AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development

Kelson writes "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."

Comments

trying to figure out what to do with it,?

[geekoid]

Easy, give it to me.

Re:trying to figure out what to do with it,?

[Z00L00K]

Just download the code for Mozilla...

Anyway - the era of Netscape is over.

Conveniently killed by Microsoft and reborn into Mozilla/Firefox.

Today the alternatives to IE; Firefox, Opera and Safari are the most well-known and supported by web developers. Yet another alternative is the Lynx browser for those with pure text terminals. (you may think it's masochistic trying to use a text-only browser in today's web but sometimes it's helpful or the only resort left.)

Safari for Windows is still beta (and has had some bugs, I haven't checked the latest yet but 3.0.3 did crash on me). However it is still useful to verify your web page with and compared to the crashes we had with older browsers it's actually OK.

And still - there have been an era where Mosaic was a revolutionary new interface, but even that wasn't the first as you can see at Web Browser History.

A relatively up to date graph can be seen at Wikipedia, but your browser should support SVG to make the most of the graph. Unfortunately it only shows the most common browsers and oddballs like tkWWW are left out.

Good gosh.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

I didn't even know Netscape was still around. I think the last time I used it was..2002? It was ages ago. My aunt got her very first internet connection. And she used Netscape. Yeah, it was dial up.

Re:Good gosh.

[Anonymous Coward]

ah didnn no AOL was steal a -rounn

Re:Good gosh.

[palegray.net]

To heck with Netscape, I didn't even really think AOL was still around in any meaningful context... who uses them these days, anyhow? Every grandmother I know uses someone else for high speed net access... then again, NetZero apparently still has enough money to run television commercials.

Re:Good gosh.

[Kelson]

I didn't even really think AOL was still around in any meaningful context... who uses them these days, anyhow?

Think beyond the dial-up service and AOL application. Those are declining, but people still use other services owned by AOL: MapQuest, Moviefone, etc. And of course AIM.

Version 4 is still useful

[davidwr]

From time to time I drag out NS version 4 for lowest-common-denominator quick-and-dirty compatibility testing or to use websites whose active content mucks up modern web browsers.

Active-content blockers like NoScript have reduced the need for this but I still keep it around.

Disclaimer: For "real" standards-compliance testing you should be testing against standards not a particular implementation.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[eln]

Netscape 3.0 was the pinnacle of the Netscape browser. The standard edition (not necessarily the Gold edition) was light weight, fast, and standards compliant. Of course, it also marked the point at which IE really started to catch up with Netscape in terms of stability and performance. Netscape 4 was big, bloated, and marked the peak of Netscape's attempts to "embrace and extend" the standards. It also helped accelerate Netscape's decline.

Of course, I still think the best browser "busy" logo was the multiple animated panes behind the M in Mosaic Netscape 0.9 (before they were forced to change the name by the University of Illinois). Those were of course replaced by one of the worst, the giant pulsating N of Netscape 1.0.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[encoderer]

Actually, I'd say that the version that marked the decline of Netscape was Version 5.0....

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[hairyfeet]

You aren't the only one that keeps an old browser for that trick, although I've since moved to Offbyone. It is great for those sites that even noscript throws its hands up over, without just letting who knows what run on the site. The best part is it is available without an installer, just a simple 839Kb zip file which means you can just carry it on a flash or even a cd, and if I want to clear out the history I simply toss the old one and unzip a fresh browser. And if someone needs a sweet rendering engine there are links on the site to speak to the developer directly. I bet this would make a great engine for other apps, as it is VERY fast and has support for OpenSSL.

And on the topic of Netscape, IMHO they were dead when they released that horrible version that was so buggy and slow( I believe it was NS4). And let us not forget that Netscape was as bad as IE for using their own proprietary hooks which made it hard to render in other browsers. I am so glad that now we have so many choices like Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon, etc. Instead of the "Coke VS Pepsi" that was NS VS IE.

And for those that want a "Netscape like" browser, there is always Seamonkey, which is much better and supports most Firefox extensions, including the important ones like noscript. It also makes a great browser for those older folks that are still stuck on older versions of IE and Outlook. I can't count the number of folks I've switched with Seamonkey due to the convenience of being able to check their mail just by clicking on a tab.

It is sad to see a once great come to the end, but IMHO it died a long time ago, and now they are simply pulling the life support. It does make me look back on the good old days, When Peter Norton made great tools and everyone had their own favorite DOS hacks. Now Get Off My Lawn!

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[tepples]

Disclaimer: For "real" standards-compliance testing you should be testing against standards not a particular implementation. How can testing be done apart from any implementation? The only way I can think of to "test against standards" is to test against some peer-reviewed reference implementation of the standards.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[rrohbeck]

And it's still being used. It's the default browser on many older Solaris boxen.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[shakezula]

I'll also throw in a vouch for the "still usefulness" of the 4.x versions of Navigator.

I recently changed careers from a call-center network admin to state wide agricultural extension (think 4-H and County Nutrition Programs, weed control, bug control, etc) support analyst. The people I support are educators with the state's land grant university and state and federal research scientists. Many of them still prefer to use Netscape 4.79 and have used it since it was released. One of my primary job functions is to purchase and replace PC hardware and I am consistently asked to re-install Netscape and migrate bookmarks.

Originally I began extolling the virtues of "modern browsers" (Firefox) and even installed it on a few new Dual Core PCs. Nearly immediately after leaving, I was called asking where the "lighthouse with the N" was for the Internet." I now include both browsers and clone the bookmarks in Firefox, but I still find people prefer to stick with what they know and works for them!

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[SaturnNiGHTS]

the netscape 4.x tree was very useful (i used it all the way to 4.78), but the one that went kaboom was netscape 6, when they rolled out the first gecko browser implementation. that thing was bloated and horribly slow...plus rendering was broken.

that's the one that forced me back to netscape 4.x, and eventually, mozilla. (that, and moving to linux)

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[martrootamm]

AOL should have actually quietly released 6.0.x and then recommended for users not to download and install until it said so.

