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Netscape The Internet Software

Netscape Finally Put Down 159

Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released. "Nearly 14 years after the once mighty browser made its first desktop appearance as Mosaic Netscape 0.9, its disappearance comes as little surprise. Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years."
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Netscape Finally Put Down

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  • by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <{moc.nosduh-arab ... {nosduh.arabrab}> on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:36AM (#22524394) Journal

    Its GOT to be worth something.

    Besides, there is one banking site that I need that still doesn't like firefox / linux, but works perfectly with seamonkey.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:47AM (#22524454)
      Netscape is only familiar to people who've used the internet 10 years ago. The Joe Sixpacks who picked up a "pooter" 5 or 6 years ago to get on the "internets" never heard of it, or of Firefox.
      • Netscape deserves to DIE DIE DIE, for what they did to Mosaic.
        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by ajlitt ( 19055 )
          They also deserve to DIE DIE DIE for naming JavaScript.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What does the name mean to you? To me, it mostly means a web browser and company that offered a good solution early, but quickly became bloated (both the company and the web browser) and faded away. I'm sure AOL will retain the trademark, but how much is that "flash in the pan" association really worth?
    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Besides, there is one banking site that I need that still doesn't like firefox / linux, but works perfectly with seamonkey.

      The current version of Netscape is based on Firefox, it has no mailing client or anything sea-monkey specific. They just ported the sidebar from seamonkey to use on Firefox'es codebase.
    • by ockegheim ( 808089 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:04AM (#22524552)

      Maybe the US government is sponsoring them. You need IE or Netscape to get a US visa [state.gov]. So if, say, you have a Mac or run Linux, then Netscape has a monopoly.

      • by deblau ( 68023 ) <slashdot.25.flickboy@spamgourmet.com> on Saturday February 23, 2008 @02:51AM (#22524988) Journal
        Step 1: about:config
        Step 2: general.useragent.extra.firefox=Netscape/6.2
        Step 3: reload
        Step 4: profit!
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Hmm, it also claims to require Adobe Acrobat Reader, even though there are about five billion other programs that are perfectly capable of viewing PDF files.

        It saddens me how many people don't understand the concept of a file that can be opened in multiple programs. The other day I had a dreadful time trying to explain to someone that there isn't actually any difference between a "Notepad file" and an "Emacs file". (Can I blame Microsoft yet?)
      • It says Netscape 6.2 as *minimum* and the forms run quite well on Firefox. There are enough examples that are truly screwed, why not point to them?
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ockegheim ( 808089 )
          It wouldn't let me see the forms because I was using Firefox (your browser is not what I want to see sort of dialog box). Thanks to slashdotters I know I can change the user agent if I want to but that might be beyond less technical people. And I pointed to that site because it's the only site in recent memory that's told me I have the wrong browser.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tom9729 ( 1134127 )
      I might be wrong here, but I think Firefox and Seamonkey (or Iceweasel and Iceape if you're a Debian guy) both render pages in pretty much the same way.

      Have you given the user agent switcher [mozilla.org] plugin for Firefox a try?
    • As others have pointed out Seamonkey is more Netscape than Firefox. Why not give the name "Netscape" to the open source project Seamonkey? I was a little disappointed in the Mozilla Foundation for taking the name Mozilla away from the browser-suite, but I think naming the Seamonkey Project "Netscape" would be a nice gesture on AOL's part.
  • by gnick ( 1211984 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:38AM (#22524412) Homepage
    I loved Netscape [wikipedia.org] back in its day, but this really isn't going to be overly painful for the world in general.
    • The headline: "Put Down" It's like they shot Barbaro [bloomberg.com]. Netscape was not retired out of sympathy (empathy for those of you in Rio Linda) for the browser; The Old Blue N died of natural causes. May she rest in Bittorrent.
    • by BunnyClaws ( 753889 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @02:46AM (#22524972) Homepage
      It took awhile for me to come around to using Netscape. Back in the day I preferred using Lynx from a dummy terminal because it was very fast and efficient. At the time the graphics on websites were not very interesting so I didn't feel a need to switch to a graphical browser. Eventually, I started to use Netscape, to surf the web. I can still remember the shooting stars passing by the "N" as my browser perused the ether of the Internet.

