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."

Re:Already Dead

[Nimey]

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:AOL is irrelevant

[jonbryce]

AOLers don't use Netscape, they use AOL browser, which is a re-skinned IE with extra bloat.

Re:Good!

[asa]

> 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

Re:Already Dead

[Nimey]

Again, I wonder if you actually *used* 4.0x. I was one of the early adopters who grabbed 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, and maybe 4.04, and they were all slow and unstable (Windows 95 versions). I was disgusted enough to buy a copy of Opera 3.x, which I never regretted. I stopped buying Opera upgrades after 5.x and switched to Mozilla and then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

I suppose I could have used IE3... no, I couldn't have, and I kept hearing about stability problems with IE4 and Active Desktop.

Netscape is not dead

[BenoitRen]

It lives on in SeaMonkey. Not only in the concept, but also the default theme, which looks just like Netscape 4.

Re:The Daily WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Good!

[ClosedSource]

AOL bought Netscape because they wanted access to the economic value Netscape's alleged victim-hood at the hands of MS would bring. That was the only value the company had. After MS lost the government anti-trust case, AOL got their payday. Their only mistake was that they paid way too much for Netscape, so they lost money overall.

Try SeaMonkey

[Kelson]

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.

Re:Good gosh.

[Kelson]

I didn't even really think AOL was still around in any meaningful context... who uses them these days, anyhow?

Think beyond the dial-up service and AOL application. Those are declining, but people still use other services owned by AOL: MapQuest, Moviefone, etc. And of course AIM.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[SaturnNiGHTS]

the netscape 4.x tree was very useful (i used it all the way to 4.78), but the one that went kaboom was netscape 6, when they rolled out the first gecko browser implementation. that thing was bloated and horribly slow...plus rendering was broken.

that's the one that forced me back to netscape 4.x, and eventually, mozilla. (that, and moving to linux)

Re:trying to figure out what to do with it,?

[Z00L00K]

Just download the code for Mozilla...

Anyway - the era of Netscape is over.

Conveniently killed by Microsoft and reborn into Mozilla/Firefox.

Today the alternatives to IE; Firefox, Opera and Safari are the most well-known and supported by web developers. Yet another alternative is the Lynx [isc.org] browser for those with pure text terminals. (you may think it's masochistic trying to use a text-only browser in today's web but sometimes it's helpful or the only resort left.)

Safari for Windows is still beta (and has had some bugs, I haven't checked the latest yet but 3.0.3 did crash on me). However it is still useful to verify your web page with and compared to the crashes we had with older browsers it's actually OK.

And still - there have been an era where Mosaic was a revolutionary new interface, but even that wasn't the first as you can see at Web Browser History [livinginternet.com].

A relatively up to date graph can be seen at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], but your browser should support SVG to make the most of the graph. Unfortunately it only shows the most common browsers and oddballs like tkWWW [mit.edu] are left out.