I remember SPSS does this with their software (I also remember this bit by reading its Wikipedia page once, but that bit does not seem to be there anymore, now that I've skimmed through it...), when they make release because they have to and then recommend against users deploying it until they say so.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[DavidShor]

I did administration for my school, and I had a similar issue. The faculty were adamant on using IE.

The solution? Skin Firefox and change the icon, they couldn't tell the difference.

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[Anonymous Coward]

http://userstyles.org/styles/4615

Re:Version 4 is still useful

[Walter Carver]

I can run any old Netscape browser on Windows but I can't in Linux. It needs old libraries. I would be grateful if you point me to HOWTOs on how to get it to work on a modern distro.

Thanks!

I remember NS8

[ducomputergeek]

I set my dad up with the browser when it came out until he finally replaced his PC with a Mac. It served him a couple years and he was able to surf most pages okay and then use the IE engine on webpages that required it.

I'm not sure what AOL as company is really going to do. Most people have figured out that they don't need AOL to get on the internet and have moved on to broadband solutions. My father used Netscape dial up until he got his Mac and switched to a Phone/DSL/Sat. TV bundle last year.

Re:I remember NS8

[elrous0]

My first browsers were Cello and Netscape 1. Before MS came along and killed it, Netscape was the king of the internet. I'll never forget how sad it was having to abandon it, as fewer and fewer websites worked properly with it.

Re:I remember NS8

[aardwolf64]

Yeah... Using Netscape 8 would pretty much make anyone switch from PC to Mac.

Re:I remember NS8

[tnk1]

AOL isn't selling access anymore, so the point is moot. They're doing content work and online advertising. The access business will probably still exist for a few more years before the lights are out, but they already fired all the marketing people, most of the customer service people, and many of the access tech people too.

AOL can easily fail, but they already canned the dial up model a few years ago, so the client and all the old AOL stuff isn't the problem any more. Too late? Maybe, maybe not.

That said, they really didn't have much they could do in terms of broadband. By the time broadband was big, the people who actually owned the lines for cable and fiber realized they'd make more money if they kept it to themselves and made sure that you would have to pay very well indeed to run a billion dollar business on their lines. Today, with their calls for tiered access, they are continuing that trend. Google is basically the AOL of this decade, a company whose value is based on their ability to deliver fast search results over someone else's physical connections. Should tiering become commonplace, Google and other content providers could be in a very different world.

Re:I remember NS8

[Kelson]

My first browsers were Mosaic in the college computer labs, and Lynx on my dial-up shell connection. Then Netscape 1 once I got PPP access (or was it SLIP? I forget).

I remember reading about Cello and trying to track down a copy, but I don't think I ever got it to run.

Re:I remember NS8

[longacre]

Safari has its own host of problems.

Re:I remember NS8

[RobertM1968]

I'm not sure how many of those people actually worked (or work) for AOL. The DialUp team did NOT. We worked for UUNet, then MCI/Worldcom. Who AOL used after that I dont know... but I doubt they installed the tons of access numbers needed when MCI/WC went under. AlterDial (and UUDial) was owned and operated by UUNet, and used mostly for AOL and MSN. Authentication and such were done by us too. Support was handled by a different group.

Re:I remember NS8

[Eravnrekaree]

Whatever happened to competition? I thought that telcos were required to provide at cost access to their networks for third party telephone companies so people could have a choice of telephone companies. Maybe this should apply to access to the network for ISPs as well, perhaps ISPs should be able to offer DSL even when the phone line is provided by another comopany. We also have FIOS and there really ought to be a provision where other companies can offer service over FIOS lines. Either this, or telephone companies need to be regulated as a public service monopoly as electric utilities are. There has also been talk of requiring cable companies to provide at cost access to their networks to third party cable providers but it never happened.

Re:I remember NS8

[thephotoman]

I'm not sure that I'd fully blame Microsoft for Netscape's demise. The fact is that Netscape made some very serious mistakes that caused major problems. If their version 5 had been released and been good, I'm fairly certain people would have still paid for it in deference to MSIE being on their machines. After all, look at Firefox today. Every computer comes with a web browser on it, but with very few exceptions, that browser isn't Firefox (or even closely related to Firefox), yet the project is still successful.

No, the fact that Microsoft actually did make a better browser than Netscape had available at the time was just as much at fault for the once great browser's demise.

Re:I remember NS8

[rtb61]

No matter it it still makes much more sense for AOL simply to adhere to the fire fox open source licence, re-skin firefox to AOL and create their own default search configuration, menu configuration to suit the web site, client tools etc and even compete with firefox.com.

To simply walk away from the branding advantages of having your own browser and email client available to download from your servers for your internet customers doesn't make any sense, and is just a silly as coding a browser from scratch when you don't have to.

Restructuring makes a lot more sense than just shutting it down.

Re:I remember NS8

[ebs16]

Time Warner's biggest mistake was acquiring AOL and not integrating it into its Road Runner service. Why pick up a dial-up service when the company was already betting on broadband? Had AOL (w/o the software client) been made a broadband provider wherever Time Warner had contracts the company may have still been strong today.

Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[microbee]

AOL was shutting down!

Re:Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[G33kDragon]

Impossible!

If AOL shutdown, where would people get all their free "Try AOL" coasters?

Re:Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[cp.tar]

AOL was shutting down!

... shutting down, shutting down
AOL was shutting down
my fair lady...

Re:Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[Kelson]

Sorry to get your hopes up!

Re:Damn it, for a second I thgouht

[hedwards]

Worse still, we'll lose the idiot identification feature. It seems like only yesterday I could add *@*aol.com to my filter list, and have the average intellect expressed in the emails I received would increase 10 fold.

Sigh, those were the days.

Already Dead

[rudy_wayne]

Netscape died years ago.

Netscape 4.7x was the last decent version. Netscape 6 was a horrendous piece of crap and every version since then has just been a crappified version of the Mozilla Suite.

