Netscape Navigator 2
Netscape Navigator 2 is a discontinued proprietary web browser released by Netscape Communications Corporation as its flagship product. Versions were available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, SunOS, JavaOS, and FreeBSD.
The browser introduced and improved several features and also added proprietary extensions to the HTML standard. Notably, Netscape 2 was the first browser to support JavaScript and animated GIFs, two technologies still predominant on the web today.
Features
The browser introduced many new or improved features:- Support for progressive JPEGs
- Support for GIF89a
- Support for client-side image maps
- Support for plugins
- Improved bookmark organization
- Added support for FTP uploading
- Added support for JavaScript
- Added OLE support
- Added support for HTML frames
- Introduced Netscape Mail and Netscape News, an e-mail client and Usenet News reader, respectively
Netscape Now
Popular plugins
The support for plugins led to the development of several popular plugins to extend Navigator's functionality.- Acrobat Amber - Released in early 1996 by Adobe Systems, it allowed for a pdf to be streamed.
- Lightning Strike - Released by Inifinet, it offered non-standard real-time wavelet compression
- RealAudio Player
- MovieStar - Released by Intelligence at Large, it offered streaming of QuickTime videos
- Macromedia Shockwave Player
- Netcloak
Easter eggs
The bottom of "about:authors" read: