History
The origin of the Netscape plugin functionality started not within Netscape, but at Adobe Systems. John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, and Allan Padgett, one of the primary authors of Acrobat Reader, were hopeful that Adobe's fledgling PDF file format could play a role beyond the desktop. Therefore, soon after Netscape released the first version of Navigator, Padgett and fellow developer Eswar Priyadarshan tried to find a way to make PDF an integral part of the Web experience. The result was a live demo shown to Warnock and Jim Clark, the CEO of Netscape. Prior to that demo, the only native file formats on the Web were HTML pages and the images embedded within them. Links to any other file type caused the user to be prompted to download the file, after which the user could open the file in the appropriate application. In that demo, however, when a user clicked on a link to a PDF file, the file instantly opened within the browser window, seamlessly blending HTML and PDF consumption. Clark excitedly asked who at Netscape had provided support for the integration, only to discover that the integration was done without Netscape involvement, but with a bit of reverse engineering of the Netscape browser.
The companies set out the next week to bring what was known as "Allan's Hack" to market. While Netscape was ready to incorporate PDF directly into the browser, and certainly Adobe would have gained from that, Padgett proposed a different approach, a plugin architecture. Adobe developers Gordon Dow and Nabeel Al-Shamma had recently added a plugin architecture to the Acrobat Reader to leverage the development efforts of developers outside of the Reader team. Padgett had been a part of that effort, and he expected that if given a chance, other companies (and hopefully teams within Adobe) would choose to extend the Web as well. Clark and team in the end were convinced and set off designing the API that would support the new model.
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