Get Navigator!
You clicked the button. We are honour-bound to send you somewhere real.
Every homepage in 1998 had this button, and every one of them linked to a download that no longer exists. Ours goes to the true story instead, because a dead link is the one thing on Crabnet we will not tolerate.
What Navigator was
Netscape Navigator was released in 1994 by Netscape Communications, founded by Marc Andreessen — who had co-written the earlier NCSA Mosaic browser — and Jim Clark. For most of the mid-1990s it was the web for most people, at times holding the overwhelming majority of browser use.
Version 4, the one the badge on our homepage is asking for, shipped in 1997 as part of the Netscape Communicator suite. It is the browser this website is pretending to have been designed for.
What happened to it
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and Navigator’s share collapsed over the following few years — the central fact of what got called the browser wars, and later of a landmark antitrust case.
In January 1998 Netscape announced it would release the browser’s source code. The code went out that March, and the project set up to steward it was called Mozilla. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999. The Netscape-branded browser was discontinued for good in 2008.
Where it actually went
Mozilla rewrote the engine, and that work became Firefox in 2004. So the honest answer to “Get Navigator!” in the present day is that Navigator molted, the way things do, and what crawled out is still available:
- Download Firefox — the direct descendant, still maintained
- Netscape Navigator on Wikipedia — the full history
- The Mozilla Manifesto — a manifesto with rather more follow-through than ours
- The browser wars — how the shape of the web got decided
A note on the badge
“Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0+” is on our homepage as a joke, but it is worth saying what the joke is about. That badge was everywhere because browsers genuinely disagreed about how to draw a page, and authors picked a side.
The disagreement got resolved, mostly. The engines converged. There are three left, and two of them share a heart. You will notice that this is the same shape as everything else on this website, arrived at independently, which is exactly what we have been trying to tell you.