SAN MATEO (04-11-95) - I'm a Netscape user. More specifically, I use a program called the Netscape Navigator (currently in Version 1.1b2) to browse the World Wide Web, the absolute computing phenomenon of 1994 and 1995. I am not alone.
Netscape, the company, apparently has distributed more than 4 million copies of the Netscape Navigator in less than six months. This is not an economic miracle, since they gave permission for people to download the software for free. The truth is that it is a really good program as well. It is good enough that it really overshadowed any of the other first- generation browsers, free or not, some of which haven't even shipped. But it definitely got a lot of people's attention, and now we're in for it: Everybody in the world wants to set standards for how people browse the Web.
Netscape itself is pretty much heck-bent on making sure its Navigator remains the leading browser. So it is building everything it can into its browser. In fact, I've heard that they are building so much into it that I expect the company to bundle an operating system. (Just joking, sort of.)
The week before last, for instance, Netscape agreed to integrate Adobe's Acrobat reader software into Navigator. This is actually very, very important, because it will bless Adobe's PDF documents (such as newsletters and magazines) on the Internet. (Acrobat is also big, relatively slow, and has marginal navigation tools for on-screen reading. But, hey, it's better than Hypertext Markup Language!)
Netscape is also building in support for newer versions of HTML, secure transactions and other new features as quickly as it can.
That's Netscape. Then there's everybody else. The ones to watch are the companies that sell operating systems. IBM has already bundled a complete navigator with OS/2, including the ability to connect through its Advantis network. Apple hasn't said much about bundling an Internet browser, but it is expected to eventually include one. Microsoft has said that it will include TCP/IP software in Windows 95, and the company is widely expected to include a browser either as part of its Microsoft Network software or separately. This would be a big deal, in either case. But I believe that the Microsoft Network will be a casualty as Microsoft buttons down Windows 95 to get it shipped on schedule. (Microsoft hasn't yet announced such a thing, but it should.)
More interesting, both Sun Microsystems Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc. are determined to use new features to set new standards with their new Web browsers.
Sun has announced Hot Java, a browser that incorporates technology that would let Web sites offer animations in real time.
Ironically, this feature would allow Microsoft to turn Microsoft Bob into a Web browser, because Globey or Scuzz the Rat could be real-time animations that help you wander around the Web.
And Silicon Graphics is introducing WebScape, a new browser that will use the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) standard to let you wander through three-dimensional spaces in real time on the Web.
If you've seen the Star Trek Interactive Technical Manual from Paramount Interactive, you have a sense of how this works: wandering through a virtual hallway to get from one part of a Web site to another.
Both Hot Java and Webscape seem to need a T1 connection and a RISC workstation to be usable. So the likelihood is that most of us will be using Netscape Navigator for the foreseeable future. But it is fun to think of wandering around the world in a virtual environment with little animations of Bill Gates or Scott McNealy guiding us to their favorite Web sites.
Stopwords:
I've got so many passwords, I could scream. One automated teller machine card with a PIN; two credit cards with PINs; two phone cards with PINs; five network applications with explicit passwords (two E-mails, one shared document manager, one scheduling program, one remote access); five on-line services with passwords; six Web sites with explicit passwords.
Obviously, I'm managing it so a lot of the passwords or PINs are the same, but the requirements are different, so I'm now trying to keep track of five different passwords on 21 different things. Doesn't this have to change? Isn't technology wonderful?
Your vote counts:
Please send in your nomination for the InfoWorld 100! This will be the second list we've compiled of the most aggressive client/server adopters in the country, and it's going to be 100 percent better than the last, mostly because it is the second list. If your company or another that you know of is really trying to make distributed networks of PCs work as a platform for mission-critical applications, please let us know.
Multithanking:
I should have done this last week, but just a short thank you to all the NT users who wrote in. I'll even thank the people who don't read InfoWorld but who responded to the part of my column asking for letters that was posted on an NT news group on the 'net. (We do prefer that people ask permission to distribute anything that's printed in InfoWorld, even if it's noncommercial.)
(Editor-in-chief Stewart Alsop welcomes comments and may be reached on the Internet at stewart_alsop@infoworld.com.)
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