[Eug]

Netscape is dead

As of Feb. 1, 2008, Netscape Navigator will no longer be supported. AOL sez use Firefox instead.

P.S. Nine years ago, AOL bought Netscape for 4.2 billion bux.

[Lateralus]

The AOL purchase was the kiss of death.

Netscape would have never regained its former glory, but things could have went much differently over the past nine years had Netscape landed in the hands of a more capable suitor...

Netscape is dead because AOL reduced it to a smattering of rebadged AOL web portal pages and a gussied up theme on top of a version of Mozilla that was always several months behind whatever was currently available.

[Big Mac]

At least Firefox came from it.

[Atomic Rooster]

Long live iCab...I think.

[angelmb]

Yeah, iCab 4 shines.

[voodoo]

Netscape died so long ago.

V

[Mithras]

I went to high school with the son of Netscape's CEO. He had a very nice ski chalet in Aspen. And a jet. Amazing how well you can do for yourself while flushing a company down the tubes.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

I went to high school with the son of Netscape's CEO. He had a very nice ski chalet in Aspen. And a jet. Amazing how well you can do for yourself while flushing a company down the tubes.

I think the real term is "selling out" rather than "flushing." The difference is that one usually goes with it when one flushes one's company, and people like Mark Andreeson are too smart to go that route. On the other hand, when promised a huge budget to develop one's product even further as part of a very, VERY attractive buyout offer, smart people often overlook the fact that these promises come from suits that talk out of multiple bodily orifices.

Originally Posted by voodoo 

Netscape died so long ago.

I couldn't agree more. Like about the date of the first "AOL" version. It was great while it was in an original version, but after AOL, it was just so much advertising...

As Lateralus says, AOL buying them was the kiss of death. Has AOL done anything at all that wasn't a bad idea with maybe two weeks' worth of hindsight? I think not.

[Sherman Homan]

One of the more fascinating books of the last decade was "The New New Thing". Especially the chapter on Jim Clark and the yacht he built with all of that Netscape money.

[SirCastor]

Gosh, I remember when Netscape was the 800lbs. gorilla browser. I remember when Netscape actually cost money. Then Microsoft built Internet Explorer, and gave it away for free. That was the real nail in the coffin. Netscape never recovered from that. I also remember when Netscape started to pull from Gecko source. Wow.

On a side note, when i first heard of Netscape, I was fourteen. For some reason I pictured the internet being rendered in 3d... something along the lines of VRML or that one Vector tank game.

[chris v]

It was the horrible OS 9 installer for Netscape 6 that drove me here, so I have them to thank for discovering the forums, and iCab (which was awesome under OS 9) and then Camino, or whatever it was called back then -- I was big into the betas & nightlies for a while when it was really growing. I keep Firefox around now, but have pretty much settled on Safari for at least 2 years.

I don't think I've even launched Netscape since switching to OS X except to check browser compatibility with websites. Supporting Netscape 3 was a PITA, which I quit doing a long time ago, once it slipped below 5%.

I never fully understood what AOL thought they were getting when they bought Netscape, either. It's not like they needed the codebase, as the open-source browser movement was already underway, and they switched to it, anyway. Were they buying the braintrust, or did they just want to eliminate it, so they could go mano a mano with Microsoft? (and lose?)

[driven]

The last version of Netscape that I actually *LIKED* was version 4.x.

They skipped version 5 and jumped to 6.0. That version blew. It seemed they were more focused on themes then making a decent, fast product. It suffered from a lot of the same bloat and lack of focus that Vista does now. At least they improved the core product by 6.2. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out the Netscape branded browser remained too focused on tie-ins to AOL. Firefox improved dramatically later. There was no reason that AOL couldn't have made this work.

Why is AOL still around anyway?

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by driven 

Why is AOL still around anyway?

Because people are still convinced that they need to push their parents or tech-challenged friends toward a provider that uses bloated software to 'guide' you through logging on and a script that decreases the quality of web images to speed up browsing time.

At DSL prices.

[Oisín]

Why is AOL still around anyway?

Plain stubborn spite and a headfast refusal to grant the world at large the satisfaction of its long overdue demise?

[ghporter]

I think it's a combination of ignorance as noted by Lateralus, and corporate greed as noted by Oisín. The suits in their boardroom must live under rocks-and expect their customer base to live there too.

My 75 year old dad has used a variety of ISPs in Southeastern Michigan, and has settled on one that currently does what he wants-but he's not at all incapable of deciding there's something better without a bunch of expensive hand-holding and "support" that isn't at all helpful. Of course, I'm damning my dad with faint praise-he can do anything he wants to and knows it. Way too many people in the U.S. of any age are spooked by "computers" because they think they're magical boxes or something. Sheesh.

[Eug]

I switched to MS Internet Exploder (on the PC) when both IE and Netscape went to version 4. (It was 1997, and I wasn't on a Mac at the time.)

Netscape Communicator 4 was a bloated mess. MS IE was much faster. Furthermore, IE 4 came with Windows 98 and nobody I knew who was running Windows saw the reason to use Netscape when it didn't work as well as IE.

A year later, AOL bought Netscape. AOL killed Netscape, yes, but it was already in decline long before that IMO. AOL (along with IE 5 on the PC) was just the nail in the coffin, and the Netscape guys did very well to get $4.2 billion for their fading company.