.

Re:Already Dead

[tcc3]

People like to blame MS for dirty tricks in establishing IE as the "standard." This is the real reason. People started using IE because Netscape started sucking.

Re:Already Dead

[Nimey]

You're kidding, right? Did you *use* 3.0 and 4.x? 4.x was bloated, unstable dreck that was pushed out the door before it was ready--it was one reason, IMO, why Netscape failed (in addition to MS's malfeasance). 3.x was the last "real" version of Netscape, although 7.2 wasn't that bad (IIRC it was based on Mozilla 1.7), just filled with AOL bloatware.

Re:Already Dead

[seriesrover]

No kidding - 4.x was just horrid. I was coding javascript at that time and our js files were littered with 'if 4.a, else if 4.b, else if 4.c

Re:Already Dead

[larien]

Pretty much. IE 3.x sucked, but it was out at the time of Netscape 3.x & 4.0x. 4.0x wasn't too bad, it didn't really suck until 4.5+. By that point, IE was up to 4.0 and actually worked fairly well, at least better than Netscape at the time and even I (rabid anti MS was I was) ended up going to IE because it was better.

The MS tricks just helped the demise, but they weren't the sole reason.

Re:Already Dead

[kc2keo]

Agreed. I used Netscape for only two times. Never really liked it. The earlier versions were probably better like you say but I never used those versions (to be honest I can't remember). I use Firefox all the time and like it. Looking forward to version 3.0 stable.

Re:Already Dead

[Nimey]

Again, I wonder if you actually *used* 4.0x. I was one of the early adopters who grabbed 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, and maybe 4.04, and they were all slow and unstable (Windows 95 versions). I was disgusted enough to buy a copy of Opera 3.x, which I never regretted. I stopped buying Opera upgrades after 5.x and switched to Mozilla and then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

I suppose I could have used IE3... no, I couldn't have, and I kept hearing about stability problems with IE4 and Active Desktop.

Re:Already Dead

[Kjella]

Perhaps 4.x was decent at some point, but it certainly far overstayed its welcome. My final memories of it was a ugly, buggy POS which I hoped would die in favor of MSIE (this was before Opera and Mozilla really got anywhere). Since then I've stayed with Opera, flirting a bit with Firefox in the days when it got a new name for every release, but as its marketshare grew and sites became more compliant I found the Opera experience to improve just as fast. Netscape past 4.x always felt very strange to me. They were the greatest, handed it away then tried to reclaim it by piggybacking. If they really wanted to stay in the game they should have stepped up (Microsoft's IE bundling and monopoly not withstanding) and delivered a decent product in the crucial years. They utterly failed at that and everything Mozilla/Firefox has achieved has been their own doing IMO.

Re:Already Dead

[dgun]

Do I recall some kind of ridiculous refresh bug in one of the Netscape 4.x versions, whereas if you moved the browser on your screen the page refreshed?

Re:Already Dead

[larien]

Maybe I'm being generous to it, but I don't remember it being that bad; we certainly used 4.06 & 4.07 at the time on Window NT. Bear in mind this was the start of my IT career, so I was a lot less cynical back then!

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to be kidding me. Although, I'll forgive those that don't remember the long long history of 4.0. 4.0 was great at first. It seemed to get worse and worse with each revision. I "found" the admin password to the schools network and used it to upgrade Netscape on all of the computers, cause it was much faster, had better javascript support, and crashed less often. I heard from 3rd parties that IT services was both delighted and pissed off. Delighted that they didn't have to do it and pissed off that someone else had done it with out permission.

Re:Already Dead

[wattrlz]

I believe most people started using IE because it was an integral part of the operating system. At least I know that's why I did. Why wait all those precious seconds openning up another browser when you have one already running in the background?

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. Its funny, too, since they rushed it out to compete with IE which had finally become better than 3.x. With NS4, many users refused to upgrade and everyone recomended IE for new users. That pretty much kills Netscape, since v5.0 was dropped in favor of a rewrite (Mozilla), and everyone else was rapidly ditching their server software (which is how they made money) because it was utter garbage and good alternatives were emerging.

Pretty much killed them. However, AOL kept Mozilla/Firefox alive since they were employing most developers. Now that the psuedo non-profit foundation raking in money and is self-sufficent, AOL can ditch it. Everyone should thank AOL since if they didn't dump money into the carcus that was Netscape, then Firefox would have long ago been dead and never at a usable state.

Re:Already Dead

[BeanThere]

Uh, right, and preinstalling IE with Windows, forcing OEMs to make IE the default, and distributing IE on millions of CDs etc. had NOTHING to do with it. And it can't be that Netscape 'started sucking' because their "air supply" (remember those words?) had pretty much literally been cut off - hard to develop software without money. Puh-lease. I remember those days, and IE3 and IE4 were horrendously crap for years - they only started becoming remotely usable and stable by about version 5, long after the Netscape company had pretty much bought it.

Re:Already Dead

[Kelson]

Do I recall some kind of ridiculous refresh bug in one of the Netscape 4.x versions, whereas if you moved the browser on your screen the page refreshed?

Close. It was when you resized the browser window, and it was present throughout the 4.x series. I was sooooo happy when Mozilla did away with that problem.

Re:Already Dead

[BlueStraggler]

Netscape 4.x was the last version that was widely released for the Unix crowd. I think it was more "native" on Unix workstations (coming from the NCSA after all) and I never had any problems with stability - despite being forced to use it up to v4.8 because there was no alternative until Mozilla started to become available. Considering the number of platforms they were supporting, I'm not surprised that some were not particularly stable, but fortunately for me, SGI was not one of them, and it's was pretty easy to dismiss Windows 95 and Mac OS users complaints about stability as clearly being related to their choice of OS.