      It wasn't long after that I became a Netscape bigot. Even after Netscape Communicator came out with its bloated bundled package and IE 4 and 5 started running more efficient I still stood behind Netscape. AOL bought Netscape and things started to slide downhill from there. Remember when AOL was still significant enough to buy out good software companies and rape them? LOL Remember the name AOL-Time Warner? Times have changed. I still continued to use Mozilla up until the Firefox uprising started.

      Anyways, sorry to have rambled. Thanks for listing an old man reminisce.
    • Out of curiosity, does anybody know why Wikipedia doesn't post charts and graphs of the useragents visiting Wikipedia? It seems that would probably be more accurate than the charts and graphs they have up now.

  • AOL is Death (Score:2, Insightful)

    by snowraver1 ( 1052510 )
    Netscape was doing well until AOL bought them. Months ago, AOL announces that dialup is no longer profitable. That's enough proof for me! The CDs are like death spores.
    • by andy314159pi ( 787550 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:41AM (#22524430) Journal

      The CDs are like death spores.
      I think there's a barrio of Mexico City that is made entirely of discarded AOL CDs.
      • Wow, jokes about AOL CDs - thanks for another memory from the mid 90s! Hey, did you hear the one about how Bill Clinton keeps his ankles warm?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by eln ( 21727 )
      AOL was only able to buy them because they weren't doing well. The only part of Netscape that was worth anything by that point was the netscape.com portal site, which is generally cited as the reason AOL bought them at all. The browser wars were over by that point, and the source code had already been opened up. AOL made a half-assed effort to keep Netscape the browser alive, but I believe even at that point IE was the default browser for AOL clients.
      • Re:AOL is Death (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Atomic Fro ( 150394 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @06:45AM (#22525810)
        As I recall, this happened around the same time IE was built solid into Windows 98 and Microsoft's "embrace / extend / extinguish" strategy pumped full blast with "IE Active Channels." Microsoft started MSN as an internet service provider and AOL was a little nervous about Microsoft making Windows rely on MSN. So AOL bought Netscape and kept the browser alive as a bargaining chip. At the time AOL was the #1 internet provider and if AOL made everyone use Netscape, Microsoft's internet strategy would be dead in the water. This threat kept the AOL icon on the desktop of default installs of Windows.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by istartedi ( 132515 )

      Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. The dot com bust came, IIRC, two years later. There was no way they were viable as an independant entity. When NS was at 3.x, they had the advantage of not crashing your entire Windows as IE4 installs did. That was why I preferred NS. However, when I got a chance to work with Netscape's customization kit for ISPs, and compare it to the counterpart Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK, or "Eeek!"), it was no

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 )

        Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. There was no way they were viable as an independant[sic] entity.

        You assume that Netscape's primary business was the web browser. It was for a while, but eventually Netscape started giving their browser away and shifted over to their Enterprise Server business. Netscape Web Server was extremely popular, and Netscape worked hard to sell add-on products like LiveWire. Eventually they worked out a deal with Sun, thus produc

        • LAMP stack and other Free/OSS products. Unless their code was highly optimized and/or easier to use, their competition was Free/OSS or MS crap that PHBs like. Is there room for a 3rd player there? Now that you mention it, I've seen packet dumps from Netscape ES. Using LF instead of CRLF (per RFC) to terminate fields, and YES, that made more work for me too. I never actually worked with their server products from an admin PoV, but if that's any indication of the quality of their code, it seems unlikely

  • by calebt3 ( 1098475 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:42AM (#22524432)
    And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
    But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
    The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
    and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
    reborn with its strength renewed, and the
    followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

    from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
    • Re:about:mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)

      by calebt3 ( 1098475 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:57AM (#22524512)
      Sorry to reply to my own post, but I noticed that the Book of Mozilla is getting another entry [wikipedia.org] when FF3 goes public!:

      Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the
      fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their
      children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

      from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
      • Blast you just beat me... I copied mine from the HTML source to the page in FF3 beta 3.
    • Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words [mozilla.org] , and spoke [mozilla.org] of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

      from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
      (10th Edition)

  • Long Live the King!
  • by Anonymous Coward
    And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
    But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
    The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
    and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
    reborn with its strength renewed, and the
    followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

    from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
  • Again? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris Burkhardt ( 613953 ) <Chris@MrEtc.net> on Saturday February 23, 2008 @12:51AM (#22524474) Homepage
    How many times is Netscape going to die?
    • Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:27AM (#22524666)
      Ask Atari or Napster. Old trademarks never die, they just get adopted by successively seedier operations.
      • Re:Again? (Score:5, Funny)

        by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @02:45AM (#22524964) Journal

        Ask Atari or Napster. Old trademarks never die, they just get adopted by successively seedier operations.

        My $30 Polaroid DVD player begs to differ.

        Hey, where's that burning smell coming from?

      • I'm waiting for someone with $42.50 burning a hole in their pocket to revive the AMC car brand.

        My brother's first car was an '82 AMC Eagle (bear in mind, this was around 1998). He'd had it for a day and had already poured four quarts of oil into it and was still getting the 'Low Engine Oil' light. So he took it to my dad, who opened the hood and right away noticed that the lid holding the oil filter in place was very very loose, so he tightened it and turned on the engine.

        Presto! They have oil pressure! A L
  • by mrbcs ( 737902 )
    It's been 11 years for me. From version 2 until my current version 7.2. I'm gonna hang on as long as I can. Firefox just doesn't like me, and I hate Internet Exploder.

    Gonna have to try Seamonkey I guess.

    11 years... man that was quick.

  • Someone should.... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by jimpop ( 27817 ) *
    Someone should seriously look at the business side of what happened to Netscape over the past decade. Clearly, IMHO, there is probably a good case to be made that bureaucracy and mis-management killed the beast. How could something so cool, in it's day, navigate (no pun intended) itself into oblivion? I've seen similar things happen with other cool products being absorbed into bureaucratic companies, only to loose market respect and following. I think there is probably enough evidence out there, somewhe
    • Oh I dunno. How about just the fact that the software firm that made 98% of all desktops entered the market with their own browser which they (1) gave away for free and (2) bundled with their OS and (3) gave a few nonstandard tricks to, which everyone used (cf. that 98% of desktop), which made lots of stuff not quite Just Work(TM) unless you were using IE?

      Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate. No doubt, sup
      • Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate.

        What the hell are you talking about? Netscape gave away the Netscape Navigator browser for free, so they never really had the ability to make a good profit on it. Their real product was server software, of which they had many kinds [wikipedia.org] for sale. Where MS really started to kill them was with bundling IIS free with WinNT Server.

    • by corsec67 ( 627446 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:40AM (#22524710) Homepage Journal
      Second System Effect [wikipedia.org]. Basically, you make a first version that is lean, does a few things well, and release that. Then in the second system you add a bunch of "it would be cool if..." things, making the second version huge, bloated, and not as good as the first version.

      Vista, as compared to Windows 2000, for a big example.
      • Second System Effect [wikipedia.org]. Basically, you make a first version that is lean, does a few things well, and release that. Then in the second system you add a bunch of "it would be cool if..." things, making the second version huge, bloated, and not as good as the first version.

        Vista, as compared to Windows 2000, for a big example.
        Where does NT figure into that model?
  • Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years.
    More like "...hindered competition and outbundled..." if I remember correctly.
  • by filbranden ( 1168407 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:02AM (#22524546)

    the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years.

    I remember well those days. IE was no competition to Netscape, Netscape was much superior. IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had, I guess it didn't even support tables, for sure it didn't have frames, Javascript, etc.

