That icon was called a "throbber". The name came from the original icon used back when the browser was called Mosaic NetScape (and the early Netscape Navigator days): a simple blocky purple N with a 90s pixel bevel effect on it. When animated the bevel would alternate between "sticking out" and "going in" to the plane of the screen, causing the N to appear to "throb". The name stuck, and all browser icons that animated to indicate network activity came to be called "throbbers".

I liked throbbers because they signalled "ok, I'm going to the network to fetch what you asked for" as opposed to the hourglass cursor which indicated ordinary computer activity. It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience. They seemed not to understand that the network was fundamentally different, and in many ways more dangerous, than the local PC because it is almost always, as we say today, someone else's computer; and that the end user should be made aware of and encouraged to respect that difference.

I think the nostalgia for the feeling of navigating cyberspace is part of what inspires art movements like vaporwave, with its incorporation of 90s GUI elements in its aesthetic. In the 90s, there was always this ambient feeling of "this boxy beige Macintosh isn't a sleek Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, but it's an acceptable interim substitute until you get a cyberdeck which could be any day now". We were sort of roleplaying at being a part of sort of a beta version of Gibson's tragically hip cyberfuture, not realizing that we were ultimately being sold the shitty parts of that future without any of the cool parts. It's kind of like the joke about Bill Gates in hell: the cool stuff was just the demo.

I couldn't have put it better myself. I always felt like the netscape throbbers[0] really captured the mysteriousness and wonder of what it felt like to navigate the early web.

jwz's favorite throbber (also my favorite) captured this feeling particularly well since it is literally an animated compass[1].

I actually got really into the history of browser throbbers back when I was in college — I ended up archiving all I could find from the mozilla ftp and internet archive[2].

[0]: https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/compass2.gif / https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-compass-anim.gif

[2]: http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/browsers/throbber...

While I used to maintain an SeaMonkey (Mozilla Suite) xpfe complete theme with a properly animated throbber, I actually still use the jwz throbber through my unfinished xpfe userChrome.css in Firefox to this day.

Sadly, there are no css dynamic css classes above the #PanelUI-menu-button element in chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml, so it's not possible to properly animate it without javascript; for now, it animates when you hover over it.

https://i.imgur.com/vmzlwNU.jpg

FYI you should open these links in a new/private/incognito browser session, because jwz hates this Orange Hell.

> It was Windows 98 that ruined the experience and thrill of "going to the network", because Microsoft decided that the web and the local desktop should merge into a single, seamless experience.

One weird side effect of this was that Internet Explorer and Explorer itself were integrated. At a time, you could set your desktop wallpaper to an HTML page. There were even "HTML apps" introduced around the same time* which I believe is still being somewhat continued today for Windows 10 widget development

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Honestly I sort of miss the late-90s web/desktop integration features of Windows. There were so many different ways to hack on it. You could make an Explorer folder be a web page, of course, but it went way beyond that because there was so much magic and so little safety. You could program the browser in any language installed in your Windows Scripting Host, including VB and JS but also Perl and TCL and whatever else you wanted to use. You could invoke any Windows facility using its magic {UUID}, so you could embed the Control Panel in a web page. It was all fully integrated with the Windows database features, so depending on what databases you had installed you could achieve a lot. Access was common, if you had Office Professional, but anything you could describe to ODBC would work.

Yes, local directory windows and such were rendered with the IE engine in Windows 98 as I recall. Files and directories became "hyperlinks" and Microsoft made a big stink about how they could be navigated with one click instead of a double click, "just like the web". "Push" was the fad; instead of visiting Web sites, in Soviet Russia websites would come to you. That motivated Active Desktop.

I thought it was stupid and potentially dangerous because it misled users to treat the web and local resources equally, and put the same amount of trust in each. Of course nowadays, not treating local resources with the same amount of distrust we give the web is a major security fail, and that's why we must notarize and sandbox everything.

That was Active Desktop

Related nostalgia: websites that didn’t specify a bgcolor, so they got defaulted to gray. And the tables with the default embossed look.

Grey on Netscape, IE's default background was white.

also : text in black not the today's crap look.

I will never understand why people think grey text on a white background is a good idea.

Related tragedy: font-weight: 300 used on webpages. In combination with low contrast (the most absurd thing I have seen was #999 on white) it's completely unreadable. I have actually written a bookmarklet to fix it: https://paste.debian.net/1207934/

I also have (partially outdated) custom stylesheet that fixes that for websites I {used to,} visit often: https://jenda.hrach.eu/w/blackweb

the following explains the 'why':

https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure...

no idea to what extent, if at all, it is true. I can imagine there being a grain of truth in there but that implementing this correctly is much more difficult and nuanced than it might seem at first glance - most "digital designers"[1] probably don't get the budget/freedom to properly tackle accessibility in their commercial projects, I can also imagine that the majority of digital designers are 'young' and have close to 20/20 vision making it that much harder for them to truly put themselves in the shoes (eyes?) of people with lesser than perfect vision[2].

as someone with only a laymans' understanding of all this stuff I'm probably guilty of talking out of my **; I welcome someone with real graphic design credentials putting me straight :D

[1] "digital designer", a person working in/with visual design, who started employment, or was born, after the release of the first iPhone ;-) (alternatively someone working in the design industry who never had the privilege of buying a copy of "The Face" for the simple fact they we not born in 1985)

[2] a category I begrudgingly have to admit to being part of more and more ;-/

What about not setting color of text (especially when it's dark text on light backgroud - the "default") at all and leave it to the user? There is a setting in web browser exactly for this: https://user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net/uploads/i...

Ugh, that #444 in the article is horrific to try to read.

I use the Firescape Navigator[0] add-on that adds the Netscape throbber to my Firefox toolbar. It reminds me of when I was still using Netscape daily and had just started switching to Firefox.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firescape_nav...

Was thinking the same thing! Miss those feels.