9 ms·

Netscape ISP Homepage

165 points by fireeyed 5y ago

AceJohnny2 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Internet_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Internet_Ser... > Netscape ISP is a dial-up Internet service once offered at US$9.95 per month. The company serves web pages in a compressed format to increase effective speeds up to 1300 kbit/s (average 500 kbit/s). The Internet service provider is now run by Verizon under the Netscape brand. The low-cost ISP was officially launched on January 8, 2004. Its main competitor is NetZero. Netscape ISP is no longer actively marketed, but for a time its advertising was aimed at a younger demographic, e.g., college students, and people just out of school, as an affordable way to gain access to the Internet.
- akoster 5y ago
  Reminds me of Opera Mini [1] utilizing Opera’s compression servers (which really helped with capped mobile data plans a few years back) or Google Web Light [2] which I have heard might be similar [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Light
  - zorked 5y ago
    I used to be involved with an ISP-specific product which was basically a plain-old HTTP proxy that would ensure everything is compressed with gzip at max settings and which downscaled images. For dial up, it worked well. For everything else the added latency that came with re-enconding reduced subjective connection speed considerably unless you were lucky to hit the server's cache.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      It's unfortunate how many of these things won't work so well with SSL everywhere. At one point I toyed with the idea of a setup that'd rely on keeping a cache reasonably coherent between two sides of a slow link, but it'd be most effective if it was shared, but it's a non-starter unless it's only shared between people who'd be happy with MITM'ing their SSL connections for the sake of getting more of their connections. Basically if both sides have a decent sized cache, on a cache miss you can re-request the resource from the origin but instead of returning the full page compare it to the cache entries you know the other side also has and produce a diff, and return just the compressed diff. It also overcomes bad cache settings etc., as long as the slow link between the caches is the primary performance limit of course. (To guard against the caches going out of sync, you can of course return a hash, and let the cache on the "client side" force a refresh if it does) If I ever find myself on a really slow connection again, maybe I'll test it with a VPN to a VPS.
  - rollcat 5y ago
    Opera Mini doesn't just compress web pages. They run Presto (their OG web engine) headless on the backend, pre-render the pages, and push THAT to the device. It doesn't just conserve bandwidth but also the CPU power.
    - tootie 5y ago
      Amazon Silk works the same way. I think it's the default browser for Kindle devices.
buildbuildbuild 5y ago
Surprising to see recent headlines. Who here is still maintaining this. I am so nostalgic and intrigued.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  It must be AOL. AOL runs Verizon's Mail. When I clicked to check my Netscape Mail, which I have never had, I was taken to an AOL.com mail login page. Plus, the Netscape page attempts to load AOL resources.
- tombert 5y ago
  I have SeaMonkey installed alongside Firefox on my laptop simply because it's kind of fun to browse the web in a browser that sort of looks like the late Netscape Navigator, or early Mozilla browser. It's fun loading a Netscape site in it.
  - visiblink 5y ago
    Ditto. While Mozilla shut down the mailing lists this week, there's now an alt.comp.software.seamonkey newsgroup.
    - swiley 5y ago
      It's been a while since I've tried newsgroups. They were already on their way out by the time I was born. Does gnus still work? Is there a way to connect (preferable with the ability to post) with it for free? How does one make a newsgroup?
      - UncleSlacky 5y ago
        > Is there a way to connect (preferable with the ability to post) with it for free? Yep, you can get a free account at https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ if your ISP doesn't carry newsgroups (note it's for text groups only). Personally, I use Thunderbird as a newsreader (and my ISP still carries most newsgroups), there are also dedicated apps like Pan: http://pan.rebelbase.com/ http://pan.rebelbase.com/
jtchang 5y ago
Holy those pages load fast. Design feels slightly dated but the speed is fantastic.
- thwarted 5y ago
  And all the SPA frameworks were created to make pages load faster for a better experience, and now the original, simpler stuff is a much faster loading experience.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    They are almost always noticeably faster for page loads after the initial one. If they aren't then it was built really, really wrong
    - thwarted 5y ago
      Noticeably faster on subsequent page loads compared to the first one, sure. But many SPA take longer, in general, to get to the usable point than this netscape page.
      - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        Yes that is why I explicitly said "after the first one". That was my whole point it is slower on the first and faster on later ones. Which is why they are for Applications
        thwarted 5y ago
        The performance of website SPAs over time isn't the comparison I made. In my experience, the first, second, and any later load-to-usable time of a SPA is longer than the load-to-usable time for websites that are implemented like this netscape site.
- realtalk667 5y ago
  every change they could make to feel the site feel less 'dated' would be a change for the worse.
neandrake 5y ago
Aside from being a little small, the layout of this page is very easy on my eyes and also holds my attention compared to most news sites I come across. It also loads and displays content really well without requiring external javascript.
statenjason 5y ago
That loaded fast. Also, seeing the network request for background gradients takes me back to an era of CSS I don't miss. Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners?
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners? Originally it was kinda simple: just a 3x3 <table> with stretched images in the outer cells, then <div>-itis. Fortunately we rarely needed 9 nested <div> elements - a common trick was to create a 2000x2000px-sized PNG containing the top-left, top, and left-edge border and then another for the other side and make that a background image - the only problem was the lack of support for transparency and how IE would get PNG colors wrong for some reason until IE8 unless you altered the gamma ( https://salman-w.blogspot.com/2011/03/png-color-problem-in-ie.html https://salman-w.blogspot.com/2011/03/png-color-problem-in-i... )
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I remember building rounded containers this way, it’s been so long I had forgotten how much border-radius has saved us from those little hells.
    - karlshea 5y ago
      And that was around the time the CMS was really getting mainstream (instead of Frontpage). So then you had to go digging through a million templates trying to wrap the right thing with your 3x3 table.
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        It was fun breaking sites with XSS vulnerabilities (i.e. most of them) where entering </table> into an unsanitized user-content editor would break the entire website layout.
- slater 5y ago
whalesalad 5y ago
I remember using the first version of the Netscape browser that had this aesthetic and used this page.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I like that sportsball and celebs is off to the side - to differentiate it from news.
thought_alarm 5y ago
"Designed for AOL Netscape 6"
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  https://help.aol.com/products/netscape-isp https://help.aol.com/products/netscape-isp
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  A relatively capable browser, with DOM and JavaScript. I test with it regularly.
  - spiritplumber 5y ago
    An elegant browser for a more civilized age.
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      Being based on early Mozilla Suite, it is a bit rough around the edges, feels alpha quality, but has a nice feel, and quite elegant.
kivlad 5y ago
https://www.compuserve.com https://www.compuserve.com is the same thing. Oath/Verizon is keeping these sites on some kind of life support to this day.
- swiley 5y ago
  Wow that feels so weird seeing spammy headlines with a minimalist layout and knowing it's not broken.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    I was surprised not to see the old interactive Flash ads like "Swat the fly for a better insurance rate!"
- mrweasel 5y ago
  They actually took the time to make it at "template" of sorts. I wonder if the sites are deliberately made using an older design language to appeal to a certain audience? You almost want to clone it and just replace the content with something more interesting.
  - caslon 5y ago
    Actually, the Netscape page is just a thin veneer over the CompuServe page. If you take the green gifs off, the page is filled with CompuServe colors. It's less a template and more Netscape wearing the skin of CompuServe turned green.
- whoisthemachine 5y ago
  I prefer to think there's some developer out there who wrote wonderful code to made that "Homepage" performant and easy to maintain, and has successfully argued for their continued existence, occasionally pushing out a small feature addition to feed in data from new sources as old sources go.
jandrese 5y ago
Some people are going to call the design dated, but to me that kind of layout is timeless. Just the facts and it has good information density. But LOL that the "Maps" link goes to mapquest.com. In other news Mapquest still exist.
- Igelau 5y ago
  Needs more frames!
  - GrumpyNl 5y ago
    Old school, great load time.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  It’s completely beautiful to me. Just the information you need and no bs.