    IE3 was the worst piece of software I have seen. EVER!

    The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE. Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow. They made the only possible download the bundle of browser, mail, news reader. Even Mozilla when they got the code from Netscape they had it bundled, further on they split it again to launch Phoenix (then Firebird then Firefox) to start getting some success again.

    Netscape didn't die from competition of IE, at least not in terms of features. If Netscape wasn't the only one to blame for its own death, Microsoft's part in it was only by bundling the browser into the OS, not by making a product that could compete with Netscape.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cjb658 ( 1235986 )
      There was no competition. Everyone got IE preinstalled with their computer, so that's what they used.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hcmtnbiker ( 925661 )
        There was no competition. Everyone got IE preinstalled with their computer, so that's what they used.

        To start off Netscape still blew the doors off IE. Every company I can think of kept Netscape as their browser, it was cutting edge, fast, and what people where used to. It was a better product and therefore, won its way on the desktop even though there was a 'free' alternative. Down the road though Netscape instead of moving towards innovation as IE caught up to it, decided it should focus its sights
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          True that.

          Sure, millions of Windows users had IE as their first browser because it came with Windows, and never needed to look for another. That's Microsoft's fault, such as it is.

          But the millions of people who were already using Netscape at the time and switched away from it because it became the most craptacular web browser ever? That's all on Netscape.

          I personally went from someone who mocked IE and never intended to use it, to someone praying for Netscape to die in the space of a few short years. Fo
    • Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow.

      IMO, what really killed Netscape was the nested tables. Without good CSS support, what was the only way to display nice webpages?

      Perhaps it was simply shortsight. They didn't have a good code for rendering pages, and it kept bloating, and bloating, and bloating.

      IE did one thing right: The display of massively nested tables. I liked IE4. It was slim, nice, and fast. If we follow the story more closely, we'll see that Internet Explorer and Netscape fell in the same trap: Bloat and lack of good development. The only difference is that IE was the default, so it didn't quite die. It was alive, but it kept rotting (getting infected) anyways.
      • by Nimey ( 114278 )

        I liked IE4. It was slim, nice, and fast.
        Spock has a beard in your universe, doesn't he?

        But I'll grant that IE4 probably was, at least in comparison to Communicator 4. As long as you stayed well away from Active Desktop.
      • by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @02:37PM (#22528164) Homepage Journal
        You are correct.

        I have downloaded the code to NS4 when the source was first released (was it 1999?) I remember reading through the pages and pages of code and I remember feeling amazed at the terrible quality of what I saw. One very striking example of that is still in my head: it was a sorting routine. A number of pages were commented out with a comment on top, which read: 'trying to implement quick sort. Too hard. Use bubble sort instead (for now.)'. And yes, the quick sort was commented out and the routine implemented bubble sort and that was that.
    • You are right up till 4.0

      IE 4.0 was finally better than Netscape 4.0

      I was a die-hard N user up till 4.0 put me off it for good. IE WAS crap, IE4 was finally better than Netscape 4 from a user perspective when Netscape took a sharp down-turn in quality and stability.
    • by tjstork ( 137384 )
      The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE

      It was definitely better than IE2, but when IE4 came out, with a fully programmable DOM, it was all over for Netscape. Netscape never really worked to try to improve their core browser engine from 1 to 4, just kept hacking on it and building out more stuff, whereas Microsoft did. At IE4, web developers began writing for IE, rather than Nets
    • by Bogtha ( 906264 )

      IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had

      Given that Netscape 3 was released a year after Internet Explorer 2, that's a pretty unfair comparison, don't you think? Internet Explorer 3 was released at the same time as Netscape 3, why not compare like for like?

      Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE.

      Netscape 3 didn't have any support for CSS, while Internet Explorer 3 was the first major b

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by GoldMace ( 315606 )
      >>IE3 was the worst piece of software I have seen. EVER!

      The versions of IE before IE3 were far, far, worse...

