The roads I take...

I posted earlier about the legendary "Amazing Fish Cam" operated by Netscape.

Back in 1994, Lou Montulli started this second live camera on the web in the offices of that then-unknown small startup company, and subsequently, an "Easter Egg" was planted in the crazy new "web browser" product they developed, so that it would show live images from their fishtank when you pressed Ctrl+Alt+F in that software (Netscape Navigator). All they did was to make the browser go to the fishcam website, but at that time, something like that was truly amazing (today, people probably would call it the "Awesomecam" or so).

The fishtank and the cam watching it, as well as the "Easter Egg" all were kept alive for a long time, the latter being present in the Netscape Communicator suite and its open-sourced followup, the Mozilla suite, the former operated by AOL even after the acquisition of Netscape and the layoff of the Netscape team.

Even SeaMonkey inherited the fishcam "Easter Egg", but AOL finally turned it off some time in 2008, so we have been looking for a replacement for some time, not wanting to let a legend die.

Lou Montulli was apparently thinking along the same lines when it came to the cam itself and acquired a domain name for setting it up again, and informed us about it with a comment on my blog post about its death. I exchanged a few mails with him since that time and last week he had some info and pictures up on the site, so we switched the shortcut on the trunk nightly builds to point there. Last night, Lou informed me that he has a new camera up now so the image quality is much better.

So, where is it? How does it look? What fish are there?

Check it out yourself:

Rebirth of the Amazing FishCam @ fishcam.com


As it's Lou's work, I think it really can claim to be "the oldest camera site still in existence".
Of course, readers of this post will have a lot of ideas what can be improved or whatever - keep in mind though that changing what's up on the site is not up to SeaMonkey people, we merely have a one-liner in our code that points there, Lou is the one operating the site and the fishcam itself. And remember that he just did set it up again and it's a just a fun project.

Thanks to Lou for keeping the legend alive, we're proud to be able to link to it from SeaMonkey - after all, the fishcam fits quite well with that brand name we have now!

It looks like the legendary Netscape (later AOL) Fishcam in Mountain View has really gone away now, the last URL where one could get a live feed has been redirected to netscape.aol.com, and a still existing old page has only static content but no live camera any more.
SeaMonkey still has the Ctrl-Alt-F shortcut mapped to calling a webpage for the fishcam but this has been failing recently. In theory, a live cam of maritime life would fit very well with SeaMonkey, actually (due to the creatures we're named after), and it would be even cooler if that would use an ogg stream and the HTML5 <video> tag on trunk.

It's just that we don't have such a cam available any more, from all we know.

Because of that, I probably will review the patch to remove this easter egg unless someone comes up with a really appealing proposal of where it should point to nowadays.

I was pointed on IRC to "Code Rush" being available online, and as I never saw it before, just viewed it.
It really was a crazy time 10 years ago when Mozilla saw the light of the day as an open source project. "We're doomed" is something one hears again and again in this documentary about those days at Netscape. I know that feeling. I wasn't there from the start in 1998, my first download was M5 somewhere in 1999, and the first fully localized German build I released was M11 or so on January 1, 2000. I didn't see all of that happen, but just was on the way into the project where this report ends. It also was a hard time for all of us Netscape fans back then, and I also wondered sometimes if that effort was doomed. But I believed in the technology, because it was sexy in a technological way.
And here we are, about 10 years later - almost an eternity in this market - and look where we are! Mozilla is alive! And not only that, it's probably more alive than ever. We have a multi-million-download browser as well as a number of other projects, like a mail client, a complete Internet suite, calendaring software and whatnot. And we're going stronger than ever.
Yes, it's really a crazy time - still.

Oh, and if you haven't seen "Code Rush" yet, go and watch it. As a bonus, you'll even get to see how Stuart hacked around in mozilla/xpfe/ before he even joined Netscape!

As a few other Mozillians reported, the Netscape browser is finally declared dead, after a long time of going down.

Still, Netscape was originally the "Mosaic Killer" codenamed "Mozilla", and this name is carrying on the great legacy of the legendary Internet browser. The code lives on in the form of Mozilla-based browsers. Firefox is regaining the lost market share for this great legacy and showing how innovative the spirit from back then still can be. And SeaMonkey is continuing the Internet suite that Netscape started more than a decade ago.

So the Netscape-branded browser may be dead, but the saga it started is continuing.

Just see what those who following the footsteps of this legacy will be able to show up in 2008 and everyone will see we are going strong even without that brand name - the code, the browser, and even the suite.