I perused the Xdefaults file for Netscape 4 one day, and it was full of fascinating comments from the developers. A lot of them were expressing bitterness about arbitrary, non-standard, and downright buggy differences between various platforms that they were supporting, which evidently led to a lot of pain and suffering. No surprise that after Netscape 4, the Unix crowd was left in the dustbin - it was the easiest way to cut the number of supported platforms by 80% and focus their development on the PC market.

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape died years ago.

But the corpse won't stop twitching!

Releasing 4.08 as late as August 2002 was a bad scare. Then there was the insanity of including the MS Trident engine in 2005.

Releasing incompetent browsers under a once powerful brand name is a real bogeyman for developers - you're afraid it might get enough market traction to have to code exceptions for it.

I want the Netscape name properly buried in history. I admit I'm reading this article for the exact reason some people go to funerals -- I need to confirm the bastard's finally dead.

Re:Already Dead

[jakel2k]

4.7.X was the best of it's time
6 was crap -- Couldn't even uninstall it without messing up the Windows system.
7 was less crap but the damage was already done and was still far worse than 4.7.X -- Didn't even bother giving it a fair shake... it was still worse than 4.7.X.

It was only a few years ago where Firefox was able to climb out of the hole Netscape dug and become the recommended browser by geeks again.

Re:Already Dead

[Kelson]

That's pretty much the same path I took. Dropped Netscape 4 in favor of Opera 3, used it through Opera 5, then went over to Mozilla, eventually jumping to Firefox.

Though I kept paying for Opera upgrades until they went free-as-in-beer, in part to encourage them to keep developing the Linux version. These days I spend about 60% of my time in Firefox, and 35% in Opera (not counting web development).

Re:Already Dead

[mrbcs]

Still using 7.2
Version 6 was a piece of shit. I was using 4.08 at that time. That was the last one I found to be stable until 7.1. I like the email and browser together... but I guess I'm gonna have to go the Firefox - Thunderbird route soon.

It's been 10 years for me. Sad to see Netscape get so screwed up. Oh well, 10 years is eternity in Internet time.

Re:Already Dead

[MightyMartian]

Let's remember that in the 1990s Netscape was a product you were actually supposed to pay for. When Microsoft started giving away a browser, well that just pretty much destroyed Netscape's financial future.

Re:Already Dead

[rudy_wayne]

>>"Again, I wonder if you actually *used* 4.0x. I was one of the early adopters who grabbed 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, and maybe 4.04, and they were all slow and unstable (Windows 95 versions)."

Yes, some of the 4.0x versions sucked hard. But some of that may have been Windows 95 which was also a huge load of crap. By 4.7x Netscape was actually pretty decent.

.

Re:Already Dead

[guruevi]

Yeah, I used it. It beat Internet Explorer 5 and early 6 back then (and still does) in stability, security and compliance with W3 standards and back then Opera was still charging you for their browser (or you had to put up with a screenwide banner taking up 1/8 of your screen).

Although Mozilla and other players came up a few moments after 4.x, they were still in it's infancy (or alpha/beta).

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I can attest to the fact that 4.x point releases were often released with no QA whatsoever. Does it compile? Yes? Release it. Testing was only occasionally done on two platforms, Windows NT and Solaris. Nobody bothered to test on MacOS or any other unix variant.

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

well NO. netscape browser was for most people free. Netscape did not try to make money from the browser, they concentrated on the Server market and ignored the consumer. I worked in a large corp at the time and we gave up trying to license the browser from netscape due to there sales people having no real interest in the small change that would bring them, they wanted to push the server on us. Those of us that were netscape fans and remember the utter pile of poo that was netscape 4.0 have no delusions about what killed netscape, it was pure suicide on there part. They ignored the consumer thinking the server was the market where the money was to be made and did not realise that without the browser they were a dead company with second rate server software.

I always find it amusing to see people that think MS killed them, usually it comes from people that did not work in the industry at the time or really had no clue about how poorly netscape were doing all by themselves. Microsoft simply put the nail in their coffin, if it wasn't them it would have been somebody else.

Re:Already Dead

[Stonent1]

Yes! I loved netscape 3! Netscape 4 made me switch to IE!

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Opera miss the chance to become very popular. At that point, Netscape starts to suck and IE is not that great. I was looking left and right for a better browser and a lot of people I know are doing the same. A friend of mine told me about Opera and I really like it but don't want to pay (can't really afford to anyways). Though I do use Opera today, I was using Mozilla until Opera is free (was very annoyed to put up with bugs from Mozilla and Firefox).

Re:Already Dead

[fat_mike]

Who cares?

If you all spent as much time building shit as you do do having retarded arguments, well...

I'd having my flying car
I'd just say traffic and above flying car would be good to go
I'd nod my head towards the square (on my non-existent) 3D television that showed Jenna Haze Interactive
I wouldn't have to hear about the fucking "BROWSER" because the "BROWSER" didn't exist.

You could be building the above...
But...
I see that "Whose dick is bigger" will continue to be the story around here.

Re:Already Dead

[davidpack01]

That was horrible, especially on dial up (which was the only thing around back then for me). Did anyone ever encounter the link clicking bug? You would click on a link and nothing would happen, making you have to restart Netscape.

Re:Already Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape 4.x was stable for you on IRIX? I can't really believe that, because it was crashing left and right for me, and reproduceably so on certain sites. The situation wasn't much different on Solaris. I still have netscape Navigator 4.80 installed, but essentially never use it, not only because of the lack of stability, but also due to the ancient, half-assed CSS and Javascript support. Compared to Firefox or Seamonkey, the old Netscape releases are insanely fast - at least 3-10x faster (except for deeply netsted/complex tables), but that includes the time to the next crash.

Re:Already Dead

[jonthomson]

Yeah, pretty much. Don't think I've ever used IE primarily for more than a few months, Netscape was pretty much my browser of choice through uni until about '03, and by the time I'd left there it can't have been long until I switched to Firebird as it was when I first got it circa 0.7. Come to think of it, at said uni I was introduced to Pine in 2000, and it's still the only mail client I have installed, although I haven't used any mail client in the past six months

Re:Already Dead

[TJamieson]

Oh my goodness you just brought back some memories of mine that I'd rather forget. That fucking window resize bug! When I used 4.x I was still a wet-behind-the-ears kid with no clue about tech, and yet I knew that couldn't be right, even back then.

