NetCaptor

» see netcaptor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I missed NetCaptor completely. Tabs arrived for me the way they arrived for most people, which is that Firefox turned up and had them, and going back to Internet Explorer 6 afterward felt like a punishment. What I did not know until much later is that somebody had solved this in 1998 and had been selling the solution the whole time I was living without it.

Adam Stiles was a software developer in Pasadena, twenty five years old, and he started the thing in the summer of 1997. He published it on 4 January 1998 under the name SimulBrowse, then renamed it NetCaptor because he did not like the first name. It was not a browser in the sense of being an engine. It was a shell: it used Internet Explorer's Trident engine to render pages and wrapped its own interface around it.

The interface is the whole reason it matters. NetCaptor put multiple pages inside one window as tabs, and Wikipedia's own careful phrasing is that while Opera and Booklink's InternetWorks had done adjacent things earlier, NetCaptor's tabs were the closest in form and function to the tabs everyone uses now. Around them Stiles added PopupCaptor for killing pop-up windows and CaptorGroups for opening a whole set of bookmarks at once.

~ the record ~

~ where the tab came from ~

The best fact in this story is that Stiles did not get the idea from another browser. He got it from HomeSite, the HTML editor he used every day, which had tabs for holding several open files. He wanted the same behavior for pages instead of documents. In his own account it started as an experiment to see whether he could do it at all.

So the browser tab, which is now the basic unit of how a couple of billion people organize their attention, was ported into a browser from a text editor by one person who was annoyed at his own workflow. It was not researched and it did not come out of any of the browser companies that were fighting each other at the time.

~ the shell problem ~

NetCaptor ran as shareware with adware attached, and from 1999 to 2004 it was Stiles's full-time job. That is a real business built on top of somebody else's rendering engine, which is exactly the position that cannot survive being right.

The features were the product, and features are copyable. Mozilla shipped tabbed browsing and then Firefox made it ordinary from 2004. Microsoft finally put tabs into Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, eight years after NetCaptor had them, and on that day everything a person paid a shell for came free inside the thing the shell was wrapping. There was no engine of his own to fall back on, because the entire premise had been that he did not need one.

~ the rest of the shelf ~

NetCaptor was the earliest but it was not alone for long. A whole category of Internet Explorer shells grew up doing the same trick: take Microsoft's engine, which was already installed on every Windows machine and could not be uninstalled, and sell a better window around it. Maxthon started as MyIE2 and Avant Browser came out of the same instinct, and all of them competed on tabs and pop-up handling rather than on rendering.

Almost the whole shelf is gone now for the reason NetCaptor went. The one that lasted longest was Maxthon, which survived by eventually bolting a Webkit engine into itself and becoming a real browser rather than a coat worn over one. That is the only exit the shell business ever had, and it required becoming the thing you had spent a decade not needing to be.

~ the last post ~

Version 7.5.4 came out on 18 February 2005 and was the last one. Development had already stopped by then, though the site stayed up and the software kept working for people who had it.

On 8 January 2008 Stiles posted that NetCaptor was dead, ten years to the week after the first release, with the line that it had been quite a ride. He gave away a registration key so anyone still running it could unlock the paid version for nothing. Asked about it years afterward he said that if he had not built a tabbed browser somebody else would have, probably around the same time, which is a more generous reading of his own contribution than the record supports.

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