The Fascinating Story of Netscape, the Browser Empire That Built the Internet You Use Every Day

In May 1995, a programmer at Netscape was given ten days to ship a programming language. It got mocked for a decade. It is now running on the screen you are reading this on, and the company that rushed him was dead within nine years. The standard explanation for Netscape's collapse is that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and gave it away for free. That is true. It is also incomplete. This documentary covers how Netscape Navigator reached eighty percent of the browser market, what the August 1995 IPO actually sold, why the free browser killed the company, and the three things Netscape built and gave away that still run the modern web: SSL, cookies, and JavaScript. Netscape lasted nine years. The standards it left behind did not stop.