- mypalmike 5y ago
  I still use the verb "mapquesting" when referring to online maps. It gets a laugh every once in a while.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Only one response comes to mind: OK boomer.
- basch 5y ago
  Compare that to the garbage that is the default msn page in Edge. I’m disappointed Microsoft isn’t using their new tab page to be more educational. So many scammy ads.
  - mikestew 5y ago
    One of the lists I'm using on the home pi-hole apparently isn't fond of MSN, either, because "Safari can't find the server 'www.msn.com'. Sure enough, the pi-hole query log says it's being blocked. Maybe I'll disable for a few minutes and see for myself... Yeah, now I see why. The MSN home page is worthy of an article, hell, a series of articles. I wouldn't dare click a thing on that page.
coolreader18 5y ago
I feel like the first character of this title should be lowercased, URLs traditionally are and I thought it said "LSP" instead of "ISP"
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Agree @mods
  - kiwijamo 5y ago
    Has the title changed in between your post and now? It currently is 'Netscape ISP Homepage' which makes sense to me?
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      "Isp.netscape.com" was the title.
human 5y ago
Looking at this design triggers so much nostalgia. Reminds me of my early days learning html.
bigiain 5y ago
I was sorely disappointed to see that was laid out with divs and css, not tables...
ficklepickle 5y ago
I was curious if I could find anything out about their stack. Turns out they are using something called Apache Traffic Server[0]. > Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation [0] http://trafficserver.apache.org/ http://trafficserver.apache.org/
- mike_d 5y ago
  Traffic Server is a caching HTTP server originally built by Inktomi. At one point a good majority of the "internet" was served by AOLServer, a multithreaded TCL scriptable server written by NaviSoft and acquired by AOL.
xiii1408 5y ago
My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP. She lives in a very rural county in Tennessee, and there are no DSL, cable, or fiber options. Her house is unfortunately also down in a valley, so there's no cell phone reception, although there's reasonable 5G service if you walk up to the top of a nearby hill. Perhaps Skylink will be an option soon, although not yet. My parents bought her a Kindle a while back, which is difficult to use without WiFi internet access, although it doesn't require much bandwidth. I actually made her a dial-up WiFi router using an RPi, USB WiFi and dial-up modem adapters so that she can create a WiFi network off of her dial-up connection to download e-books. My friends helped me use the GPIO to set up a nice, user-friendly button to connect and disconnect the dial-up connection, as well as a notification light to signal whether the dial-up is connected, connecting, or off. (Remember you can't leave dial-up on all the time, since you want to receive or place calls using your landline sometimes.) Actually, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the dial-up connection working with an open-source Linux client instead of Netscape's proprietary Windows client. I ended up having to use VirtualBox and some Linux FIFO's to listen in on what the proprietary windows client was doing when connecting. In case anyone else happens to come upon this problem: the proprietary Netscape client lowercases the password before sending it over the wire. :P
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  Have you considered open sourcing the work you did? Sounds interesting for hobbyists and retro technologists.
- user3939382 5y ago
  I would make a deal with a friend or neighbor who gets 5G reception on top of the hill. Connect a 5G modem to a Ubiquiti point-to-point antenna set that beams the connection to the house at the bottom (they have different products depending on the distance). That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.
  - kiwijamo 5y ago
    Have you missed all the recent chatter about Ubiquiti? I'd steer well clear and look at other options such as MicroTik et al.
virtue3 5y ago
This site loaded so freaking fast it blew my mind.
aphextron 5y ago
Rememeber how great the web used to be?
- topspin 5y ago
  That page, including the thumbnails, would load in under 18 seconds over a 56kbps analog modem. I remember watching the JPEGs emerge from the progressive blur as pages loaded.
taylorfinley 5y ago
Today I learned you can still order an AOL CD: https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM
gremlinsinc 5y ago
Politically I lean left, so my take from my view is the articles so far I've read are almost 90s like as they're much more just the facts and less spin. (Of course that's cause it's mostly just a wrapper around reuters and ap news feeds) It's kind of refreshing. I usually read news from news, politics, conservative, and socialist, and libertarian subs on reddit to get an idea how ppl think about what's going on from different angles. Usually just read the headlines and the comments. Plus hacker news. I'm thinking when I just want news this might be a good portal to just get middle of the road news without opinions or spin in an old school layout that doesn't hurt my adhd brain.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  BBC is mostly like that. They have the decency to put “analyst takes” after an hr in the news article and to feature multiple opinions. And you can just read the top “just the facts” section.
