AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development

Kelson writes "After years of trying to figure out what to do with it, AOL is officially discontinuing the Netscape browser. In the four and a half years after they dismantled the development team and spun off the Mozilla Foundation as a lost cause, only to see Firefox take off, AOL has tried twice to reinvent Netscape. There was the chimera-like Netscape 8, which used both Mozilla's and IE's rendering engines, and just months ago they released Netscape 9, trying to ride the social networking wave. AOL will release security fixes through February 1, 2008, after which the browser will officially be dead. For the "nostalgic," they suggest using Firefox and installing a Netscape theme."

Damn it, for a second I thgouht

AOL was shutting down!

Already Dead

Netscape died years ago.

Netscape 4.7x was the last decent version. Netscape 6 was a horrendous piece of crap and every version since then has just been a crappified version of the Mozilla Suite.

.

Re:Already Dead

You're kidding, right? Did you *use* 3.0 and 4.x? 4.x was bloated, unstable dreck that was pushed out the door before it was ready--it was one reason, IMO, why Netscape failed (in addition to MS's malfeasance). 3.x was the last "real" version of Netscape, although 7.2 wasn't that bad (IIRC it was based on Mozilla 1.7), just filled with AOL bloatware.

Re:Already Dead

Uh, right, and preinstalling IE with Windows, forcing OEMs to make IE the default, and distributing IE on millions of CDs etc. had NOTHING to do with it. And it can't be that Netscape 'started sucking' because their "air supply" (remember those words?) had pretty much literally been cut off - hard to develop software without money. Puh-lease. I remember those days, and IE3 and IE4 were horrendously crap for years - they only started becoming remotely usable and stable by about version 5, long after the Netscape company had pretty much bought it.

Try SeaMonkey

Version 6 was a piece of shit. I was using 4.08 at that time. That was the last one I found to be stable until 7.1. I like the email and browser together... but I guess I'm gonna have to go the Firefox - Thunderbird route soon.

Actually, it sounds like you'd be more interested in SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org] than Firefox+Thunderbird. It's a continuation of the Mozilla suite that was the basis for Netscape 7, and still has the combined browser & email. It's also still being developed as a Mozilla project, so it's current as far as capabilities & security fixes go.

Nostalgia

For my nostalgia we have the old Netscape icon as a slashdot category image. That's more than enough for me.

So, did Microsoft really win?

I'd have to say no, and in fact, their attack on Netscape
probably woke up a lot of people, and Microsoft may regret it.

Days gone by

I will always remember sneaking into the "study" super-late at night, dialing up, and going into chat rooms with Netscape Navigator. I will never forget viewing my first porn website (don't know if it's still around, Babylon-X) using Netscape Navigator. I remember receiving my first email using Angelfire and Netscape Navigator. I even remember the very first file I ever downloaded (a printer driver for an old HP) using Netscape Navigator.

Yup, many of my firsts on the internet involved Netscape Navigator...I haven't used it in years, but I am still a little bit sad to see it go. Goodbye, comet-flying-over-a-global-sized-N...you were the gateway to a hell of a lot in my youth.

Re:Days gone by

It's not necessarily gone.

Someone could buy the Netscape brand name and donate it to the Mozilla foundation.

We'll all get a kick out of Netscape (previously known as firefox) kicking the ass of IE.

Heck if someone setup an organization to buy that brand name to give it to firefox, I'm paying big $$$

Long live..

Long live Mosaic and the N. That 8bit pron you delivered on my desktop during the mid 90s opened the door for many good times. You shall be missed old friend.

A bad way to die

I haven't used Netscape in quite a few years, but I hate seeing it die like that. It used to be a proud trademark - it stood for something - and ended up as yet another AOL castoff. I wish they'd transfer the name to the Mozilla Foundation. While I'm sure they wouldn't use it, at least it would be next to its child where it belongs.

Good!

AOL bought Netscape as bargaining power against MS, but then never actually used it that way. Instead, they mistreated what is arguably the most well known brand from the early days of the net in ways that only AOL could. Any other company would have built up Netscape. AOL lets it rot, then bastardizes it with every hare-brained scheme they can think of (dialup ISP, frankenbrowser, lame Digg knockoff), each further damaging the brand. The only smart thing AOL did that had anything to do with Netscape was to create the Mozilla foundation.

Now AOL is just as weak, having abandoned their walled garden, missed broadband altogether, and their only relevant public service is AIM, which has taken off to such a point that they simply aren't capable of killing it, no matter how incompetent they are.

Rest in peace, Netscape. Your long suffering at the hands of your caregiver is at an end.

(Why do I suspect zombie Netscape will rise from the grave in a year or so, when some new executive needs a name for a new pet project? BRAAAAIINNSSS 11.0, now with 250 gazillion free hours of shambling!)

Re:Good!

> The only smart thing AOL did that had anything
> to do with Netscape was to create the Mozilla
> foundation.

Actually, AOL didn't create the Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell Baker created the Mozilla Foundation and as part of that endeavor she solicited donations from AOL and several other large companies. AOL was convinced to donate $2M over 2 years, a couple of trademarks, and some hardware. Other organizations also donated cash, equipment, bandwidth, and full-time staff to the early Mozilla Foundation. There's no doubt that AOL's donation was significant, but it can hardly be said that they created anything.

