Netscape Finally Put Down

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."

They should keep the name ...

[tomhudson]

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.

And 0.06% of the population will have to switch...

[gnick]

I loved Netscape [wikipedia.org] back in its day, but this really isn't going to be overly painful for the world in general.

AOL is Death

[snowraver1]

Netscape was doing well until AOL bought them. Months ago, AOL announces that dialup is no longer profitable. That's enough proof for me! The CDs are like death spores.

Re:AOL is Death

[eln]

AOL was only able to buy them because they weren't doing well. The only part of Netscape that was worth anything by that point was the netscape.com portal site, which is generally cited as the reason AOL bought them at all. The browser wars were over by that point, and the source code had already been opened up. AOL made a half-assed effort to keep Netscape the browser alive, but I believe even at that point IE was the default browser for AOL clients.

Re:They should keep the name ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape is only familiar to people who've used the internet 10 years ago. The Joe Sixpacks who picked up a "pooter" 5 or 6 years ago to get on the "internets" never heard of it, or of Firefox.

Re:They should keep the name ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What does the name mean to you? To me, it mostly means a web browser and company that offered a good solution early, but quickly became bloated (both the company and the web browser) and faded away. I'm sure AOL will retain the trademark, but how much is that "flash in the pan" association really worth?

Someone should....

[jimpop]

Someone should seriously look at the business side of what happened to Netscape over the past decade. Clearly, IMHO, there is probably a good case to be made that bureaucracy and mis-management killed the beast. How could something so cool, in it's day, navigate (no pun intended) itself into oblivion? I've seen similar things happen with other cool products being absorbed into bureaucratic companies, only to loose market respect and following. I think there is probably enough evidence out there, somewhere, to have several college business and management courses re-written.

IE was competition? Not from what I saw...

[filbranden]

the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years.

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:They should keep the name ...

[Tom9729]

I might be wrong here, but I think Firefox and Seamonkey (or Iceweasel and Iceape if you're a Debian guy) both render pages in pretty much the same way.

Have you given the user agent switcher [mozilla.org] plugin for Firefox a try?

Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw...

[cjb658]

There was no competition. Everyone got IE preinstalled with their computer, so that's what they used.

Why Firefox/Flock, but not SeaMonkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Netscape a whole internet suite? Why not direct people to SeaMonkey?

Re:Again?

[timeOday]

Ask Atari or Napster. Old trademarks never die, they just get adopted by successively seedier operations.

Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw...

[hcmtnbiker]

There was no competition. Everyone got IE preinstalled with their computer, so that's what they used.

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 on suing the evil company that would bundle a piece of software people might want in their operating system. The smart developers knew what the problem was and went off to form what we know today as Firefox, where they put the innovation back in in order to get their browser on the desktop, and guess what, it worked. The better product, sold at a reasonable price will win (hell, Mozilla found out how to give it away and still make money). Mozilla has been picking up market share since it's release, because it's a better product. Yes there are reasons you might just use what came with windows, but if you give the end-user a reason they /need/ the new broswer, they can be persuaded.

Seamonkey

[chebucto]

They should suggest that people switch to Seamonkey, not Firefox. It's (a) suite, after all :) .

Re:IE was competition? Not from what I saw...

[Mongoose Disciple]

True that.

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. For a while there, half a dozen versions of Netscape all had enough market share that my employer at the time wanted to support them, and those fuckers weren't even halfway compliant with each other, much less open standards or IE.

Re:Just Deserts

[hey!]

Basically, Netscape was executed the "embrace and extinguish" strategy on Mosaic; although I preferred Mosaic's simplicity, eventually so many web pages depended on Netscape's non-standard (and largely half-assed) extensions people had to use Netscape.

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.