On Friday, roughly a decade after Netscapes fortunes started to slide, AOL announced it is finally pulling the plug on the Netscape browser. "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 Microsofts Internet Explorer," Tom Drapeau, AOLs director of development, wrote on the Netscape Blog.
The start of the saga dates back to 1994, when a University of Illinois student named Marc Andreessen founded a company called Netscape Communications, after taking the world by storm with the NCSA Mosaic browser. For a time, it looked like Netscape would be the dominant player on the Web, as Microsoft seemed to regard the Internet as somewhat irrelevant.
In 1995, Netscape had a stellar IPO, with shares almost tripling in value on the first day of trading, and the dot-com boom was born. Soon enough though, Microsoft got in the game and released its Internet Explorer browser. By 1997, Microsoft was already up to Internet Explorer 4, with significant advances over its three earlier versions.
By 1998, not coincidentally, Netscapes financial results had turned south and the company started laying off employees. A year later, America Online bought the struggling company for $4.2 billion, in what now looks like an exorbitant waste of money, but it was 1999, after all.
BIRTH OF MOZILLA
At the time of the acquisition, Netscape had started building an open-source version of the browser called Mozilla, an effort that in 2003 produced the independent Mozilla Foundation. Before the Foundations creation, Drapeau said, "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."
"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," Drapeau continued.
While Netscape failed to compete successfully against Internet Explorer, Mozilla has managed to make headway. According to Web usage tracking firm TheCounter.com, the open source Firefox browser has about 14 percent of the Web browser market, while Microsofts Internet Explorer has 79 percent and Apples Safari browser has 3 percent. For comparison, metrics firm NetApplications puts Firefoxs share at 16 percent. Either way, Netscapes share remains negligible.
USERS PUSHED TO FIREFOX
With AOL sounding the final death knell for Netscape, Drapeau encourages Netscapes remaining users to make the move over to Firefox. "Given AOLs current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel its the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox," he said.
AOL will continue to provide security patches for the browser until Feb. 1, 2008, after which all support will cease. Nostalgic users can still download old versions of the browser from AOLs archives, although a better option for the Netscape look is to install a Netscape theme for Firefox, Drapeau said.
