Yeah, but with Lynx you miss out on all the cheesecake photos [wink wink].
Posted on 12/31/2007 12:17:16 PM PST by GATOR NAVY
NEW YORK (AP) - Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.
Its current caretakers, Time Warner Inc. (TWX)'s AOL, decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape's usage dwindled with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.
"While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer," Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.
In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.
People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead.
A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.
The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows.
Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.
Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape's stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2 billion market value even though it had only $20 million in sales.
But Netscape's success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.
Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10 billion deal completed in early 1999.
Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing.
Lynx is great. I don’ need no steenkin’ graphics!
There’s still an AOL? Good grief.
Yeah, but with Lynx you miss out on all the cheesecake photos [wink wink].
LOL - I used 4.74 for years with W98SE because it was "stable" compared to other stuff I tried at the time. Eventually the buggy 4.x series were retired here in favor of IE6, Firefox, Opera, etc. I lived with 4.74 crashes and hangs for a long time. :o)
Netscape is just Mozilla repackaged with more bloat. Sea Monkey is almost exactly like Netscape. Firefox is the trimmed down version with a browser only. And Firefox has way less fine tunning options. Yet it is more developed in terms of keeping up with things. One of the most annoying things about firefox is that its cookie control is far inferior, if not just about impossible to control in an easy way. Once you block a site then it is a real hassle to unblock it. SeaMonkey makes that easy.
Netscape is just Mozilla repackaged with more bloat. Sea Monkey is almost exactly like Netscape. Firefox is the trimmed down version with a browser only. And Firefox has way less fine tunning options. Yet it is more developed in terms of keeping up with things. One of the most annoying things about firefox is that its cookie control is far inferior, if not just about impossible to control in an easy way. Once you block a site then it is a real hassle to unblock it. SeaMonkey makes that easy.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/
YOU are a prince {or princess, I can’t tell}. Thank you.
Then after I do all that and import my Netscape bookmarks, do I uninstall all the Netscapes I have on my computer? I run on XP.
Like many here, netscape was my first exposure to the world wide web .. and what a marvel it was. Even on dialup in those days. RIP, netscape.
I just finished writing a bash script that uses lynx to pull either the definition of a word or its synonym from the web, depending on how you call it. It’s still quite useful for things like that. :)
What's AOL?
The problem isn’t Internet Explorer anymore. Plenty of people want an alternative browser. No, the problem is Firefox now. When Netscape signed their sharing agreement with Mozilla, they basically signed their own doom. They never should have allowed competing versions of the same codebase. Had they done something like Sun did with Java, getting open source help, but retaining rights to the code, then maybe Navigator could have survived.
I hated Netscape, in the 90s too. IE 3 and then 4.01 were my favorites, and there were powertools you could download from Microsoft that let you highlight text on pages back then with IE 4. I didn’t like IE 5 at all, but 6 made up for it some and now 7 is just fine with me again. I don’t like Firefox at all either.
Time Warner bought AOL. It screwed Ted Turner out of some money, so it wasn’t all bad.
You’re right. AOL bought Time Warner, but Ted still got screwed.
Johnny-come-lately. In 1994, I was running Mosaic and waiting for Netscape to come out. :P
Mosaic only supported GIF images -- anything else opened in a helper app. No tables, no forms, no type or visual control of any kind. It was basically gopher with a mouse.
The question you raised is.....will CNN now go the way of Netscape?
The precedent is now there. IE:Netscape as Fox News:CNN
Let us proclaim the good news....... Time Warner will surely abandon CNN.
Just another casualty of the Microsoft octopus that made a fortune stealing the brilliant ideas of others and using its monopolistic marketing clout to destroy those companies. I think a list of companies damaged or destroyed by Microsoft would fill a fair sized hard drive. I can only imagine how easy computers would be to use if those companies had been able to continue adding their brilliant ideas instead of being driven into the ground by Microsoft. Bill Gates is evil.
LOL!
I played with Mosiac a little after I had been using NS for awhile. I remember thinking how “ancient” Mosiac was compared to NS.
Thanks for the laugh and the memories. Kids today don’t have a clue.
Firefox is free, ans as goldstategop said, can be plucked from firefox.com .
To get a little more technical, Firefox is based on the Mozilla codebase. It's the same browser under the hood, but with some different styling.
A little history is in order.
The first point-and-click Web browser was Mosaic. When Mark Andreesen went into the private sector, he called his newer, better browser Mozilla -- as in Mosaic + Godzilla. It became Netscape.
Netscape was the first browser for anyone who discovered the Web in 1995, and remained the most popular browser for several years after. But you can't out-compete a free product that's pre-installed on Windows, so IE pulled ahead.
So Netscape tried to reinvent itself. No longer a browser company -- though, actually, they made most of their money off their server software -- they tried to become a Web hub. That went reasonably well, but not spectacularly. So AOL used all that pretend money they had due to their inflated stock price, and bought Netscape.
Provider/hub/browser. AOL/Netscape vs. MSN/IE. That was the competitive landscape. It just didn't work out that way.
So AOL decided to make the Netscape code base open-source. They went back to the old Mozilla name, and just put it out there. Anyone, or any group of anyones, could take that code and make a browser out of it. Firefox did the most popular, and IMHO best, version of that.
There was no longer a place for the Netscape browser as a commercial concern, when volunteers were doing a better job. Pulling the plug on it is past due.
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