Netscape Bites The Dust December 31, 2007
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Anyone out there who remembers surfing during the ‘The Browser Wars’ will, no doubt, feel a little twinge at AOL’s decision to pull the plug on the ailing Netscape Navigator browser.
Back in the mid-1990s, Netscape was THE browser on the market, used by nearly 90% of Internet users. These days it’s just less than 1% and it’s that ‘lack of users’ AOL is blaming for the decision to stop supporting the product after Feb 1 2008. In his blog, lead developer Tom Drapeau commented:
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”
Anyone else out there remember Netscape’s heyday?-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
Comments
Sure, how could I forget Netscape. The browser that brought pictures to the web and made it come alive! The browser that went out of its way to drive us nuts by introducing paid versions, feature bloat, and bizarre rendering. I stuck with NS for as long as possible trying not to give in to IE. But NS4 was so bad and IE5 so much better, I had to change. On the bright side, the failure of NS in the late 90s led directly to Firefox.
Ah yes, who can forget Microsoft having to claim under oath that it was not anti-competition. One of the biggest 'elephant-in-the-room' lies since the tobacco industry claimed it knew nothing about its product being addictive.
As one of its few users I view the news of its future with anguish. The 8.1 version which I currently use is far better than Firefox and does everything I ask of it. The only time it gives problems is when connecting to Microsoft sites, but then you would expect that from Microsoft who have to incorporate non standard stuff in their coding to thwart other browsers.
Good old netscape, still, ive been usin firefox since its existed, so, can't complain.
I found original Netscape 1.0 floppy disk versions of both the Win and Mac versions and Educational License clearing out an old store at work before Xmas, along with a Colour Classic (still working) - them were the days!
back in the day I was more of a mosaic browser man, aol played its part in history rest in peace netscape, long live firefox.
Maybe they should release the source code since its dead, who knows it might lead to other better things.
I still remember building pages using notepad and Netscape 0.9N which didn't even support tables! In fact I think I may even still have that old exe floating around somewhere :-)
The Linux version of Netscape ie. Netscape 9 for Linux that came out not long ago had some good features like the mini-browser and was compatible with some Firefox themes and to the fact that it needs no-installation. All these made me thing it was bouncing back- As someone said releasing the codes could a good thing; may be the start of another community_ran browser.
Blaming 'lack of users' makes me laugh! I had a netscape account (N Ireland) and they switched it off without warning me (and all the other customers) in advance. If they invested their money in making it good rather than sending out a disk with incremental free internet access every month to every person in their database they might not be in this mess. Rant over :)
AH, i remember the great conferences they held in NYC. We used to fly over from London for them, I still have a great bag they gave away as swag. Marc Andresson (?) also upgraded my hotel room to a suite for me at the Hilton once too, that was fun. Now of course everyone can raise a few million squid.