annoying bugs in it, whereby if you setup your Tasks view in a certain way, the moment you reboot it, that view disappears.
However, if you want an RSS feed syndicator as well, you’re currently mostly stuck with browser-based solutions like Feedly, or desktop solutions that you have to go hunting around for and which aren’t always very easy to use.
And if you want an HTML editor, well, you have to figure out how to do that in some kind of IDE like Geany or something similar.
None of these things are hard to find or use, especially for experienced Linux users like me. But, as you may have surmised by now, I’m KIND OF A MASSIVE NERD. (You don’t spend all day long staring at SQL code until you get a headache, like I’ve been doing for weeks, unless there is something rather badly borked in your brain – or unless you’re a massive nerd.)
For those who just want something simple that basically bloody WORKS, and doesn’t end up sending vast amounts of data to MIcrosoft, Google, and others, then this is an interesting and powerful potential alternative.
Now, here’s where I have to admit that I’m so old and creaky that I do, in fact, remember the days of Netscape Navigator and Communicator. Granted, teh innarwebz were rather simpler and less crazy back then than they are now. But the frontiers of telecommunications technology back then had barely been explored. And Netscape’s Navigator and Communicator packages represented the cutting edge back then.
Of course, that’s about the time when Microsoft came along to piss in the punch-bowl by including the entire kitchen sink in their crufty, buggy, awful, stupid, slow, annoying, bloated, crappy, idiotic [20,000-word anti-Windows rant deleted for sake of reader sanity and time] operating system. Microsoft Internet Exploder and their email client – I forget what it was called, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Outlook – came for FREE with WinDOZE. And that was all she wrote.
(How highly satisfying it was to watch Microsoft take a serious dose of its own medicine when Google came along and destroyed their freeware business with a better product, eh?)
As for this “Netscape Redux” approach to doing things, we’ll see how it goes. But if you look at Vivaldi’s features, it has some amazing stuff packed into the browser alone:
And if you look at the full-banana browser, it does stuff that pretty much nothing else does right now.
I quite like the fact that this new browser allows you to pick and choose what you want to do. You can get the fully loaded version with mail client and RSS feeder and translation services all built in. Or you can download just the browser itself. It’s all in one package either way, and it looks like you can adjust your choice later on if you want.
This is how web-based technology SHOULD be – fast, simple, intuitive, flexible, fun to use, and capable of growing and changing with the user.
Give it a shot and see what you think. I might do the same myself, though I’m extremely satisfied with Brave right now and I like Thunderbird’s ability to integrate multiple mailboxes, including my Gmail, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange accounts all in one place.
One thing is for sure, in my mind:
The Big Tech oligopoly has pushed too far, too fast, and too greedily. And, while they don’t really see it yet, they are bleeding users to less offensive, idiotic, and evil alternatives.
It’s a good time to be a web-geek, is all I can say.
1 Comment
“And if you want an HTML editor, well, you have to figure out how to do that in some kind of IDE like Geany or something similar.”
Go truly 96 and just save a Libre Office Writer document as HTML.
Personally I am tired of Javascript “Progressive enhancement” on the Net. I am a web dev by trade so allow me to explain the term to those who aren’t.
In the 96 web you had html. Maybe a little javscript for games or little alter boxes. Now you have a page with no content load and then javascript fires off to load everything else. When I first encountered this (also called Ajax) in the early 2000s it was great, for Intranets within a company to make web apps for data input, do an Ajax call to hit a databse and populate a dropdown with all the options rather than load that with the page itself. But everyone else has since taken it too far and broken the web. Most websites now literally everything is loaded through ajax and its bloated everything. I do want the 90s web back.