Netscape 1994 - 2008

[alsenior]

It looks like AOL has thrown in the towel and have given up on netscape. from the first of February 2008 netscape will no longer be supported by Aol.

From slashdot

"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."

Slashdot | AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development

[pauldarkside]

Ah the memories ... none of them particularly good. I wonder how many of the facebook generation even remember Nutscrape?

[Steve]

None, but you can guarantee there'll be a Facebook group protesting it, and that thousands will join, then ask WTF it's about.

[Raz316]

just the other day I joined the 'if 8 squillion people join this group, my wife will let me name out kid Netscape' group on facebook

[=TcQi=]

I wonder if Opera's days are numbered too.

[hitman67]

It should be IE's days that are numbered. FF ftw!

[behappier]

I remember using Netscape in 1994, must still have it on a floppy somewhere. For the life of me, I thought it was already dead and mutated into Firefox.

[ACiD303]

I still have floppies which have Netscape 2.x and 3.0....think it was the only browser I dared use at the time!

[Output]

I'd never liked Netscape myself either, even years ago - and like behappier, I'd thought it was already dead.

[idimmu]

used to use it as a lad, but quickly ditched it for IE

[Areku]

Netscape was the first broswer I ever used. As said above, not amazingly good memories.

[HEXUS]

AOL announced Friday that as of February 1st 2008, it will no longer continue support for its Netscape browser and recommends its users switch to Mozilla's Firefox.

Read more.

[kopite]

I used to use it back in 97. I kind of liked it felt it was a bit more chunky than IE back in the day.

ITs sad that its dead but as other people has said I thought it was long gone. Been using ff for years now

[b0redom]

I was working for Netscape when that whole acquisition happened. Basically AOL just wanted the browser so it could set the default to point at AOL.COM and make lots and lots of money from advertising.

They did a deal with Sun Microsystems to provide all of Netscape's real software - the web, directory, proxy, mail server etc side of stuff, which has now morphed into the awful SunONE servers.

As Netscape was giving the browser away for free, there was very little development work being done on it at all even before AOL took it over.

I still remember someone doing a massive multi-million dollar deal to sell Netscape browser to a company, then a week later Netscape announcing that it would be free. Red faces all around there!

[MSIC]

If i remember rightly (and i probably dont) Netscape was the first browser that i used to be able to download (very, very slowly) my first ever colour picture of something i wanted to find on the internet - a photo from the upcoming release of Star trek: Generations. I even think it was something about Geordie being tortured.
Ah... something magical about that, as you previously had to wait for 'Starburst' magazine to publish stuff.
It really was liberating, despite taking something like 20 minutes to download (and that was using our university).

Quite a long time before "The Internet" existed, up to that point it was just a bunch of computers networked together. And then we had the "Information Superhighway" - god, why didnt that phrase stick?

[TiG]

Netscape Navigator 3.04 Gold owned IE at the time, don't let anyone say different...

TiG