  - Natfan 5y ago
    My issue with the BBC is that they don't cover everything. Specific topics which might anger the current government frequently do not get brought up, likely because the BBC's funding might be in jeopardy if they did.
addajones 5y ago
I miss my old EarthLink.net email address. . Where can we go to get these old emails? Do any still exist?
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
ha, someone posted in the discussion about this years ago in 2016 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12978762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12978762) that it was just like http://compuserve.com http://compuserve.com also. Amazing that one is up also
cjamesd 5y ago
I wonder if all the traffic from HN every few years justifies the continued existence of these sites to the owners (unknowingly, not sure how granular they might be in their traffic analysis). Kind of like patronage at a museum.
King-Aaron 5y ago
aaah, the good old days of 980px wide websites.
akoster 5y ago
I might just have to switch now that Fry’s ISP is no more https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys.com/isp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys....
buro9 5y ago
Inaccessible without visiting guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers DNS ad-blocking shows up a fair number of these methods because the sites become unavailable (not a bad thing) Latest fetch: https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netscape.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netsc... Earliest fetch (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.netscape.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.ne...
spiritplumber 5y ago
This is what the front page of a portal should look like. It looks good, loads instantly, doesn't ask you inane questions about cookies or bombard you with ads... Perfect.
- bergheim 5y ago
  I actually had the tracking popup, I clicked "options", had to unselect a million things, scroll all the way down, and finally they let me decline tracking. So not quite like the old days..
gerjomarty 5y ago
I was wondering what everyone was talking about when a huge AOL cookie consent page came up for me first, requiring me to reject consent from a bunch of tracking cookies. If this site doesn't actually track anything (and I stress I haven't checked), I guess they've just put the consent modal on everything they own just to be safe? I guess this is because I'm based in Europe, given the majority of comments here.
ghewgill 5y ago
The best thing about this news page is the complete lack of clickbait headlines. Some of the headlines are so good that you don't even have to read the article!
bartread 5y ago
Man, that logo hit me right in the nostalgia. Nice that they haven't modernised it actually. Also, that homepage is incredibly lightweight by today's standards: 125KB with uBlock Origin enabled and still "only" 390KB with it disabled. Granted I'm looking at it on a fibre connection, but for me it loads almost instantly. I imagine, if you're still using the Netscape dial-up internet access service over a 56Kb modem, it's going to be a rather different experience: probably 20 - 30 seconds to load with an adblocker switched on, and maybe up to a couple of minutes without one. I used to get stroppy with pages >50KB back when I still used a modem because of the time they took to load. Still, a very beautiful and nostalgic homepage. Props to Verizon for not screwing it up.
athenot 5y ago
Seeing that Netscape logo is a blast from the past. Out of curiosity I stripped out the subdomain to see where netscape.com goes these days, and it redirected me to aol.com. Ouch, that hurts! Not just for nostalgic reasons but also as a parallel with how the open web these days is being co-opted by Google / Facebook.
Grieving 5y ago
When I got into software development around 2013-2014, only dialup and satellite internet were available in my area, and nobody had really nice computers (mine was an old, secondhand netbook). As a result, I can't overstate how much I appreciate informational sites consisting of 'plain' Web 1.0 HTML/CSS. They loaded fast, didn't lag when doing something as simple as scrolling, and didn't break when the connection dropped. They were also easier to archive with wget, which was very important to me given the instability of my connection. Thankfully that was the heyday of jekyll/octopress, so there were a lot of accessible dev blogs.
fatjokes 5y ago
Man, look at that clean, readable HTML source! Growing up View Source was how I learned the bulk of my HTML/Javascript. Miss those days...

