Netscape Navigator 2 was a proprietary

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

released by

Netscape Communications Corporation Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

as its

flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the f ...

product. Versions were available for Microsoft Windows,

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system ...

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrit ...

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgiu ...

, Solaris,

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 ...

, JavaOS, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

. The browser introduced and improved a number of features and also added proprietary extensions to the HTML standard. Notably, Netscape 2 was the first browser to support

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

and

animated gif The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987 ...

s, two technologies still predominant on the web today. Netscape Navigator 2 Screenshot

Features

The browser introduced many new or improved features: * Support for

progressive JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image ...

s (previous versions supported only the baseline format)Shafer, p. 5 * Support for GIF89a (previous versions supported only GIF87a) * Support for client-side

image map In HTML and XHTML, an image map is a list of coordinates relating to a specific image, created in order to hyperlink areas of the image to different destinations (as opposed to a normal image link, in which the entire area of the image links to a ...

s (previous versions supported only server-side image maps)Shafer, pp. 4-5 * Support for plugins (previous versions supported only

helper application A helper application is an external viewer program launched to display content retrieved using a web browser. Some examples include JPEGview, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player, Real Player and Adobe Reader. Unlike a plugin whose full code ...

s)Shafer, pp.5-6 * Improved bookmark organization * Added support for FTP uploadingShafer, p. 6 * Added support for LiveScript (now known as JavaScript) * Added OLE supportShafer, p. 7 * Added support for HTML frames * Introduced Netscape Mail and Netscape News, an e-mail client and

Usenet News Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

reader, respectivelyShafer, p. 10

Netscape Now

To promote Netscape Navigator, Netscape developed the "Netscape Now" program. The program promoted the display of the "Netscape Now! 2.0" web badge on websites with newly supported features, including frames, live objects, Java applets, and JavaScript.

Popular plugins

The support for plugins led to the development of a number of popular plugins to extend Navigator's functionality. * Acrobat Amber - Released in early 1996 by Adobe Systems, it allowed for a

pdf Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

to be

streamed Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

.Shafer, pp. 71-72 * Lightning Strike - Released by Inifinet, it offered non-standard real-time

wavelet compression In mathematics, a wavelet series is a representation of a square-integrable (real- or complex-valued) function by a certain orthonormal series generated by a wavelet. This article provides a formal, mathematical definition of an orthonormal w ...

Shafer, pp. 72-73 * RealAudio PlayerShafer, pp. 75-79 * MovieStar - Released by Intelligence at Large, it offered

streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content i ...

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

videos (as there wasn't a QuickTime plugin yet)Shafer, pp. 74-75 * Macromedia Shockwave PlayerShafer, pp. 79-82 * NetcloakShafer, p. 197

Easter eggs

Netscape had several easter eggs. Navigator 2 featured verse 12:10 from

The Book of Mozilla ''The Book of Mozilla'' is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape, Mozilla, SeaMonkey and Firefox series of web browsers. It is viewed by directing the browser to . There is no real book titled ''The Book of Mozilla''. However, apparent qu ...

. The bottom of "about:authors" read:

References

;Books * * * * * * *

External links

Netscape Navigator 2.0 in Web Design Museum

Netscape Navigator 2 Download
{{Web browsers Gopher clients Netscape Windows web browsers Discontinued web browsers