Netscape 1.x
Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.
Many other versions of Netscape can be found on the Sillydog Archive and the Netscape FTP. Some earlier versions can be located on the Mcom.com Archive.
Wanted: Genuine floppy/CD dumps - these often differed slightly from the free download versions.
Screenshots
Release notes
"You're about to embark on a journey across the Internet, and Netscape is your vehicle. Netscape Navigator(TM) opens a world of new media applications, such as online publishing and information access, interactive shopping, and distance learning. It also allows organizations to communicate more efficiently with customers, suppliers, partners and employees."
Netscape Navigator (often referred to as just "Netscape") is a tool that retrieves hypertext documents over the Internet, renders them on your screen, and enables you to easily "browse" them. This version also includes the ability to access Usenet newsgroup and SMTP e-mail servers.
At release Netscape Navigator 1.0 competed against NCSA Mosaic. Over Mosaic, Netscape offered the ability to see documents and images as they load, loading both images and text at the same time, support for JPEG graphics, document caching, a friendlier GUI with more configuration options, and hierarchical bookmarks.
Like other browsers of the time, Netscape Navigator was commercial software. However, Netscape Corp differentiated their product by making a version freely downloadable for personal use.
Note: The freely distributable versions were branded as version "1.0N", and were functionally identical. The version posted below is the commercial "1.0" version.
Also note that 1.0 can not connect to much these days.
Installation instructions
The Windows version is a Windows 3.1 16-bit executable.
Information
- Product type
- Application Web Browser
- Vendor
- Netscape Communications Corporation
- Release date
- 1994
- Minimum CPU
- 386sx
- Minimum RAM
- 4MB
- User interface
- GUI
- Platform
- Windows Unix MacOS
- Download count
- 50 (5 for release)
Downloads
| Download name | Version | Language | Architecture | File size | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Netscape Navigator 1.0 for Windows (3.5) |
1.0 for Windows | English |
|
1.13MB | 3 |
 Netscape Navigator 1.0 for Windows Manual |
1.0 for Windows | English |
|
30.53MB | 0 |
|
Netscape Navigator 1.1 Personal Edition for Windows US (1994) (3.5-1.44mb) |
1.1 Personal Edition for Windows US | English |
|
7.8MB | 2 |
|
Netscape Navigator 1.22 Personal Edition for Windows US (1995) (3.5-1.44mb) |
1.22 Personal Edition for Windows US | English |
|
19.53MB | 0 |