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
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.
> My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP.
I wish all the websites which reasonably can and should would have mandatory lightweight versions optimized for dial-up and comparably slow connections so you could still use your bank, read news, chat (I mean WhatsApp which doesn't even have a PC client app you could install once), download books, book hotels/flights, order stuff from e-shops and online marketplaces etc while on narrowband. Thanks G-d we still have plain old POP3+SMTP e-mail servers and clients still available at least.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
My dad recently had me help him remove "Maps Galaxy" which had taken over his Chrome homepage, and which he had accidentally picked it up trying to get to Mapquest (which he apparently still uses regularly).
He is also the kind of person who wants an iPhone because he was impressed by the quality and capabilities of the Apple ][ computers he used in college. It's difficult for me to understand, but I have to respect that kind of loyalty in our rapidly-changing digital world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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-i... )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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..
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Have you missed all the recent chatter about Ubiquiti? I'd steer well clear and look at other options such as MicroTik et al.
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> That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.
How? If that were true, WiFi range extenders would violate TOS as well.
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Ignoring all the problems you had, this is so sweet I can't stand it - your grandmom has an excellent grand-daughter/son <3
> My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP.
I wish all the websites which reasonably can and should would have mandatory lightweight versions optimized for dial-up and comparably slow connections so you could still use your bank, read news, chat (I mean WhatsApp which doesn't even have a PC client app you could install once), download books, book hotels/flights, order stuff from e-shops and online marketplaces etc while on narrowband. Thanks G-d we still have plain old POP3+SMTP e-mail servers and clients still available at least.
Have you considered open sourcing the work you did? Sounds interesting for hobbyists and retro technologists.
If you get time, make a blog post somewhere with this info on it, so other people can find it easily !
Would you consider putting the project up on github?
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.
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Light
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.
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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.
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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.
My dad recently had me help him remove "Maps Galaxy" which had taken over his Chrome homepage, and which he had accidentally picked it up trying to get to Mapquest (which he apparently still uses regularly).
He is also the kind of person who wants an iPhone because he was impressed by the quality and capabilities of the Apple ][ computers he used in college. It's difficult for me to understand, but I have to respect that kind of loyalty in our rapidly-changing digital world.
I don't use Apple, but I understand "old people" (like I am rapidly becoming) follow the 1) It works!, and 2) If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
You don't specify, but can I assume that he has the same iphone for the last 5-7 years, or he upgrades regularly?
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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.
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.
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I still use the verb "mapquesting" when referring to online maps. It gets a laugh every once in a while.
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It’s completely beautiful to me. Just the information you need and no bs.
I think it what makes it look dated are the shadows and gradients. If they got rid of those it would look pretty modern.
Very much agree and only disappointed to see it's not laid out with tables.
Needs more frames!
Old school, great load time.
https://www.compuserve.com is the same thing.
Oath/Verizon is keeping these sites on some kind of life support to this day.
Wow that feels so weird seeing spammy headlines with a minimalist layout and knowing it's not broken.
I was surprised not to see the old interactive Flash ads like "Swat the fly for a better insurance rate!"
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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-i... )
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.
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> That loaded fast.
After getting through the order-of-magnitude slower cookie consent page, yes.
What cookie consent page?
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"That loaded fast"
welcome to non-garbage HTML! ;)
And someone spoke about pdf value as 'fixed' presentation a few days ago, this page felt the same.
spacer.gif
I feel like the first character of this title should be lowercased, URLs traditionally are and I thought it said "LSP" instead of "ISP"
Agree @mods
Has the title changed in between your post and now? It currently is 'Netscape ISP Homepage' which makes sense to me?
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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.
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.netsc...
Earliest fetch (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.ne...
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.
Holy those pages load fast. Design feels slightly dated but the speed is fantastic.
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.
They are almost always noticeably faster for page loads after the initial one. If they aren't then it was built really, really wrong
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every change they could make to feel the site feel less 'dated' would be a change for the worse.
Surprising to see recent headlines. Who here is still maintaining this. I am so nostalgic and intrigued.
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.
Ditto. While Mozilla shut down the mailing lists this week, there's now an alt.comp.software.seamonkey newsgroup.
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> Who here is still maintaining this
Copyright © 2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved - so yes to the AOL observation.
The search works well too: https://isp.netscape.com/pf/newssearch?q=business%20OR%20mon...
It's also GDPR compliant! I guess there still must be enough traffic on it to continue updates.
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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.
> Surprising to see recent headlines. Who here is still maintaining this
Likely just a rendered RSS feed.
Today I learned you can still order an AOL CD: https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM
Rememeber how great the web used to be?
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.
This site loaded so freaking fast it blew my mind.
I like that sportsball and celebs is off to the side - to differentiate it from news.
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...
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/
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.
I miss my old EarthLink.net email address. . Where can we go to get these old emails? Do any still exist?
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.
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.
I was sorely disappointed to see that was laid out with divs and css, not tables...
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!
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.
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.
I might just have to switch now that Fry’s ISP is no more https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys....
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.
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..
ha, someone posted in the discussion about this years ago in 2016 (http://compuserve.com also. Amazing that one is up also
"Designed for AOL Netscape 6"
A relatively capable browser, with DOM and JavaScript. I test with it regularly.
An elegant browser for a more civilized age.
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https://help.aol.com/products/netscape-isp
I remember using the first version of the Netscape browser that had this aesthetic and used this page.
Looking at this design triggers so much nostalgia. Reminds me of my early days learning html.
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.
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.
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.
aaah, the good old days of 980px wide websites.