165 points by fireeyed 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Internet_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Internet_Ser... > Netscape ISP is a dial-up Internet service once offered at US$9.95 per month. The company serves web pages in a compressed format to increase effective speeds up to 1300 kbit/s (average 500 kbit/s). The Internet service provider is now run by Verizon under the Netscape brand. The low-cost ISP was officially launched on January 8, 2004. Its main competitor is NetZero. Netscape ISP is no longer actively marketed, but for a time its advertising was aimed at a younger demographic, e.g., college students, and people just out of school, as an affordable way to gain access to the Internet.

akoster 5y ago
Reminds me of Opera Mini [1] utilizing Opera’s compression servers (which really helped with capped mobile data plans a few years back) or Google Web Light [2] which I have heard might be similar [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Light
- zorked 5y ago
  I used to be involved with an ISP-specific product which was basically a plain-old HTTP proxy that would ensure everything is compressed with gzip at max settings and which downscaled images. For dial up, it worked well. For everything else the added latency that came with re-enconding reduced subjective connection speed considerably unless you were lucky to hit the server's cache.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    It's unfortunate how many of these things won't work so well with SSL everywhere. At one point I toyed with the idea of a setup that'd rely on keeping a cache reasonably coherent between two sides of a slow link, but it'd be most effective if it was shared, but it's a non-starter unless it's only shared between people who'd be happy with MITM'ing their SSL connections for the sake of getting more of their connections. Basically if both sides have a decent sized cache, on a cache miss you can re-request the resource from the origin but instead of returning the full page compare it to the cache entries you know the other side also has and produce a diff, and return just the compressed diff. It also overcomes bad cache settings etc., as long as the slow link between the caches is the primary performance limit of course. (To guard against the caches going out of sync, you can of course return a hash, and let the cache on the "client side" force a refresh if it does) If I ever find myself on a really slow connection again, maybe I'll test it with a VPN to a VPS.
- rollcat 5y ago
  Opera Mini doesn't just compress web pages. They run Presto (their OG web engine) headless on the backend, pre-render the pages, and push THAT to the device. It doesn't just conserve bandwidth but also the CPU power.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Amazon Silk works the same way. I think it's the default browser for Kindle devices.

buildbuildbuild 5y ago

Surprising to see recent headlines. Who here is still maintaining this. I am so nostalgic and intrigued.

IncRnd 5y ago
It must be AOL. AOL runs Verizon's Mail. When I clicked to check my Netscape Mail, which I have never had, I was taken to an AOL.com mail login page. Plus, the Netscape page attempts to load AOL resources.
tombert 5y ago
I have SeaMonkey installed alongside Firefox on my laptop simply because it's kind of fun to browse the web in a browser that sort of looks like the late Netscape Navigator, or early Mozilla browser. It's fun loading a Netscape site in it.
- visiblink 5y ago
  Ditto. While Mozilla shut down the mailing lists this week, there's now an alt.comp.software.seamonkey newsgroup.
  - swiley 5y ago
    It's been a while since I've tried newsgroups. They were already on their way out by the time I was born. Does gnus still work? Is there a way to connect (preferable with the ability to post) with it for free? How does one make a newsgroup?
    - UncleSlacky 5y ago
      > Is there a way to connect (preferable with the ability to post) with it for free? Yep, you can get a free account at https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ if your ISP doesn't carry newsgroups (note it's for text groups only). Personally, I use Thunderbird as a newsreader (and my ISP still carries most newsgroups), there are also dedicated apps like Pan: http://pan.rebelbase.com/ http://pan.rebelbase.com/

jtchang 5y ago

Holy those pages load fast. Design feels slightly dated but the speed is fantastic.