Re:Already Dead

[toddestan]

I found the last of the 4.0x series (4.08 if I recall correctly) was a lot more stable than any of the later 4.x releases. Though that's not saying much, it still crashed a fair amount. I stuck with it though, because atleast when Netscape crashed it genernally didn't take the OS down with it like IE did. Then I found Opera 4 and switched to that.

Re:Already Dead

[zullnero]

What you're not taking into account is what was available when Netscape 3.x and 4.x were around. What you're doing is almost like as comparing Doom to Half-Life 2. The notion of pumping ads constantly into your browser, spamming your cache full of garbage, back then, was widely seen as a "good idea". There were a lot of ideas like that during the late 90's.

Lynx was the free browser alternative of choice right up until Opera came out, but back then, either your browser was bloated, broken, didn't render html right, would get regularly rejected by security schemes, and it would inundate you with ads until you paid for the ad-free version. I recall switching browsers frequently due to one stupid problem or another...and generally ended up sucking it up and dealing with Netscape's bloat instead of IE's incredible insecurity or having to use two browsers just to do anything.

In that kind of landscape, bloated wasn't so bad. I think we all remember all this, but maybe not. I am noticing a lot of folks getting modded a 5 for stuff like the parent post.

Re:Already Dead

[Nimey]

Bloated *was* pretty bad if, like me, you were using an old PC. I had a Pentium-83 Overdrive and 12 MB of RAM with Windows 95a, and no secondary cache (Packard Bell, I didn't know any better). I remember it taking almost 30 seconds to get Communicator 4.0x to load. It probably took even longer after a crash, since there'd be less free memory.

As it happens, I did use Lynx as my primary browser for a time in 1999-2001, when I spent most of my time at the Linux console (ah, piping images from Lynx to zgv! Good times.). It was also a half-assed-but-usable Usenet client and my intro to same.

Honestly, if Opera hadn't been there, I'd probably have switched back to Netscape 3 on that W95 box. I hadn't used Lynx by that point, and since I had to share that box with my parents and sister textmode wouldn't cut it.

Re:Already Dead

[hawk]

There was also a matter of which machine could run which browser without regular crashes. I tended to use Mosaic on unix and linux, but had to use IE on a mac because netscape and mosaic 3 both crashed far to often.

And now that I think of it, opening too many browser windows too fast could fatally fork-bomb both linux and netbsd . . .

hawk

Nostalgia

[truthsearch]

For my nostalgia we have the old Netscape icon as a slashdot category image. That's more than enough for me.

Re:Nostalgia

[LordSnooty]

Hey, it's a whole category, maybe that should be shut down after this news. Indeed, the last three stories make interesting reading - Feb 2007 "Will NS9 undo mistakes of NS8?" - Jun 2007 "First peek at NS9" - Dec 2007 "AOL kills NS". Time sure moves fast in Internet-land.

Re:Nostalgia

[SeaFox]

For my nostalgia we have the old Netscape icon as a slashdot category image. That's more than enough for me.

In a few years, we can get that same warm feeling when we look at the the AOL icon.

Re:Nostalgia

[NutscrapeSucks]

Sweet, sweet victory

So, did Microsoft really win?

[SpaceLifeForm]

I'd have to say no, and in fact, their attack on Netscape
probably woke up a lot of people, and Microsoft may regret it.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape is dead, and IE is still around. You certainly have a funny definition of "win".

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[SailorSpork]

Well, if you consider that AOL/Netscape dropped out of the race when the Mozilla Foundation picked up the reigns to take its place (i.e., when AOL dumped it), I'd consider the Netscape->Mozilla bloodline is still a front runner.

But if you're talking about in name only, then yeah, IE beat "Netscape" a long time ago.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[Kelson]

Netscape is dead, and IE is still around. You certainly have a funny definition of "win".

But the codebase eventually became Firefox, which seems to be doing a lot better than Netscape these days.

It's kind of like the PC/Mac wars: IBM opened up the PC to clones. The PC platform went on to wild success, even though IBM's PC division dwindled until they sold it off.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape is dead, and IE is still around. You certainly have a funny definition of "win".

But the codebase eventually became Firefox, which seems to be doing a lot better than Netscape these days.

Netscape had around an 80% market share in the late 1990s before IE4 started eating into it. Microsoft's current market share -- with better browsers Mozilla/Firefox and Opera on the market for over five years -- is around what Netscape had back when Netscape was the giant monopoly everyone was afraid of because they threatened to cripple the web with nonstandard extensions. Firefox's current share is obviously less than IE's and is far less than what Netscape fell from.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[Kelson]

Firefox's current share is obviously less than IE's and is far less than what Netscape fell from.

Sure, but the point is that it went to the brink and bounced back.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[philwx]

Oddly enough, I think he means that the netscape issue was the first big "omg microsoft is a monopoly" issue raised. At least the first one the public could relate to. And had netscape not been killed off by IE they might've been allowed to be monopolistic longer. Though this is fairly speculatory.

Re:So, did Microsoft really win?

[houghi]

Yeah, because after that it went realy downhill with Microsoft.

Oh no, wait. They still use it as an excuse that it brought Internet to the masses and many believe that that is the case.

Days gone by

[Pojut]

I will always remember sneaking into the "study" super-late at night, dialing up, and going into chat rooms with Netscape Navigator. I will never forget viewing my first porn website (don't know if it's still around, Babylon-X) using Netscape Navigator. I remember receiving my first email using Angelfire and Netscape Navigator. I even remember the very first file I ever downloaded (a printer driver for an old HP) using Netscape Navigator.