- A

The Daily WTF

I once read this interesting Daily WTF/Worse Than Failure article about Netscape and how AOL's marketing team was screwing with it. For the life of me, I can't find the article. But one of the things they did was realize that pop-up blocking was one of the new cool things for browsers to have. But the marketing team stepped in and said, "Hold on just a second. We can't have the browser blocking OUR pop-ups." So they added rule to block all pop-ups except those that came from the netscape web page.

The netscape homepage happened to have a pop-up on it and of course, this is the default home page of the browser. When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".

Re:The Daily WTF

When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".

What would have made that perfect is if the pop-up itself was advertising the pop-up blocking feature.

Re:The Daily WTF

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Blake_Ross_on_Popup_Suppression.aspx [thedailywtf.com]

blink

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AOL Needs to Loosen Their Grip

The one time they let one of their projects breathe, it turned into Mozilla. Once they realized it wasn't their property that was inherently faulty, they tightened that grip right back up figuring if they just squeezed hard enough maybe they could make another diamond. They're so desperate to turn everything they own into a revenue generator, they'll do it at the expense of the product itself. Yes, every company needs its projects to make money for them, but you can't sacrifice your racing horse for good luck in the race.

They only think of their products in terms of themselves, they don't look at them from a customer viewpoint. I don't think the people in charge at AOL ever stopped to ask "Why would someone want Netscape?" they ask "How can we make Netscape represent us?"

It's like they think of their products as sales reps. Forget that big deal you landed 5 years ago, how are your numbers this week? They want it to make another big score, but without any resources. Coffee is for closers.

Netscape had numerous chances to work its way into people's hearts and minds but they never added a single feature people would actually want. Every feature they added was self serving. The company is just all backwards; they don't want to make great products, they want their products to make them great.

AOL = King Anti-Midas

Q: When you're the largest ISP in the nation and you acquire both Netcsape and Winamp and all the developers from Mozilla and Nullsoft, how is it that you manage to monumentally fuck it all up?

A: ?

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

Maybe that's true if you only associate with 10-year-olds. But as recently as 1996, it was the only browser worth using, created by one of the most innovative tech companies around.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

You speak blasphemy, sir! Netscape was a GREAT browser in its heyday (how quickly people seem to forget). In fact, it was pretty much the ONLY browser for a time. People would say "open up Netscape" instead of "open up your browser" just ten years ago.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Slashdot user WizMaster, who is Exhibit 193062847 in the series "What's Wrong With America Today."

Re:I remember NS8

AOL isn't selling access anymore, so the point is moot. They're doing content work and online advertising. The access business will probably still exist for a few more years before the lights are out, but they already fired all the marketing people, most of the customer service people, and many of the access tech people too.

AOL can easily fail, but they already canned the dial up model a few years ago, so the client and all the old AOL stuff isn't the problem any more. Too late? Maybe, maybe not.

That said, they really didn't have much they could do in terms of broadband. By the time broadband was big, the people who actually owned the lines for cable and fiber realized they'd make more money if they kept it to themselves and made sure that you would have to pay very well indeed to run a billion dollar business on their lines. Today, with their calls for tiered access, they are continuing that trend. Google is basically the AOL of this decade, a company whose value is based on their ability to deliver fast search results over someone else's physical connections. Should tiering become commonplace, Google and other content providers could be in a very different world.

Re:To be honest...

What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?

Have collapsible toolbars.

Really, the only thing I miss in Firefox that was in Netscape since 4.something.
Seamonkey has it, though.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

You aren't the only one that keeps an old browser for that trick, although I've since moved to Offbyone [offbyone.com]. It is great for those sites that even noscript throws its hands up over, without just letting who knows what run on the site. The best part is it is available without an installer, just a simple 839Kb zip file which means you can just carry it on a flash or even a cd, and if I want to clear out the history I simply toss the old one and unzip a fresh browser. And if someone needs a sweet rendering engine there are links on the site to speak to the developer directly. I bet this would make a great engine for other apps, as it is VERY fast and has support for OpenSSL.

And on the topic of Netscape, IMHO they were dead when they released that horrible version that was so buggy and slow( I believe it was NS4). And let us not forget that Netscape was as bad as IE for using their own proprietary hooks which made it hard to render in other browsers. I am so glad that now we have so many choices like Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon, etc. Instead of the "Coke VS Pepsi" that was NS VS IE.

And for those that want a "Netscape like" browser, there is always Seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org], which is much better and supports most Firefox extensions, including the important ones like noscript. It also makes a great browser for those older folks that are still stuck on older versions of IE and Outlook. I can't count the number of folks I've switched with Seamonkey due to the convenience of being able to check their mail just by clicking on a tab.

It is sad to see a once great come to the end, but IMHO it died a long time ago, and now they are simply pulling the life support. It does make me look back on the good old days, When Peter Norton made great tools and everyone had their own favorite DOS hacks. Now Get Off My Lawn!