AOL Pulls Plug on Netscape Web Browser

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK (AP) - Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.

Its current caretakers, Time Warner Inc. (TWX)'s AOL, decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape's usage dwindled with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.

"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," Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20071228/D8TQN9U81.html

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I still use netscape 7.1 98% of the time. I will miss my old friend once it fades away.

[davidinalameda]

1. Netscape is still out there?

didn't realize it

[Mojorabbit]

8. I still use it

It is what I started on and I hate changing something once I get used to it.
Guess I have a big learning curve ahead.

[damntexdem]

25. I'm using Netscape 7.2 at my office.

But it looks like it will be Firefox for me there, just like at home.

I won't touch Internet Explorer.

[oldgrowth]

2. Try SeaMonkey from firefox ,link

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

[bananas]

5. Buy these cute sentient creatures and feed them to your stupid goldfish

[bananas]

6. "So eager to please, they can even be trained" = "Please don't feed me to your goldfish! I'll do any

[Tellurian]

3. Say it ain't so!

My Netscape Navigator is 9.0.. Just upgraded from a 7.3 a few weeks ago and lost all my bookmarks.. sheesh!

[bananas]

4. Thank god for firefox!

[lapfog_1]

7. Greed killed it off long ago...

Netrape. Or Netscrape. Or Nutscrape.

All were applicable. Then they were blindsided by IE.

Oh well.

[WA98296]

9. The greed that killed it is the monopolistic greed of Microsoft to control the world.

[FREEWILL56]

10. With the garbage MS is putting out, there is still hope for a real competition

with some real software. Stay away from Vista people. There isn't just bugs to go through as it isn't compatible with most things and made my audio and video cards just about bare bones after making it compatible. It's base requirements are much higher too with its primary goal as to protect itself. Remember the M5?

[harmonicon]

13. that's why I bought a mac this year

I've had several windows machines, and really really like XP, but my computer was over 3 years old and failing. I bought a new macbook and now run mac os and my old windows XP machine on it. Now I can run my old XP stuff and slowly ween myself off windows - I just don't want to deal with vista. I don't like mac either, but oh well..... if some better audio editors come out for linux, maybe I'll go there.

[FREEWILL56]

16. Hmmm, now that brings up a question from me.

I was under the assumption that MACS needed their own special boards and circuitry. Can a MAC OS be placed on say an PC MOBO? If so I may consider buying a MAC OS. If they can go on PC MOBOs what software can run on it? Interchangeable?

[harmonicon]

18. you can do that in a sense, but it's not common

I think you can use a program like parallels (what I use to run XP on my mac) to run macOS on a generic motherboard (I've talked to a guy who ran OSX on a non-mac machine, but can't remember how exactly he did it). What's the appeal in using non-mac hardware? When I was pricing out laptops, the mac was the cheapest laptop I could get with a 2 gig intel processor and 2 gigs of ram (the other thing I was considering was an Asus barebones machine).

[lapfog_1]

11. No, what they failed to realize is that the model for making

money was radically changing. Instead of giving Netscape away (and improving the Windows version), they wanted to charge the end user a per seat license fee. They failed to understand that advertising revenue and providing more than a simple browser was the ticket. By the time Netscape was sold (it once had a campus of buildings in Mtn View, CA, and hundreds of expensive developers working for them) it was too late. If they had purchased AltaVista away from Dec/Compaq... and combined it with free software... they might still have lost to M$, but perhaps, just maybe, they could have been Google. Maybe. Of course, the googlers had a pretty good method of doing web searches, while AltaVista was much more pedestrian.

So who knows.

Firefox is what Netscape should have been anyway, so the market got what we wanted anyway. And M$ hasn't bought Google... and possibly can't at this point.

[douglas9]

12. R.I.P. Netscape

http://operawatch.com/

[Buns_of_Fire]

14. I tip my hat to its passing. Farewell, old bud.

Netscape was my first real browser, back in the days when you actually had to BUY the sucker ($29.95, if I recall correctly -- on 3 1/2" floppies (what's a "floppy?") and with a real manual that you could use as a reference, too! In a box!)

This was, of course, back in the days when there was only one internet, and not all the tubes had been installed yet.

[CatholicEdHead]

21. NCSA Mosiac was my first browser

I still have a copy of Netscape 1.0 somewhere.

[mike_c]

22. me too-- back in the day when...

...the WWW was the next cool thing.

[bigworld]

23. GEnie refugee here.

God, I feel old.

[pinniped]

15. What ever happened to the live fish tank feed?

?

[sendero]

17. AOL...

.. the kiss of death. They have about as much business running a software development effort as I do performing brain surgery.

Oh well, there a several good browsers out there, and Netscape was no longer even in the running.

I'm looking forward to the day when AOL itself fails, which can't be that far in the future :)

[0007]

19. AOL can go fuck themselves and take IE with them.

[silverojo]

20. Netscape and IE should both go down the toilet

Only thing saving IE is Micro$haft. Both those browsers are slow, creaking bloatware, and IE is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

[liberalnurse]

24. I used it a while, loved it...then the upgrade

screwed everything up! It took me a week to switch things around and/or re-establish my bookmarks etc.....