Relive the 90s with the Throbber extension!
Choose to go Netscape style or Netscape-killer style, depending on your mood.
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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
Extore is a team of professionals who are passionate about creating extensions for web browsers. This devotion also gives us opportunity to appreciate work of other people. We get inspired by useful, open source extensions made by developers all over the world. Our strong belief is that one should share helpful add-ons with others. That’s why we’d like to present you our ever-growing list of favourite extensions that have inspired us. Moreover, as you probably have already learned, sometimes struggling for the best brings an end to the good. Talking about add-ons it often turns out that an upgrade is worse then previous version. Also it can become really tricky to get back to the beloved version of your favourite extension. That’s why we’re going to make not only the latest, but all versions of our favourite (and we hope yours too) add-ons available for download. No more compromises, just stick to the version you really like!
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