[driven]

I think a huge mistake was the re-write that took place between Netscape 4.x and 6.x. It took far too long just to release a product that didn't work as well as the previous version. They would have been better off taking the effort to add what they wanted into the 4.x code-base. As a developer I know this is often undesirable because software is harder to read (and find the place to make a change) then it is to write, but in this case the market conditions should have trumped the desires of the engineers.

[Lateralus]

Very true.

The transition to 6 was handled horribly, forcing many people to stick with 4.x until the Netscape got its **** together with a replacement. But the problem was that Netscape 4.x was already lacking horribly and wasn't enough to holdover people waiting for a solid 6.x/7 release.

Most of them jumped ship during the wait and never came back.

Though I'm one of the few who actually benefited from Netscape 6.

At the time, I was a computer novice. I was using Windows 98 in concert with IE, which of course provided more crashes than I could count. I knew of Netscape in passing but had never used a browser other than IE. So with the coverage that 6 got when it was released, I downloaded it. I remember loving the theme and noticing that I wasn't have the same instability issues with Netscape that I was having with IE.

In hindsight, 6 was a horrendous release. But it was probably the first product I encountered that introduced me to the wonders of non-MS software.

[Eug]

Yeah, Netscape 4 on the PC was OK. It just wasn't any better than IE 4 overall.

While people waited for Netscape 4 to be updated, it fell progressively behind. And then they released Netscape 6 a long time later, but it sucked.

[Mithras]

Originally Posted by SirCastor 

For some reason I pictured the internet being rendered in 3d... something along the lines of VRML or that one Vector tank game.

Oh, wow. Spectre VR? I loved that game.

[Cipher13]

The first version of Netscape I ever used was 0.96, and the last was Communicator 4.5 (4.7 introduced all sorts of **** I didn't want). After that, I moved to IE5 (for Mac), which was vastly superior.

After that it was Chimera (or was there one before that?) or Phoenix or something, then Camino and finally Safari (or Firefox on a PC - the OS X version of Firefox is ****).

[sek929]

Maybe I don't do everything the web has to offer but Firefox has always worked much better than Safari for me.

[osiris]

RIP

[mindwaves]

I remember using Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator and I used to awe at programs who had a fancy splash screen at startup complete with the "Loading x, y, z." (also PS). It made me feel like I was using something spectacular until I started using IE 3.0/4.0 which just simply launched in a fraction of the time as Netscape which at that time, I was over the fad of splash screens and wanted to get down to business. Netscape has losed me since.

[ctt1wbw]

I remember using Mosaic on a Unix box. Netscape isn't that bad, I have it under my Vista laptop, along with Firefox, Safari, IE, and Flock.

I forgot how many I have on my iMac. And yes, AOL killed it, just like they are killing the internet.

And since when did Microsoft make Internet Explorer?

[analogika]

Originally Posted by ctt1wbw 

And since when did Microsoft make Internet Explorer?

From 1995 onward.

The first version that was actually audited to no longer contain any NCSA Mosaic code was Version 7, released in Jan 2006.

(from wikipedia)

[mitchell_pgh]

Netscape 4 was solid, everything after just couldn't beat IE. When I actually said "this isn't bad" to IE on a Mac, I knew Netscape was dead.

I remember using Netscape 1.0 and thinking "wow, this is going to change the world!"

[Shaddim]

Originally Posted by SirCastor 

On a side note, when i first heard of Netscape, I was fourteen. For some reason I pictured the internet being rendered in 3d... something along the lines of VRML or that one Vector tank game.

I blame Johnny Mnemonic.

[vexborg]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh 

I remember using Netscape 1.0 and thinking "wow, this is going to change the world!"

Netscape 1.0 peh!

I started using Netscape at version 0.96 (and left after version 4.76) - not a very stable version to say at least, but it was usable...

[analogika]

I think I didn't switch to Netscape (from NCSA Mosaic) until version 1.1 - but it's been so long I can't be sure...

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by ctt1wbw 

And since when did Microsoft make Internet Explorer?

????!!! They sort of wrote it, you know. First they charged for it unless you were a student or something, but eventually they fell in line and gave it away. But "Internet Explorer" was (and IS) a Microsoft product from the start.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

????!!! They sort of wrote it, you know. First they charged for it unless you were a student or something, but eventually they fell in line and gave it away. But "Internet Explorer" was (and IS) a Microsoft product from the start.

No, it wasn't!

They bought NCSA Mosaic in 1995, slightly modified and rebranded it into Internet Explorer.

As I mentioned above, the first version not to contain any NCSA code wasn't released until January 2006.

Mosaic (web browser) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ghporter]

The "Internet Explorer" product has always been a Microsoft product, whether they wrote every line of code or just modified the program title. It was never called "Internet Explorer" until released by Microsoft. I'm not saying that MS "invented the Internet browser" or anything like that, just that this particular product, under this name, has always been a Microsoft product.

[SirCastor]

I remember when Netscape stopped being a browser and became this massive suite of bloat. That was annoying, especially for those of us who had no interest in using it as a newsreader or a mail client.

[iranfromthezoo]

I remember using Netscape Navigator and using the internet when I was a small lad and thought it was so cool....haha the good ole days!