Me too - I was there in fact - jwz was a friend back in the day. “Monkeybutter” is the password to his loft parties :-) my big contribution to the world of the web was search strings in the URL bar, which prior required a valid URL.
For me the Meteors are the very first thing I remember from when a friend showed me the www and I saw it for the first time. The screen was flashing irregularly when he moved the mouse between the browser window and other windows, because this was a Sun workstation and apparently it used a different color palette for the browser.
When we waited for a slow page to load and I remarked how fascinated I was about the smooth Meteor animation my friend replied dryly: "They'd better spend the cycles for loading the page faster." and we laughed about that.
The original rules were any single word was converted to www.<query>.com, I.e., www.google.com unless preceded by a ?, and any string with a white space was a search. YMMV on different browsers.
An interesting story from that chapter of my life came when we were logging. To resolve the dispatch the search string hit our servers. That means we got a log of all search requests. I took a principled stand that we should never log any ip addresses or Netscape cookie trackers with the search requests. Management agreed. Hence we went out of business and got the browser we deserve, Chrome and Edge.
To be fair, it wasn't the lack of search data revenue that wound up bankrupting the company -- that whole data mining industry didn't really exist outside of a couple of players and the USG. What did Netscape in was the browser revenue stream evaporating because of IE getting shipped with Windows, and the huge amount of time and people put into the Enterprise Server project that effectively got destroyed by the birth of Apache, and then double-destroyed by the birth of PHP.
Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jim Clark is able to do a licensing deal or acquisition with Microsoft; that halts the development of both IE and IIS, and nodejs is never born because server-side-Javascript already exists in the form of Livewire living on. That alternate reality probably also kills off server-side-Java faster just because of how good Livewire really was.
Actually you’re sort of wrong, but not quite. It turns out the fact the Netscape homepage was the default was a huge asset that was unused. At a certain point we realized we were leaving tons of money on the table and pivoted to the my Netscape stuff. If we had done that much earlier and built ourselves as a services and content platform much earlier with advertising etc we could have survived the browser revenue loss. But Barksdales view was we didn’t compete with our partners like yahoo and excite. The loss of browser market share would have eaten this revenue as well over time but market share eroded a lot slower than browser license revenue and it would have extended our revenues.
The data mining industry didn’t exist at that time but it was obvious to me that with my Netscape and our content channels we could use the data we were collecting to do targeted advertising and “personalization.”
That would have been the enshitification route we avoided by nobly imploding.
