Netscape Navigator gasps its last on 1 February 2008

Web icon set to be discontinued

The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users.

Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said.

In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%.

In particular, the browser has faced competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which is now used by nearly 80% of all web users.

"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," said Tom Drapeau on the company's blog.
***
more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7163547.stm

Damn. :( I have a warm spot in my heart for the original Mosaic and Netscape, created by a student programmer who knew a good idea when he saw it, better than his employers. And I hate that the bulk of the profits from a great idea ended up in the hands of Microsoft, the company that came late to the game with no new ideas of its own.

(NB: Apparently the BBC is now hiring freepers -- "hand the reigns fully to Mozilla"?!?

The reigns
in Spayn
fall Mainely on the planes ... )

AOL ain't the kind of thing any self-respecting netizen wants to be bound up in...

for sure.

because they "improved" Navigator to the point of annoyance plus loaded it down with a bunch of AOL stuff I really didn't want.

Firefox was like the original Navigator, clean and easy to use, with addons at the user's discretion.

He's a fellow Kansan and KU grad. He helped pioneer a Lynx browser for Unix and helped develop the Netscape browser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli

:toast:

I used Netscape up until a month ago when I switched over full time to Foxfire. It was my first browser and I loved it.

While I'm sad to see Netscape go the way of the dinosaur, I'm not too sad. AOL bought Netscape but also funded the research that went into the development of Mozilla/Firefox. Basically, technically, Netscape is Mozilla/Firefox. And according to w3schools.com, Firefox has a 36.3% share of total browser users.

Oh and I wonder where the hell they got the 20% from.

But the numbers do vary, depending on the source.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/December/browser.php
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

The File > Edit feature for looking at/playing with web pages. Nothing else has anything that comes close.

With Firefox you can only look at the html code and you can not make any changes.
With Netscape 7.x, you can not only make changes to the code, you can see the effects before you save the changes back to your web site.

had a conversation with one of my professors as we were exploring ways to use the Internet for disseminating information as well as business uses. This was at least 2 or 3 years before IE came out. We thought wouldn't it be great if we can post this Powerpoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet, or MS Word document as it is for easy display. We worked on different methods and ways using the Netscape 1.x that sufficed but didn't accomplish everything we wanted or would like to see. We quickly came to the conclusion that Netscape was doomed in spite of the fact it hadn't gone public yet and when it did it would go nowhere. We figured right away that there was no way Microsoft would ever allow Netscape or anything else to make it possible to do the things we wanted to do without having to go through Microsoft. A couple of years later Netscape went public and a couple years later Netscape went belly up. It later came out in the MS anti-trust suit that MS conspired and did all the things we were afraid they would do or not do in order to force Netscape out of business.

I do get a lot of satisfaction knowing that Mozilla Firefox has cut deeply into IE's market share and hope it eventually does to IE what MS did to Netscape.

Don't have to worry about downloading. Especially, if others have a slow or near slow internet access. I even included Thunderbird and the MS Office equivalent OpenOffice.org.

We've come a few lightyears now from 1994-1995.

In the middle of a major lawsuit by a number of groups including Mozilla and AOL against Microsoft, AOL goes for a hostile takeover of Mozilla. Talk about spectacular timing, newspapers thus, consumers started asking what the hell this was all about. It really made the lawsuit against Microsoft look like one of those nuisance lawsuits the right-wing organ master has been complaining about. Then after the successful hostile takeover, AOL starts loading the browser with AOL crap with no chance of removing it. On top of that, it was so memory hungry, that the browser crashed people computers. At the time I grabbed a copy of Nutscrape 4.6 just before the AOL invasion.

Now to make matters worst, Mozilla recommends that use Firefox because Mozilla 1.7.13 (the un-AOL Nutspace 7.x) is no longer going to be updated and is full of security holes. Good-bye old friend, nice knowing you.

I was really hoping that AOL would go out of business before Mozilla stopped revising Nonsincemaze browser.

AOL took over Netscape, but still included IE in its own software. Maybe it was around the time AOL demanded Time-Warner use its incredibly inept word processing and email to replace Outlook, Lotus Notes, and whatever else they were using. Then there was the PR about Netscape/AOL funding Mozilla, which never seemed to make any sense unless everyone involved really wanted both AOL and Netscrap to die off.

Fondly remembering Mosaic, which I used on CompuServe, I found Opera as the alternative to both IE and Netscrap. Worked fine on AOL when AOL was pretty much the only game in town. Still works fine, and does everything Netscrap, Mozilla, or Firefox does, and with a minimum of fuss.

So, fuck 'em all.

They should make the source code open.

It SUCKS!!!

I've been using Netscape 8.1.3 and it's great. Does this mean it will go away or it just won't have any future updates?

nt

Someone please 'spain this to me and speak s-l-o-w-l-y. Does this mean I have to CHANGE my browser? :scared:

But increasingly, you will find new Web sites using new code that your old browser can't handle. I was still using Netscape 4.8 fairly recently (you can browse DU with it, for example) but there are lots of sites which use new code so heavily that that version is almost useless with them. NN 7.0 is far from the latest version, but it works mostly OK.

If you are using the most recent version of NN, you are probably OK for a couple more years, realistically. Not a promise, just a prediction.

That's reassurring. My OS is old and upgraded as far as my processor will allow. I just didn't need/ couldn't handle a Feb. 1 deadline to get it together...