Re:home.netscape.com in 1997
by jd3 on Monday August 16, 2021 @11:51AM
(#28199465)
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].
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.
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