Yup, many of my firsts on the internet involved Netscape Navigator...I haven't used it in years, but I am still a little bit sad to see it go. Goodbye, comet-flying-over-a-global-sized-N...you were the gateway to a hell of a lot in my youth.

Re:Days gone by

[mnmn]

It's not necessarily gone.

Someone could buy the Netscape brand name and donate it to the Mozilla foundation.

We'll all get a kick out of Netscape (previously known as firefox) kicking the ass of IE.

Heck if someone setup an organization to buy that brand name to give it to firefox, I'm paying big $$$

Re:Days gone by

[Anonymous Coward]

I will always remember sneaking into the "study" super-late at night, dialing up, and going into chat rooms with Netscape Navigator.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=282815&cid=20399823
I will never forget viewing my first porn website using Netscape Navigator.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218360&cid=17725066

Re:Days gone by

[acsinc]

"Yup, many of my firsts on the internet involved Netscape Navigator...I haven't used it in years, but I am still a little bit sad to see it go. Goodbye, comet-flying-over-a-global-sized-N...you were the gateway to a hell of a lot in my youth."

Remember the Breathing 'N'? That was the last version that really liked, not sure what the number was though - or if it was only for Mac.

Re:Days gone by

[gemada]

ah yes. those were the days. i remember downloading my first video via netscape and viewing it in the tiny 2 inch by 2 inch realvideo (or whatever it was called back then) window...i believe it was called "horsegag" and involved a blonde lady and a large white horse. some sort of educational video about interspecies "cooperation".

Re:Days gone by

[Midnight Thunder]

Someone could buy the Netscape brand name and donate it to the Mozilla foundation.

Does it really matter any more? In many ways Firefox is the phoenix of the ashes of Netscape. They took something that lost direction, was bloated in the wrongs ways and made it what it should have been. The other problem was that AOL just didn't seem to understand what to do with the Netscape brand and didn't seem like they wanted to care. If they were smart they would have taken the all important core and made it the base of the AOL client, which would have then been easy to port, but for me AOL no longer matters, with so many better alternatives available - I have even convinced my parents to start migrating, and they are now with free.fr, but the only thing preventing them from abandoning their account all together are people still using their AOL address and even for that they use Apple's mail client.

Re:Days gone by

[rhizome]

> Someone could buy the Netscape brand name and donate it to the Mozilla foundation.

Does it really matter any more?

No, not really, but it would still be kind of cool.

Re:Days gone by

[Jugalator]

Actually, with AOL discontinuing it and recommending Firefox just with a Netscape skin to keep the browser in memory, I think AOL could just as well just donate the brand to Mozilla? Or are they keeping it just in case...?

Re:Days gone by

[0b1knob]

Babylon-x is still around. http://www.babylon-x.com/main.php

Re:Days gone by

[risk one]

We'll all get a kick out of Netscape (previously known as firefox) kicking the ass of IE.

Yeah, especially the "spread firefox" guys.

"Great work folks! Now, could you do it again for our new name?"

Re:Days gone by

[cyfer2000]

I still remember finding my first html code snippet that crash the Netscape browser. (I found many of them, both netscape and IE of course.) Old days, some of them never got fixed, dark old days.

Perhaps

[WindBourne]

if AOL had not been pushing MSIE at the same, they might have been able to take it someplace. As it is, they could have expanded into cable or sats when they have money, but are slowly watching themselves die.

Re:Perhaps

[Rockin'Robert]

Ya don't pay, you lose all of your emails and contacts?

Houston, looks like we've got a hostage situation here.

AOL? Die? An idea whose time came and went - GONER!

And they still don't get it.

Well past time.

C'est la vie!

RR

Oh, I forgot, too many fat cat bonuses for the vultures left before rigor sets in.

Long live..

[loconet]

Long live Mosaic and the N. That 8bit pron you delivered on my desktop during the mid 90s opened the door for many good times. You shall be missed old friend.

Re:Long live..

[GreatBunzinni]

That 8bit pron you delivered on my desktop during the mid 90s opened the door for many good times.

Goatse guy? Is that you?

Damn! I was just ready to upgrade from Mosaic!

[kubusja]

Damn! All these bubble products - they live so long! Products with full version number below 10 can not be considered a mature one... I was just ready to try NS 10 ... I will have to stay with good old Mosaic ...

New corporate entries in the Mozilla camp

[Anonymous Coward]

Out with the old, in with the new. Perhaps that leaves some room for new entries Spicebird and SupraSphere:

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/12/spicebird-brings-mozilla-based-collaboration/

http://www.suprasphere.com/

It seems like anything to start earning market share has to do something different than just being a clone. Even though Netscape was the original and cloned into oblivion, it lost the leadership position and wasn't able ever to establish itself as doing anything innovative that others would want to clone.

AOL WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

They had netscape and winamp and they blew it. Props for funding Mozilla but the subsequent success should be sounding the alarm bells with AOL stockholders.

Mosaic For Life Dawg

[Real World Stuff]

...Spillin' a 40 for my dead homies...

A bad way to die

[Just Some Guy]

I haven't used Netscape in quite a few years, but I hate seeing it die like that. It used to be a proud trademark - it stood for something - and ended up as yet another AOL castoff. I wish they'd transfer the name to the Mozilla Foundation. While I'm sure they wouldn't use it, at least it would be next to its child where it belongs.

Re:A bad way to die

[Tim C]

It used to be a proud trademark - it stood for something

It stood for a slow, buggy, crash-prone browser that (at version 4) was on a par with IE 3 then had its butt handed to it by IE 4. Don't get me wrong, I used it as my main browser until around M13 or so of Mozilla, but it was dire. Resizing the browser window forced a page reload ffs!

I do like the idea of giving the name to the Mozilla Foundation though; it does seem kind of fitting. Just please, for the love of all that is holy and good, let the name die. (Although as another poster says, there is a certain appeal to renaming Firefox to Netscape and watching it take on IE again...)