thwarted 5y ago
And all the SPA frameworks were created to make pages load faster for a better experience, and now the original, simpler stuff is a much faster loading experience.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  They are almost always noticeably faster for page loads after the initial one. If they aren't then it was built really, really wrong
  - thwarted 5y ago
    Noticeably faster on subsequent page loads compared to the first one, sure. But many SPA take longer, in general, to get to the usable point than this netscape page.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Yes that is why I explicitly said "after the first one". That was my whole point it is slower on the first and faster on later ones. Which is why they are for Applications
      - thwarted 5y ago
        The performance of website SPAs over time isn't the comparison I made. In my experience, the first, second, and any later load-to-usable time of a SPA is longer than the load-to-usable time for websites that are implemented like this netscape site.
realtalk667 5y ago
every change they could make to feel the site feel less 'dated' would be a change for the worse.

neandrake 5y ago

Aside from being a little small, the layout of this page is very easy on my eyes and also holds my attention compared to most news sites I come across. It also loads and displays content really well without requiring external javascript.

statenjason 5y ago

That loaded fast. Also, seeing the network request for background gradients takes me back to an era of CSS I don't miss. Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners?

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners? Originally it was kinda simple: just a 3x3 <table> with stretched images in the outer cells, then <div>-itis. Fortunately we rarely needed 9 nested <div> elements - a common trick was to create a 2000x2000px-sized PNG containing the top-left, top, and left-edge border and then another for the other side and make that a background image - the only problem was the lack of support for transparency and how IE would get PNG colors wrong for some reason until IE8 unless you altered the gamma ( https://salman-w.blogspot.com/2011/03/png-color-problem-in-ie.html https://salman-w.blogspot.com/2011/03/png-color-problem-in-i... )
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I remember building rounded containers this way, it’s been so long I had forgotten how much border-radius has saved us from those little hells.
  - karlshea 5y ago
    And that was around the time the CMS was really getting mainstream (instead of Frontpage). So then you had to go digging through a million templates trying to wrap the right thing with your 3x3 table.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      It was fun breaking sites with XSS vulnerabilities (i.e. most of them) where entering </table> into an unsanitized user-content editor would break the entire website layout.
slater 5y ago

whalesalad 5y ago

I remember using the first version of the Netscape browser that had this aesthetic and used this page.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

I like that sportsball and celebs is off to the side - to differentiate it from news.

thought_alarm 5y ago

"Designed for AOL Netscape 6"

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
https://help.aol.com/products/netscape-isp https://help.aol.com/products/netscape-isp
forgotmypw17 5y ago
A relatively capable browser, with DOM and JavaScript. I test with it regularly.
- spiritplumber 5y ago
  An elegant browser for a more civilized age.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Being based on early Mozilla Suite, it is a bit rough around the edges, feels alpha quality, but has a nice feel, and quite elegant.

kivlad 5y ago

https://www.compuserve.com https://www.compuserve.com is the same thing. Oath/Verizon is keeping these sites on some kind of life support to this day.

swiley 5y ago
Wow that feels so weird seeing spammy headlines with a minimalist layout and knowing it's not broken.
- drewzero1 5y ago
  I was surprised not to see the old interactive Flash ads like "Swat the fly for a better insurance rate!"
mrweasel 5y ago
They actually took the time to make it at "template" of sorts. I wonder if the sites are deliberately made using an older design language to appeal to a certain audience? You almost want to clone it and just replace the content with something more interesting.
- caslon 5y ago
  Actually, the Netscape page is just a thin veneer over the CompuServe page. If you take the green gifs off, the page is filled with CompuServe colors. It's less a template and more Netscape wearing the skin of CompuServe turned green.
whoisthemachine 5y ago
I prefer to think there's some developer out there who wrote wonderful code to made that "Homepage" performant and easy to maintain, and has successfully argued for their continued existence, occasionally pushing out a small feature addition to feed in data from new sources as old sources go.

jandrese 5y ago

Some people are going to call the design dated, but to me that kind of layout is timeless. Just the facts and it has good information density. But LOL that the "Maps" link goes to mapquest.com. In other news Mapquest still exist.

