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

[microbee]

AOL was shutting down!

Long live..

[loconet]

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.

The Daily WTF

[tieTYT]

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:Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[cp.tar]

AOL was shutting down!

... shutting down, shutting down
AOL was shutting down
my fair lady...

blink

[dgun]

<blink>:(</blink>

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

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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

Re:The Daily WTF

[swillden]

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.

I actually paid for it

[jbrower]

I distinctly remember buying Netscape Navigator (or was it Communicator) from a local "Stop 'n Save Software" store which later turned into an EB Games. I suppose it was back in 1996 and the price was something like $40-$60. I still have the 5 diskettes it came on stuck in a drawer somewhere. Prior to that I used Mosaic.

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape died years ago.

But the corpse won't stop twitching!

Releasing 4.08 as late as August 2002 was a bad scare. Then there was the insanity of including the MS Trident engine in 2005.

Releasing incompetent browsers under a once powerful brand name is a real bogeyman for developers - you're afraid it might get enough market traction to have to code exceptions for it.

I want the Netscape name properly buried in history. I admit I'm reading this article for the exact reason some people go to funerals -- I need to confirm the bastard's finally dead.

Re:Nostalgia

[SeaFox]

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

In a few years, we can get that same warm feeling when we look at the the AOL icon.

from the Book of Mozilla, 2:1

[CjKing2k]

And so the Creator looked upon the beast and buried it deep within the earth. Its mourners looked up into the sky and joined their kin under the wings of the great bird, and the people rejoiced.

AOL = King Anti-Midas

[theurge14]

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:from the Book of Mozilla, 2:1

[qupada]

Ask and ye shall receive... boredom really is an awful thing. (It's all in the jar files in chrome/ in case anyone cares, mozilla.dtd and mozilla.xhtml)

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/1177/firefoxpe5.png/ [imageshack.us]

2:1 seems fair to me. I was going to use today's date.