Throbber

A vintage user interface element for your modern browser.

Relive the 90s with the Throbber extension! Choose to go Netscape style or Netscape-killer style, depending on your mood. ~~~ As far back as the first web client, NCSA Mosaic, there has been a need to convey that the browser is not frozen and pages are, in fact, loading. This is where the first such activity indicator came in. It was believed to gain the name "throbber" when Netscape 1.0 was released with a pulsing "N" logo. This animation was actually a last-minute choice, since the animation the Netscape team wanted to use was based on the name "Mosaic," a name they were no longer allowed to use for legal reasons. This lead Netscape to hold an animation contest to replace the throbbing N, and the winner was a monolithic N standing on a planetary object as meteors rain. Netscape tweaked it to the recognizable animation that lasted for years through many Netscape versions with little modification. Two of those N variants are included in this extension. When Microsoft came to town to compete in the browser-space against Netscape, they developed their own throbber featuring a globe rotating through the Internet Explorer icon. One of the most popular variants of that animation is also included in this extension. Eventually web browsers would evolve to support tabbed browsing and include a simple activity indicator on each tab until loading completes, spelling the end for the classic throbber. Thus this extension provides little practicality in Chrome, and is just a fun little throwback to the roots of the world wide web. Sources: https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080206124223/http://wp.netscape.com/home/contest/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War