      And that was all that were pre-installed on my old Windows 95 computer...

      And everytime I had to reformat and reinstall it, which was practically every other week, www.netscape.com would not display so I could get a better browser...it would tell me I needed a browser that needed frames or javascript or something other than MSIE 1.0...but microsoft.com displayed...not anywhere near fine...but we
  • Great, what about IE now?
  • by COredneck ( 598733 ) * on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:10AM (#22524586)
    I remembered getting on the Internet back in 1994. The browsers available was Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 with the "beating" N. This was on Windows 3.1 with a dial-up connection. There no screen backgrounds yet and the best of all, no annoying pop-up ads. Web pages actually had useful information instead of useless marketing drivel especially looking for technical information on company web sites.

    Around the time of Jul 1995, I left Indiana and took a job at MCI in Colorado Springs, CO. We had Sun Solaris machines running Solaris 2.4 and I ran Netscape on the machine. It was Netscape 0.94. At home, I ran Win 3.11 WFW and Linux with kernel 1.1.59. I downloaded a copy of Netscape but the version was 0.94. I didn't quite have Linux working with a dial-up Internet connection yet so I was stuck running Internet on Windows.

    I remembered when Netscape got bought out by AOL, it was a sad day. In my mind, I knew that AOL was going to ruin it and in some ways, they did and now, Netscape is no more. Before Netscape got bought out, I would have enjoyed working for them especially at the start of the Dot-Com era.
  • for from the ashes, firefox was born.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:23AM (#22524640)
    Wasn't Netscape a whole internet suite? Why not direct people to SeaMonkey?
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by erwanl ( 1209904 )
      It was, until the version 7. Netscape 8 is based on Firefox 1, and Netscape 9 is based on Firefox 2. So it really makes more sense to send users to Firefox (the base for Netscape) or Flock (a Firefox-based browser, just like Netscape).
  • I am happy Netscape is gone. For one, folks will survive the adware that was always included.

    The other reason is that for government sites that used to only post support for Internet Explorer and Netscape like this one: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/formspubs/help/adobenotice-e.html [cra-arc.gc.ca], I can see them mentioning Firefox, which will be good for Firefox. Do you see in the text that mentions Netscape, denying Firefox its rightful place?

  • by zippthorne ( 748122 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @01:55AM (#22524774) Journal
    This reminds me, I wonder what Lycos is doing these days.
  • Seamonkey (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chebucto ( 992517 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @02:30AM (#22524896) Homepage
    They should suggest that people switch to Seamonkey, not Firefox. It's (a) suite, after all :) .
  • "It's not dead, it's just restin'."
  • by ImdatS ( 958642 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @05:03AM (#22525470) Homepage
    Back in 1995-97, I was working for a major European media/publishing company. We were one of their (Netscape's) largest customers having bought around 200 Netscape Publishing System Licenses (NPS) for around USD 80k each! - well those were the good ol' days.

    The software was very primitive but it was a solid basis for what we needed - in our company I was responsible for the platform so I came up with a solid specification of what we needed and how Netscape should add this to NPS. We had a meeting on a very high level with Netscape management in Mountain View in September 1996(!) to discuss my paper, which I had already discussed in with Netscape Europe and managed to actually get through to Netscape US.

    The meeting was a revelation for me. By that time, the term "Intranet" was becoming a hip-term. There we were, three or four people from our company (by that time, I was "Director International Technology Co-operations" - what a title, isn't it?) - and about five or six people from Netscape.

    We explained all our needs again and told them, that we would be of course willing to pay for all these enhancements. I specifically had collected input from another ten or fifteen other media companies from Europe to come up with a neat spec for Netscape - i.e. I did all the job, which they should've done in the first place.

    After the explanation and discussion of the paper (three hours or so), one top Netscape manager said: "You know, there are only about 20-30 publishers around the world - but hundreds and thousands of companies needing Intranet solutions. So, therefore, we have decided to go for the Intranet market and thus will drop the media/publishing business. I'm sorry, but we can't implement the spec because it's just a too small market!" (not withstanding the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of media companies around the world...)

