AOL just announced that they will be killing the Netscape Navigator browser on February 1st 2008. Its hard to understand how AOL were able to run an extremely popular browser like Navigator into the ground while less popular browsers like Opera and OmniWeb are still surviving. Anyway if you feel nostalgic here is a link to nearly all the versions of Netscape Navigator ever made for any system starting all the way from version 0.4. [Link]
9 replies on “Bye Bye Netscape”
Firefox FTW!
sad news!,but in the last few years they couldnt keep up with IE and after firefox was released it made things worse.Actually i read that netscape turned from about 90% of the market share in the 90’s during its famous war with Microsoft’s IE to 0.6% nowadays thats pretty shocking you know! the weird thing is that AOL bought netscape in 1998 for $4.2 billion!!!!
Netscape have been losing its market share even before AOL bought it. AOL spent a lot of money trying to keep it a live but failed. Personally, I never liked Netscape (too slow), firefox, or explorer. I like Safari but sometimes you have to use Explorer or Firefox to view pages correctly. I am still pissed at people who design websites that are not compatible with all browsers.
AH The Good Old Days!
I couldn’t help but notice the comments.
The mozilla project is originally an AOL based project, i don’t wanna go into the full life story of browsers still AOL gave its market share and the NS domination in-favor of building the best ever standard compliant browser. thats why they were very late with NS6.. still they packed the whole engine they built and gave it a code name “mozilla” and made it open source, since then lots of gr8 browsers came out of it “firefox, flock, monkey, mozilla …… “.
so somehow NS aint died it took a different shape thats all.
personally i think its for the better.
Well, you could see that coming for a while now.
Firefox is the ‘baby’ of Navigator, so it lives on somehow!
Netscape was not needed any more and it didn’t offer anything new. It was based on Mozilla and people preferred downloading the latest Mozilla engine in firefox than to wait six months until Netscape upgraded their under pinnings. AOL should have dumped Netscape with launch of Firefox 1.0. The last time I saw someone using Netscape was I guess four or five years ago.
dude, I’m using the latest netscape navigator. man, I jsut can’t give up on it. I still remember the day 4.3 gold was released, we had it on our mac’s back in college. Thank you netscape for everything you gave us.
the aol management ought to be slaughtered.