Ron Cullen and Phil Miller, both of 32 Appy, holding the trophy they won for coming second in their class in the RAAF Butterworth Yacht Club race around Penang Island in 1982.

Di and Stewart Deans at a 19 Appy reunion on the Gold Coast

Web Browsers

Netscape Navigator, first released in 1994 and which was the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support on the 1st Feb. 2008 by its current owner, AOL. You will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates in Feb.

The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois' National Centre for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before then, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows. The developers of Mosaic left the Uni and started a company to develop the browser, and that's how Netscape was born.

Netscape's launch onto the US stock exchange in August 1995 was a major cause of the "Dot Com" madness that swept the world. It launched at $28 per share, a price that immediately doubled and give Netscape a market value of US$2 billion, even though it had only US$20 million in sales.

Netscape’s undoing began when Microsoft quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. Netscape eventually dropped fees for its software, but it was all too late. Undone by MSIE, Netscape sold itself to AOL early in 1999.

An open-source project called Mozilla gradually began to take shape, in which developers from around the world freely contributed to writing and testing the software and eventually Mozilla released its stand-alone browser, Firefox, and that was the final death nell for Netscape. What must be said though, when Netscape realised that the game they originally wanted to play was up, they made all of their source code publicly available and a great deal of this was used to kick-start Mozilla. It is probably true to say that Firefox is the Phoenix that has risen from the ashes of Netscape
 

For the past 5 years or so, when Microsoft was clearly on top in the Browser stakes, it went to sleep at the wheel and neglected its IE and this allowed Firefox to gain a secure footing. It now holds about 10 percent of the Web browser market. A clear example of MSIE's neglect is its version 6 which is full of bugs and which continually "locks up".  Recently, Microsoft looked over its shoulder and didn't like what it saw and decided to play catch-up. It developed version 7 as a quickish fix for its version 6 and we now believe that version 8 is not too far away. If you're still using MSIE version 6, we suggest you either download version 7, or try Firefox.

One major problem with Microsoft's software is it was developed before Web standards like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) came into being. As such, current versions of IE don't support current Web standards. Sam Houliston alerted us to this when he was checking our site and found some pages did not format correctly in his Firefox browser (If Sam uses Firefox - perhaps there's a lesson here - tb). With IE8, Microsoft hopes to address this concern. We'll see. The Washington Post had an article early in 2006 concerning the bugs and security problems with Microsoft's software - you can read it here

If you're using a browser other than Microsoft's IE, we'd like to hear from you, please tell us what browser you use, how you find it, and why you prefer it to Microsoft's IE.