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."
Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:1, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Brings back memories. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why Firefox/Flock, but not SeaMonkey? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:5, Informative)
Step 2: general.useragent.extra.firefox=Netscape/6.2
Step 3: reload
Step 4: profit!
Re:They should keep the name ... (Score:2, Informative)
Netscape offered customizable Site Controls. That feature can be used to protect against the malware, if configured correctly.
Re:They Eat Horses, Don't They? (Score:3, Informative)
The correct phrase (and the one most suitable for the horseplay) is "Rein it in".
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.
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.
Re:It was their attitude that killed them (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 their best-selling product. I asked anyone who would talk to me, managers, engineers, directors, whoever I could find ... "Why?" I never got an answer. That certainly spelled trouble. I don't know if anyone in the whole company knew the reason for that idiotic action.
Oh, and around that time, rumors were flying about companies that might acquire Netscape. By far, the rumor everyone thought was the most ridiculous was the one about AOL. No one took that idea seriously. And look what happened!
Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw... (Score:2, Informative)
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 well enough to download IE3, and later IE4...and that even made Windows better, it made it so you could right click on the start menu, among other things...so I had to download IE3 in order to get Netscape 3.x, or later 4.x, which wasn't even all that great...
But had www.netscape.com allowed MSIE 1.0(or whatever the OEM version of Windows 95 shipped with,the one with the BIG Windows logo and the blue sky throbber, and it sure wasn't 3.0) to at least get to a download link...they probably would have never lost the browser war to begin with...yet no one ever mentions that...