Re:A bad way to die

[Quinn_Inuit]

Same here. I switched over to Mozilla on the 1.0 release, thanks to my buddy RockWalrus. Until then, I sucked it up and used Netscape 4.7. It crashed all the time, it would occasionally do something really bizarre and muck up the cursor, but so help me I wasn't going to give MS any more market share. Was IE a better browser? Probably. But I figured that if I wanted to have any choice in the future I needed to exercise it in the present.

Re:A bad way to die

[houghi]

I think it should have died sooner. They kept dragging it on and on. It stood for something. Now it stands for nothing. The most sympathy can bring up for some lines of code is oh well and that for code I made myself and extremely recent code.

Not something I used some years ago.

I agree it is a bad way to die, because it took too long.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Morky]

Maybe that's true if you only associate with 10-year-olds. But as recently as 1996, it was the only browser worth using, created by one of the most innovative tech companies around.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[elrous0]

You speak blasphemy, sir! Netscape was a GREAT browser in its heyday (how quickly people seem to forget). In fact, it was pretty much the ONLY browser for a time. People would say "open up Netscape" instead of "open up your browser" just ten years ago.

To be honest...

[jd]

...I'd say they should give it to someone and that might well be you. The code probably has no significant IP value, there may well be code that could be usefully recycled in Firefox or other Open Source browsers, and it might be the perfect project for someone to gnaw on in their spare time. Abandonware is a pollutant in the IT environment - AOL should "go green" and hand the source to someone who is interested.

Re:To be honest...

[cgenman]

Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

With Firefox, the netscape skin, and extensions available for download, how much more do they need? Do extensions need to be compiled, or do they remain in script form?

What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?

Re:To be honest...

[jonbryce]

I thought they already did, and that's why we have Mozilla.

Re:To be honest...

[cp.tar]

What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?

Have collapsible toolbars.

Really, the only thing I miss in Firefox that was in Netscape since 4.something.
Seamonkey has it, though.

Re:To be honest...

[geekoid]

Meh, I just want to tell my geek friends I own Netscape.

I might take the trademark and put it on Seamonkey.
Try to brand to a wider audience.

Maybe keep it bloated and get an underhanded deal with MS so they can included it as an "alternative", but always make it a little worse then IE. Then when I am rich, totally release a better browser.

Now that I think about it, I would use it as an opener to some VCs for another project I am trying to get going.

Re:To be honest...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'd say they should give it to someone and that might well be you.

They should give the trademark to the Mozilla Foundation and let them rebrand Seamonkey (with the new Firefox 3 code base) as Netscape Communicator 10. Since Mozilla essentially is Netscape, this returns the trademark to the right place. They can sell it for a dollar and write off the difference between that and what they paid for it as a loss on their taxes.

Re:To be honest...

[Oktober Sunset]

I remember there used to be an extension that added grippies to collapse the toolbars, that was a long time ago tho, back when it was called firebird and came in a zip file with no icons. I have no clue if there is anything like that still about.

Re:To be honest...

[Sax Maniac]

That's a feature? How many times has this happened to me:

Go to click send or File - off by one pixel.
The icon toolbar collapse.
Try to expand the toolbar, off by one pixel.
The next toolbar collapses.
Try to expand the toolbar, off by one pixel.
The next toolbar collapses.

Dammit!!

Re:To be honest...

[FateStayNight]

if youheld down shift it would save the link instead of opening it in a new tab. This was useful back in the day if you had a lot of link targets to save quickly.

Re:To be honest...

[einpoklum]

Here's just a partial list

And that's just what's missing from both Firefox _and_ Mozilla Suite / Seamonkey. Seamonkey has some features which Firefox doesn't, and vice-versa.

Re:To be honest...

[Ilgaz]

What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?

Have collapsible toolbars.

Really, the only thing I miss in Firefox that was in Netscape since 4.something.

Seamonkey has it, though.

I wonder what would happen if only Netscape 7.2 users collectively moved to Seamonkey. Speaking with OS X numbers and just Versiontracker as source, the numbers are impressive (for Mac):
Downloads (version 7.2): 84,744
Downloads (all versions): 270,849

AOL should do a favor, should divert those 7.2 users to Seamonkey project with a good sized donation. They should have done it AGES ago. Those evil guys gave the false promise/impression of supporting 7.2 instead of diverting them to Seamonkey project which needs more users to be a better suite.

Re:To be honest...

[Anonymous Coward]

I give up. How many times has that happened to you?

If the answer is greater than one, maybe you should lay off the Red Bull.

Christmas comes late

[Sentry21]

That's awfully nice of them. Now if they'll just do the same to their other offerings, the world would be a better place.

Ah well, one thing at a time.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Amouth]

god i remember that - and sitting on a 2400 baud modem.. what a wonder the web was at that time..

Gonna miss it

[omfglearntoplay]

Firefox has taken over for a long time... but Netscape was the stuff back in the day. Sad to see it pass away.

Good!

[Dracos]

AOL bought Netscape as bargaining power against MS, but then never actually used it that way. Instead, they mistreated what is arguably the most well known brand from the early days of the net in ways that only AOL could. Any other company would have built up Netscape. AOL lets it rot, then bastardizes it with every hare-brained scheme they can think of (dialup ISP, frankenbrowser, lame Digg knockoff), each further damaging the brand. The only smart thing AOL did that had anything to do with Netscape was to create the Mozilla foundation.

Now AOL is just as weak, having abandoned their walled garden, missed broadband altogether, and their only relevant public service is AIM, which has taken off to such a point that they simply aren't capable of killing it, no matter how incompetent they are.

Rest in peace, Netscape. Your long suffering at the hands of your caregiver is at an end.

(Why do I suspect zombie Netscape will rise from the grave in a year or so, when some new executive needs a name for a new pet project? BRAAAAIINNSSS 11.0, now with 250 gazillion free hours of shambling!)

Re:Good!

