[ReignOfError]

So, whatever happened to Netscape?

It's now Firefox. Sort of. A little history:

In the beginning, there was Mosaic. And the Web saw it, and it was good. But limited. It didn't have forms, tables, and the only images it displayed were .GIFs. Mosaic was developed at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) by a student named Marc Andreessen; Andreessen went on to found a private company he called Mozilla (MOsaic + godZILLA).

By the time Mozilla actually found its way to the Web, the company had changed its name to Netscape, and it called its browser Navigator. Netscape added inline viewing of JPEG images, online forms, tables, and other goodies.

In order to pull off some of its tricks, Netscape used "extensions" -- bits of code that were developed by Netscape alone and were not part of the official HTML specification.

Netscape's business model was to give the browser away for home and non-profit users, and charge businesses. That model was shattered when Microsoft announced Internet Explorer, its own browser that was free to everyone. IE introduced its own set of "extensions," and the Web was a pretty big mess for a while. Eventually, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that sets the official specs, incorporated many of these extensions.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems introduced a cross-platform programming language called Java, and a pared-down language for Web browsers called Javascript. Macromedia introduced a browser plug-in called Shockwave that added sound, animation and interactivity; this would evolve into something called Flash.

So Netscape and IE were the main competitors in the Great Browser Wars of the late 1990s. Netscape made its money mainly from its server software, which offered featres that the free server Apache lacked. We all know how Microsoft made its money.

In the fullness of time, Netscape was floundering, and was bought by America Online. You might not remember them, but they were pretty big once. AOL stuck with Navigator for a while, but as it continued to hemorrhage money and market share, eventually Navigator was discontinued. the code base for Navigator was released as open source software, and that project went back to Andreessen's original name: Mozilla.

The Mozilla project's first, and still its main, product is a Web browser called Firefox. They also make an e-mail client called Thunderbird that's pretty neat. Because it's open source, there are other browsers that use the Mozilla codebase, notably Camino for Mac and Fennec for mobile phones.

Other browser makers, with a lot less fanfare, were working on their own projects. Opera ran a fairly steady third place, and the open-source Konqueror engine begat WebKit, the basis of Apple's Safari browser, which made its debut with Mac OS X.

Aren't you glad you asked?

[Richard Kimball]

Netscape was doomed when AOL bought it, but MS used their old tricks to damage Netscape. They welded IE to the interface, and had programs that called browsers call IE whether Netscape was the default browser or not. They also were key in establishing the W3C standards, but once they got majority market share, they made IE noncompliant, knowing that most web developers never look at the W3C standards, but simply did trouble shooting by launching IE. This allowed the noncompliant IE to become the standard, and made Netscape noncompliant, even though it was actually the more compliant.

Once they killed Netscape, MS quit innovating on IE, and browsers lounged until Firefox and Safari came out. I think Firefox had tabbed browsing for a couple of years before IE finally released an update.

AOL did pretty well when the net was the wild west, but they thought that they could keep users in an AOL sandbox. I think their losses darned near sunk Time-Warner. Acquiring them was probably the biggest mistake Time-Warner ever made. Anybody remember for a couple of years, the official company name was AOL Time-Warner?

[tubebender]

other browsers that use the Mozilla codebase, notably Camino for Mac

I rarely hear anyone say they use Camino. Why is that? I have used it for a couple of years and it suits my limited needs. My ISP, Suddenlink, has run out of bandwidth and my download speeds are not much better than my uploads. My informant there tells me they will have another pipe up and running in San Jose this weekend?

[seatrout]

—Aren’t you glad you asked?—

Yes, I am glad I asked. I learned something new. And of course I remember AOL. I wish I had a dime for every one of those CD-ROMs of theirs I tossed after getting them in my mail!

[antiRepublicrat]

A small addendum:

Netscape was superior to IE at Netscape 4 and IE 4. But then IE went to 5 and Netscape was having problems getting that old codebase to do what they wanted. So Netscape decided upon a complete code rewrite, and IE owned the browser market by the time they were done a couple of years later.

That killed Netscape. But the code rewrite lived on in Mozilla and later the browser-only spinoff, Firefox. The decision for a rewrite was a bad business move back then, but it is paying off now in a superior browser.