Blast from the Past: Mozilla stomps IE

Ok, who remembers this:

Mozilla Stomps IE
img © snafu.de

Apparently at the height of the browser wars in 97, someone dropped a huge, heavy IE sculpture at the lawn in front of Netscape offices in the dead of the night. Few people working a graveyard shift at Netscape noticed it, tipped it over and put their office mascot on top of it before anyone could notice it. In the morning people passing the Netscape offices saw a Mozilla stomping a fallen IE logo.

I admit, had no clue about this till today. I have no clue how did I keep missing it for all these years. Too funny!

[tags]ie, netscape, mozilla, browser, browser wars, microsoft, humor, funny, mozilla stomps ie[/tags]

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21 Responses to Blast from the Past: Mozilla stomps IE

  1. Dan GERMANY Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    That is so like 1940’s fraternity style to leave a giant IE sculpture on a corp. campus.

    //Dan

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  2. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Yeah, I know. It reminds me of these old movies.

    Btw Dan, why does your IP say you are in Germany?

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  3. Wikke BELGIUM Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Proxy?

    ANyway, hard workers there at netscape :) in my office, they don’t work till 1:3 AM

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  4. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    Ah yes, the good ol’ days!

    I remember using Netscape 2.0 shortly after discovering Mosiac. I was partially responsible for the browser wars at NASA. I would only allow the latest version of Netscape to connect to the web proxy. This was before people were smart enough to figure out how to change their user agent string.

    Long Live Mozilla!

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  5. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Btw, I know Dan IRL. That’s I was surprised when the German flag popped up on his post.

    Wikke – hehe. I leave my work 5pm on the dot if I can. Of course if some shit goes down (ie server crashes hard) I’m willing to stay till I fix it. But I never really worked till midnight.

    My boss on the other hand… He once called my cell from the office at 10pm on a Saturday. :|

    I guess if you really care about the software you are building and you are passionate about it (like I would imagine some of the Netscape developers were) I guess staying pass midnight to finish things up is not so unthinkable.

    Craig – LOL. Did you actually tell people that they needed the newest Netscape to connect, or was that something they just had to figure out on their own? :mrgreen:

    BOFH vs. Rocket Scientists. ;)

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  6. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    Craig – LOL. Did you actually tell people that they needed the newest Netscape to connect, or was that something they just had to figure out on their own? :mrgreen:

    I had a redirect to a webpage that explained they needed version x and where to get it. I may be a BOFH, but I try to give alternatives . . .

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  7. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Btw, have anyone seen Mosaic ever pop up in their server logs in the last 3-4 years? I don’t think I ever saw it being used anywhere. I had people accessing my site using Lynx quite a few times, but never Mosaic.

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  8. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    Btw, have anyone seen Mosaic ever pop up in their server logs in the last 3-4 years? I don’t think I ever saw it being used anywhere. I had people accessing my site using Lynx quite a few times, but never Mosaic.

    Hmmm. Let me see if I can fix that . . .

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  9. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    LOL! The browser detection plugin seems confused. :lol:

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  10. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Terminalist says:

    I found an old SunOS box with Mosaic and a different string . . .

    Man, does this page look weird in it!

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  11. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Terminalist says:

    Anybody for some old Windows . . .

    (Okay I cheated on this one. Old versions of IE don’t use proxies, so I forced this string to go though)

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  12. Dan GERMANY Anonymouse says:

    Is it time for internet infowarz?

    I am not in Germany :)

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  13. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Man, does this page look weird in it!

    Screenshot?

    The author of the plugin apparently did not consider Mosaic to be noteworthy. None of the user agents get recognized. :(

    In my logs I see the following:

    Mosaic (TueV) for the X Window System/2.4.2
    NCSA_Mosaic/2.7b3 (X11;SunOS 4.1.4 sun4m)

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  14. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Dan, Are you using Tor? Or is it just a regular proxy?

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  15. Dan UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    Hey guys, amidoinitright?

    Luke, depends on the day. I use tor + a list of active proxys, I think Tor is safer of you plan to login to anything you own. Plugins make it a snap.

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  16. Dan GERMANY Anonymouse says:

    Haha your plugin just read w3m from a japanese freebsd source as IE 6.0 under windows xp. If we lie to the computers, nobody knows.

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  17. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    LOL! How the hell did that happen?

    I think the plugin only looks at the user agent, and does some pattern matching to display these labels. So you can cheat it easily. If you change your user agent to say you are using Lynx under windows, it will probably say just that. :P

    Btw, I have a Tor + Privoxy setup and a nice plugin for firefox that will torrify me in 1 click. I just rarely use it cause it tends to be slower at times.

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  18. Dan GERMANY says:

    True it can be slow. There are other options out there too. I am using the Godhead to access my pages from now on.

    :)

    //Dan

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  19. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Godhead? I’m not familiar with that. What is it?

    Google gives me zero relevant results on that one (I mostly get religious links or stuff referring to some crappy band from the 80’s).

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  20. Riot Nrrrd™ UNITED STATES Safari Mac OS says:

    Did someone say “Mosaic”?


    -rwxr-xr-t 2 root 1001 3814752 Jul 7 1995 /usr/local/bin/Mosaic-solaris-23-2.6*

    OK, so we keep old bits lying around here … unfortunately, it doesn’t work on our Solaris 9 (or one last Solaris 7) system, it gets an EINVAL trying to push a “sockmod” module.

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