Igelau 5y ago
Needs more frames!
- GrumpyNl 5y ago
  Old school, great load time.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
It’s completely beautiful to me. Just the information you need and no bs.
mypalmike 5y ago
I still use the verb "mapquesting" when referring to online maps. It gets a laugh every once in a while.
- philistine 5y ago
  Only one response comes to mind: OK boomer.
basch 5y ago
Compare that to the garbage that is the default msn page in Edge. I’m disappointed Microsoft isn’t using their new tab page to be more educational. So many scammy ads.
- mikestew 5y ago
  One of the lists I'm using on the home pi-hole apparently isn't fond of MSN, either, because "Safari can't find the server 'www.msn.com'. Sure enough, the pi-hole query log says it's being blocked. Maybe I'll disable for a few minutes and see for myself... Yeah, now I see why. The MSN home page is worthy of an article, hell, a series of articles. I wouldn't dare click a thing on that page.

coolreader18 5y ago

I feel like the first character of this title should be lowercased, URLs traditionally are and I thought it said "LSP" instead of "ISP"

forgotmypw17 5y ago
Agree @mods
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  Has the title changed in between your post and now? It currently is 'Netscape ISP Homepage' which makes sense to me?
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    "Isp.netscape.com" was the title.

human 5y ago

Looking at this design triggers so much nostalgia. Reminds me of my early days learning html.

bigiain 5y ago

I was sorely disappointed to see that was laid out with divs and css, not tables...

ficklepickle 5y ago

I was curious if I could find anything out about their stack. Turns out they are using something called Apache Traffic Server[0]. > Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation [0] http://trafficserver.apache.org/ http://trafficserver.apache.org/

mike_d 5y ago
Traffic Server is a caching HTTP server originally built by Inktomi. At one point a good majority of the "internet" was served by AOLServer, a multithreaded TCL scriptable server written by NaviSoft and acquired by AOL.

xiii1408 5y ago

My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP. She lives in a very rural county in Tennessee, and there are no DSL, cable, or fiber options. Her house is unfortunately also down in a valley, so there's no cell phone reception, although there's reasonable 5G service if you walk up to the top of a nearby hill. Perhaps Skylink will be an option soon, although not yet. My parents bought her a Kindle a while back, which is difficult to use without WiFi internet access, although it doesn't require much bandwidth. I actually made her a dial-up WiFi router using an RPi, USB WiFi and dial-up modem adapters so that she can create a WiFi network off of her dial-up connection to download e-books. My friends helped me use the GPIO to set up a nice, user-friendly button to connect and disconnect the dial-up connection, as well as a notification light to signal whether the dial-up is connected, connecting, or off. (Remember you can't leave dial-up on all the time, since you want to receive or place calls using your landline sometimes.) Actually, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the dial-up connection working with an open-source Linux client instead of Netscape's proprietary Windows client. I ended up having to use VirtualBox and some Linux FIFO's to listen in on what the proprietary windows client was doing when connecting. In case anyone else happens to come upon this problem: the proprietary Netscape client lowercases the password before sending it over the wire. :P

gogopuppygogo 5y ago
Have you considered open sourcing the work you did? Sounds interesting for hobbyists and retro technologists.
user3939382 5y ago
I would make a deal with a friend or neighbor who gets 5G reception on top of the hill. Connect a 5G modem to a Ubiquiti point-to-point antenna set that beams the connection to the house at the bottom (they have different products depending on the distance). That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  Have you missed all the recent chatter about Ubiquiti? I'd steer well clear and look at other options such as MicroTik et al.

virtue3 5y ago

This site loaded so freaking fast it blew my mind.

aphextron 5y ago

Rememeber how great the web used to be?

topspin 5y ago
That page, including the thumbnails, would load in under 18 seconds over a 56kbps analog modem. I remember watching the JPEGs emerge from the progressive blur as pages loaded.

taylorfinley 5y ago

Today I learned you can still order an AOL CD: https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM

gremlinsinc 5y ago

Politically I lean left, so my take from my view is the articles so far I've read are almost 90s like as they're much more just the facts and less spin. (Of course that's cause it's mostly just a wrapper around reuters and ap news feeds) It's kind of refreshing. I usually read news from news, politics, conservative, and socialist, and libertarian subs on reddit to get an idea how ppl think about what's going on from different angles. Usually just read the headlines and the comments. Plus hacker news. I'm thinking when I just want news this might be a good portal to just get middle of the road news without opinions or spin in an old school layout that doesn't hurt my adhd brain.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
BBC is mostly like that. They have the decency to put “analyst takes” after an hr in the news article and to feature multiple opinions. And you can just read the top “just the facts” section.
- Natfan 5y ago
  My issue with the BBC is that they don't cover everything. Specific topics which might anger the current government frequently do not get brought up, likely because the BBC's funding might be in jeopardy if they did.

addajones 5y ago

I miss my old EarthLink.net email address. . Where can we go to get these old emails? Do any still exist?

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

ha, someone posted in the discussion about this years ago in 2016 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12978762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12978762) that it was just like http://compuserve.com http://compuserve.com also. Amazing that one is up also

cjamesd 5y ago

I wonder if all the traffic from HN every few years justifies the continued existence of these sites to the owners (unknowingly, not sure how granular they might be in their traffic analysis). Kind of like patronage at a museum.

King-Aaron 5y ago

aaah, the good old days of 980px wide websites.

akoster 5y ago

I might just have to switch now that Fry’s ISP is no more https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys.com/isp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys....

buro9 5y ago

Inaccessible without visiting guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers DNS ad-blocking shows up a fair number of these methods because the sites become unavailable (not a bad thing) Latest fetch: https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netscape.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netsc... Earliest fetch (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.netscape.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.ne...

spiritplumber 5y ago

This is what the front page of a portal should look like. It looks good, loads instantly, doesn't ask you inane questions about cookies or bombard you with ads... Perfect.

bergheim 5y ago
I actually had the tracking popup, I clicked "options", had to unselect a million things, scroll all the way down, and finally they let me decline tracking. So not quite like the old days..

gerjomarty 5y ago

I was wondering what everyone was talking about when a huge AOL cookie consent page came up for me first, requiring me to reject consent from a bunch of tracking cookies. If this site doesn't actually track anything (and I stress I haven't checked), I guess they've just put the consent modal on everything they own just to be safe? I guess this is because I'm based in Europe, given the majority of comments here.

ghewgill 5y ago

The best thing about this news page is the complete lack of clickbait headlines. Some of the headlines are so good that you don't even have to read the article!

bartread 5y ago

Man, that logo hit me right in the nostalgia. Nice that they haven't modernised it actually. Also, that homepage is incredibly lightweight by today's standards: 125KB with uBlock Origin enabled and still "only" 390KB with it disabled. Granted I'm looking at it on a fibre connection, but for me it loads almost instantly. I imagine, if you're still using the Netscape dial-up internet access service over a 56Kb modem, it's going to be a rather different experience: probably 20 - 30 seconds to load with an adblocker switched on, and maybe up to a couple of minutes without one. I used to get stroppy with pages >50KB back when I still used a modem because of the time they took to load. Still, a very beautiful and nostalgic homepage. Props to Verizon for not screwing it up.

athenot 5y ago

Seeing that Netscape logo is a blast from the past. Out of curiosity I stripped out the subdomain to see where netscape.com goes these days, and it redirected me to aol.com. Ouch, that hurts! Not just for nostalgic reasons but also as a parallel with how the open web these days is being co-opted by Google / Facebook.

Grieving 5y ago

When I got into software development around 2013-2014, only dialup and satellite internet were available in my area, and nobody had really nice computers (mine was an old, secondhand netbook). As a result, I can't overstate how much I appreciate informational sites consisting of 'plain' Web 1.0 HTML/CSS. They loaded fast, didn't lag when doing something as simple as scrolling, and didn't break when the connection dropped. They were also easier to archive with wget, which was very important to me given the instability of my connection. Thankfully that was the heyday of jekyll/octopress, so there were a lot of accessible dev blogs.

fatjokes 5y ago

Man, look at that clean, readable HTML source! Growing up View Source was how I learned the bulk of my HTML/Javascript. Miss those days...