The Original Web Browser finally dies..

[fitz]

Netscape Navigator is finally being retired..

It's a sad day for me as I remember using the first versions of Mosiac and NCSA that allowed me to wander around in the old gopher world.. I remember when it spawned Netscape Navigator and birthed the web revolution..

I remember meeting Marc Andreessen way back when I was a student at U of I (not that he remembers me..)

*sniff* *sniff* Ahh, I feel so damn old now..

AOL has a long history on the internet, being one of the first companies to really get people online. Throughout its lifetime, it has been involved with a number of high profile acquisitions, perhaps the largest of which was the 1999 acquisition of the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was known to many as the thought leader in web browsing, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools.

At the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla. AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded browsers. In 2003, an independent foundation was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite. AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation.

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.

 

[BouncingSoul]

Net .... Scape? What?

Hehehehe.

Early versions ruled, it got bloated and craptacular several years back and I went with IE. Then I discovered Firefox and the world was once again a beautiful place. Ah memories.

 

[kcnychief]

Good Riddance I say!

 

[gonaads]

Mosaic FTW!