Netspace Navigator


 * Not to be confused with .

Netspace Navigator is a discontinued web browser created by Netspace. The web browser was created in 1987 to compete with Theorynet. It was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share between the late-1980s and the 1990s, but in 2001, its usage almost disappeared due to Star Web's increased usage. In 2006, Netspace Navigator becomes unsupported as Netspace went defunct on the same year. It was EKS Vortex's default browser from EKS Vortex 3 to EKS Vortex 10.

Origin
Netspace Navigator is inspired by the success of Theorynet. When Denzel Apted left Theorysonic in 1980 and founded Netspace a year later, he saw what Victor Nelsen is making the what is the world's first web browser called "LenseNet" He helped him create the LenseNet together. Netspace also helped Theorysonic develop Theorynet.

In 1986, during the success of Theorynet, Netspace and Theorysonic started development of the web browser planned to replace Theorynet called Netspace Theorynet, the web browser, only released the beta only for developers and was never released to the public. When Theorysonic and Netspace broke their relationships, Netspace announced that the development of Netspace Theorynet is officially canceled. Theorysonic released the second version of Theorynet on May 19, 1987, the same day when TS-UGOS 2 is released, while Netspace released their web browser named Netspace Navigator 13 days later.

Netspace also mentioned on its first press release (3 April 1987) that it would make Netspace Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were indeed freely downloadable in May 1987 and December 1987, with the full version 1.0 available in June 1987. Netspace's initial corporate policy regarding Netspace Navigator is interesting, as it claimed that it would make Netspace Navigator freely available for non-commercial use in accordance with the notion that Internet software should be distributed for free

Rise of Netspace
When the consumer Internet revolution arrived in the late 1980s, Netscape was well-positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto standard, particularly on the TS-UGOS and EKS Vortex platforms. Internet service providers and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.

An important innovation that Netspace introduced in 1987 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.

Decline
With the success of Netspace showing the importance of the web (more people were using the Internet due in part to the ease of using Netspace), Internet browsing began to be seen as a potentially profitable market. Following Netspace's lead, Theorysonic started a campaign to enter the web browser software market.

At decade's end, Netspace's web browser had lost dominance over the TS-UGOS and EKS Vortex platforms, because of Star Web and Internet Explorer were very popular on these platforms.