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Netscape Finally Put Down
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Feb 22, 2008 11:34 PM
from the gone-the-way-of-old-yeller dept.
from the gone-the-way-of-old-yeller dept.
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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AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development 247 comments
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."
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They should keep the name ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Just Deserts (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, Mosaic may have been too purist.
In any case, Netscape was taking a page out of Microsoft's book. Microsoft knew exactly what Netscape was up to; they understood that eventually the www wasn't going to be a globally distributed hypertext document, but a software deployment platform. Netscape was on track to owning that platform, and Microsoft, whose business was built around owning the platform everybody used, decided to displace them. Neither party was particularly virtuous here.
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Re:Just Deserts (Score:4, Informative)
Uhhhhh, the only reason Microsoft "understood" this was because Netscape was shouting it from the rooftops. They went as far as to say that the browser would make Windows obsolete. It was Netscape's bold vision on the web as an app development platform that woke Microsoft up from their delusions of using The Microsoft Network to co-opt the Internet.
There is nothing in this whole "Web 2.0" hype that Netscape wasn't talking about in 1997.
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Re:Just Deserts (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:5, Informative)
Step 2: general.useragent.extra.firefox=Netscape/6.2
Step 3: reload
Step 4: profit!
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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?)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And 0.06% of the population will have to switch... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And 0.06% of the population will have to switch (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They Eat Horses, Don't They? (Score:5, Funny)
For Barbaro's sake... the horse had a good run. Making hay from an article about web browsers is to saddle the issue with an agenda; please do not bridle our argument by being a horse's ass. This is a discussion about software, and to jockey animal rights into it is just putting the cart before the horse. So slow down there, cowboy... Reign it in. While I am sure you're chomping at the bit to get this kind of information out, I am fresh out of insensitive horse puns and we will have to put this discussion out to stud.
Polo!
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The correct phrase (and the one most suitable for the horseplay) is "Rein it in".
Re:And 0.06% of the population will have to switch (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:And 0.06% of the population will have to switch (Score:5, Funny)
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AOL is Death (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AOL is Death (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AOL is Death (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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
about:mozilla (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Tje King is Dead (Score:2)
Don't celebrate, MS (Score:2, Funny)
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)
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Again? (Score:5, Funny)
My $30 Polaroid DVD player begs to differ.
Hey, where's that burning smell coming from?
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IE was competition? Not from what I saw... (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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
Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Bury the hatchet (Score:2)
Memories since first getting on the Internet (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Netscape is not dead (Score:2)
Why Firefox/Flock, but not SeaMonkey? (Score:3, Insightful)
Brings back memories. (Score:5, Funny)
Seamonkey (Score:3, Insightful)
It was their attitude that killed them (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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
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!
Re:It was their attitude that killed them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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
Re:Someone should.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista, as compared to Windows 2000, for a big example.
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Re:Someone should.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Compare e.g. NT3.51 with NT4.0, especially after all 7 Service Packs are applied to the latter.
Then compare Windows 2000, which was a decent rewrite to integrate the features of NT into a stable codebase, with its follow-ups XP and Vista.
Yeah, I think the history of NT is a fine example of the Second System Effect.
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