    I was furious - it was like a ... no, not slap, a fist? A hit with a 10-ton-fist in the face... I was so furious that I stood up and said: "You know guys, with this attitude I think you'll be dead as a company at latest within two-to-three years." - and immediately left the meeting.

    My boss came after me and tried to convince me to come back to the meeting (though not wholeheartedly as I could see he was furious as well). So, I actually left the office, the building and waiting outside of the Netscape building in the sun - waiting for my colleagues to come out.

    In the end, we left Netscape, went home and I and a small team have implemented what we needed by ourselves and completely dumped Netscape software, including Netscape Web Server (what was it's name), switching to ... I dunno, it was the httpd-server, which was the basis for Apache later on (a-patchy server); we dumped all Netscape software, even including the browser.

    That was my experience with Netscape... It was not Microsoft, it was not AOL - it was their arrogant, stupid, high-horsed, customers-don't-count attitude that killed them. It was their f***ed-up management!
    • by Dogtanian ( 588974 ) on Saturday February 23, 2008 @11:35AM (#22526888) Homepage
      Your story isn't the first I've heard about Netscape being insufferably arrogant during their heyday.

      It says it all that even on Slashdot- whose readers in general play up any anti-MS angle, give the benefit of the doubt to their competitors and mod down dissenting opinion- the prevailing sentiment seems to be that Netscape were responsible for their own downfall with a bloated version 4.x and corporate arrogance.

      Side note, but hasn't Netscape (the browser) been killed off once before anyway? And wasn't Netscape's market share also harmed when they spent far too long between releases trying to clean up the codebase for the aborted v5 during the late-1990s? According to WP (salt, etc), the bloated 4.x came out in mid-1997, but v6 didn't come out till 2000, and that was probably rushed out before it was ready. IIRC, the current "Netscape" is based upon (but not identical) to Mozilla and Firefox.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Nimey ( 114278 )
        NS6 was rushed out, yes.

        Back in the day, Mozilla had releases called milestones, M1 to M18. M18 had just been released, and then AOL decided it was time to release a new Netscape. But instead of going with the relatively good M18, they released from a bit earlier on the trunk, which Mozilla retconned as 0.6. 6.0/0.6 was slow and unstable, since it was an early beta, and FLOSS nerds stuck with M18.

        From that point, Mozilla releases switched to version numbers; IIRC the next Mozilla release was 0.7 (0.6 was
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Apotsy ( 84148 )
      Agreed completely. I worked there around 1997-1998, and by then it was clear the browser had to be free, and the server products were the only place where there was to be any money made. Fortunately, Netscape had a pretty full suite of servers by then. I remember hearing many times that the most profitable one was, by far, the proxy server.

      So what did they do with the proxy server? Improve it? Give customers more features? Improve performance? No ... they cancelled it.

      Yep, that's right, they cancelled t

  • The sad truth about modern software is with operating system derivatives constantly changing, unless a piece of software is constantly updated & rereleased, it won't work anymore.

  • Does that mean that I have to stop using Netscrape 1.1?

    When will it all end!

  • [quote]
    the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition
    [/quote]

    There was no competition involved, Internet Explorer 3.0 came preinstalled with Windows 95. When you're online at 14.4 and you've already got a browser, downloading Netscape is a hard sell. There was no way Netscape could overcome that regardless of technological merit. IE3.0 festered with huge market share and really, really painful layout problems for years because it came preinstalled on Windows 95, a
  • The Netscape is dead! Long live the Netscape!
  • This is not the last we have seen of Netscape. Some overzealous person or corporation will buy the brand and resurrect it with some new code under the hood. It's too well-known of a brand to go into retirement. It's simply too juicy of a target. However, resurrecting the brand will not be a good move for said overzealous corp. It would be like rebranding Blu-Ray as Betamax. Netscape reminds people of the bad old days of surfing the net at 14.4.

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