[jdm]

I installed Mosaic on my machine about a year ago, but I couldn’t get YouTube to work on it.

[BreezyDog]

I knew when AOL got a hold of the Netscape browser it was doomed. Hell I didn’t even think it was around anymore until I saw the news report. I’ve been a loyal Firefox user since I lost Netscape to AOL. I use IE at work because they make me.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

I’m glad y’all are so sweet with romantic memories of Netscape’s software, but every version I tried was crashy and awful. And don’t forget that Netscape the company (whose largest investor at the time was the private venture fund of AmerIndo Investment Advisors, largely funded by Indonesian and Chinese billionaires) was the main plaintiff in the Clinton DOJ’s assault on Microsoft.

So I say good-bye and good riddance to Netscape, and I further hope its White-House-Coffee-Sipping investors with their whispers into Bill Clinton’s ear lost not just their shirts but their Mao jackets and little red books as well.

[RayChuang88]

Netscape more or less died when most of its developers went onto the Mozilla project that created the various Mozilla products: Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email/NNTP client, SeaMonkey Windows-based Internet suite, and Camino Macintosh-based Interent suite. Also, even Internet Explorer has advanced quite a bit, especially the current 7.0 release.

[Tainan]

AOL still sucks.

[ovrtaxt]

Isn’t Firefox basically the same thing? It always seemed that way to me.

[SamAdams76]

The Internet is now everywhere but there was a time not too long ago when there was for all practical purposes, no Internet. Yes, the Internet has technically been around for a while but up until the mid 1990s, it was basically used only in military and academic circles and you had to know your way around a command line interface and you could only use text because most modems were only 200 or 300 baud - when the 2400 baud modem started appearing on the market in the early 1990s, it was heralded as blazingly fast!

I am fortunate to have been on the ground floor of the Internet when it started getting popular in the 1990s. I was one of the first people in my company to get an email address (when I asked for one, the IT department initially didn't know what I was talking about). Back then, you usually had to subscribe to an online service like Prodigy or CompuServe and apps like Gopher and Telnet were still widely used. I was a member of Prodigy, which had the clunkiest interface you could ever imagine. Their idea of Internet was showing you sports scores and weather reports on gaudy yellow screens that were six hours old. Still, you had the sense that you were on the cutting edge.

Then Mosaic came along and as long as you had that, you could escape the confines of those blue and yellow Prodigy screens and browse web servers all around the world. At the time, the Internet was so small that if you emailed a celebrity, they likely emailed you back. I remember having email conversations with local disc jockeys about music, talk show hosts like Gene Burns and Tom Leykis (who called me a right-wing dope). Nowadays, nobody answers your email because everybody has thousands of emails clogging their inboxes.

There was one time around 1993 or 1994 when I had the entire World Wide Web on my local hard drive. Reason was that they charged $3.60 an hour to browse the internet in those days so one Saturday afternoon, I just downloaded the whole damn thing on my 9600kps modem so I could browse it offline for free. Sound ridiculous but remember it was nothing but text in those days and I think it was only about 20 megabytes. If I was smart enough, I'd have built a search engine around it and I'd be a mega-billionaire today.

[ShadowAce]

[Clara Lou]

I have fond memories of Netscape— back about 1998, or so. Buh-bye, Netscape. Long live Firefox.

[goldstategop]

Firefox replaced Netscape so it can thought of as the son of Netscape.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[dennisw]

I remember circa 1998 my friend actually buying Netscape navigator in an office supply store.It was a free download but he had some reason for paying for a boxed edition.

I use IE,Firefox, Opera

[Egon]

What? No one but me uses Lynx?

[pctech]

Major bummer, now it looks like I'll have to uninstall it now. I like version 7 of Netscape and I still actually use it from time to time.

Thank you Bill Gates for making another once useful program go to hell.

[discostu]

AOL did more stupid things with Netscape than can be excused, it’s like they bought it for the sole purpose of killing it. Starting with buying it and never switching to it for the AOL browser and then ending (at least for me) with putting some crappy beta with an annoying unremovable debug window into the automatic download cue so your perfectly fine production code Netscape got replaced and you didn’t know it was a beta (and a particularly bad one at that) until it was far too late.

I was actually kind of sad when I finally tossed my final install of Netscape. Glad Firefox was around so I could switch to something good, but the web and Netscape were such synonyms for me for so long. Boo AOL for ruining what was once the best of breed.