[asa]

> The only smart thing AOL did that had anything
> to do with Netscape was to create the Mozilla
> foundation.

Actually, AOL didn't create the Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell Baker created the Mozilla Foundation and as part of that endeavor she solicited donations from AOL and several other large companies. AOL was convinced to donate $2M over 2 years, a couple of trademarks, and some hardware. Other organizations also donated cash, equipment, bandwidth, and full-time staff to the early Mozilla Foundation. There's no doubt that AOL's donation was significant, but it can hardly be said that they created anything.

- A

Re:Good!

[ClosedSource]

AOL bought Netscape because they wanted access to the economic value Netscape's alleged victim-hood at the hands of MS would bring. That was the only value the company had. After MS lost the government anti-trust case, AOL got their payday. Their only mistake was that they paid way too much for Netscape, so they lost money overall.

Re:Good!

[yulek]

Just to keep history in perspective, AOL didn't kill Netscape, and neither did Microsoft. The latter did their bit, but the primary Netscape killer were the Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management.

The reason that AOL was able to buy Netscape in the first place because Netscape was already failing financially and in market share. The reason Netscape was failing financially was because of its own misuse of the hottest property ever squandered in the age of the Web: www.netscape.com. The home page of the first popular consumer browser, the word once synonymous with the World Wide Web (and, however incorrectly, The Internet) was never taken advantage of. It was pathetic.

Also, in addition to vain infighting of the worst kind, the company was overrun with useless middle management from various hastily and foolishly made acquisitions which included deals for positions of "power" at Netscape. I think there was something like 30 Vice Presidents (most made via acquisitions, not promotions from within) at one point, when it was maybe 2000 employees? That's more VPs than Microsoft had at the time (with 20000 employees)... There were 7 (seven!) people between a senior engineer and Jim Barksdale...

Microsoft's role in the demise of Netscape was simply to provide a hard hitting competitor, something Netscape had no idea how to counter. Yes, Microsoft pulled some evil tricks, such as giving away free software (11 years later we are still seeing that this model can work!) purposefully breaking JavaScript using their monstrous, non-compliant JScript (which singlehandedly pushed back the coming of Web 2.0 at least 5 years), various deals for IE only installations brokered with computer makers, i.e. their usual bag of tricks.

Netscape's response was to flail and fail instead of doing something original like, say, making netscape.com into what Google eventually would become... The talent was there, more importantly the *audience* was there, but there was no one brave enough at the helm to take advantage of it. Or, more fairly, there was too much dead weight for those brave and talented folks to carry...

R.I.P.

Re:Good!

[symbolic]

Any other company would have built up Netscape

I'd like to think that's true, but alot, I'm afraid, depends on the culture of the company that acquired it. For example, I don't think there's any way in hell that Microsoft would have done much for Netscape - not because of IE, but because Microsoft just doesn't have the culture that would allow something like that to flourish. I'm guessing there are probably many other larger companies with a similar culture.

Re:Good!

[NutscrapeSucks]

Netscape themselves came up with the genius idea to scrap Navigator v5 and spend the next five years rewriting from scratch under the "Mozilla" umbrella. You can't put that on AOL.

Re:Good!

[epine]

Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management. Didn't the four horsemen resurrect themselves on fell beasts after their thrilling body surf down the dotcom water slide? Horses were less than practical in a cube farm to begin with. Back when HPaq downsized the cubical, I wonder if they also removed the drop ceilings?

AOL is irrelevant

[Nimey]

Netcraft confirms it & everything.

But seriously, does AOL have any market relevance left? Besides, who uses Netscape anymore besides nostalgiaphiles and AOLers?

Re:AOL is irrelevant

[jonbryce]

AOLers don't use Netscape, they use AOL browser, which is a re-skinned IE with extra bloat.

Re:AOL is irrelevant

[OutSourcingIsTreason]

AOL's market relevance is as a warning to other ISPs: This is what happens when you replace net neutrality with a walled-off garden of preferred content.

Re:AOL is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

>> does AOL have any market relevance left?

I think they should move into the furniture market. All the coasters in my living room are upside down "AOL 90-day Free Trial" CDs.. (I'm not lying).

Or maybe they should make wind chimes with them...

Or, I could collect a bunch of those CDs, assemble them into a huge mirror that I could then aim at things to set on fire! bwhaha

Re:AOL is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

But seriously, does AOL have any market relevance left? Besides, who uses Netscape anymore besides nostalgiaphiles and AOLers?

My mother uses AOL's Netscape because it is an 'official' browser from a big company. She has steadfastly refused to use Mozilla or Firefox because they are not as trustworthy. She is well aware it is the EXACT SAME PROGRAM but she insists that the 3-year-old version of Netscape she has is better than anything that the Mozilla Foundation could possibly release. She doesn't do anything special with it, just browses the web. I once tricked her into using Opera when a website she wanted to open was not opening in 3-year-old Netscape, but she didn't stick with it and went back to Netscape.

The Daily WTF

[tieTYT]

I once read this interesting Daily WTF/Worse Than Failure article about Netscape and how AOL's marketing team was screwing with it. For the life of me, I can't find the article. But one of the things they did was realize that pop-up blocking was one of the new cool things for browsers to have. But the marketing team stepped in and said, "Hold on just a second. We can't have the browser blocking OUR pop-ups." So they added rule to block all pop-ups except those that came from the netscape web page.

The netscape homepage happened to have a pop-up on it and of course, this is the default home page of the browser. When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".

Re:The Daily WTF

[swillden]

When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".

What would have made that perfect is if the pop-up itself was advertising the pop-up blocking feature.

Re:The Daily WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Blake_Ross_on_Popup_Suppression.aspx

Re:Nutscrapes Downfall

[cp.tar]

Well, am I surprised to see a mymincity link under that one as well?

Especially since I don't remember any kind of critical, infamous bug in Netscape 7.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[everphilski]

11 years at the pace technology moves in this day and age is ancient history. Remember the operating system it was running on for most users - Windows 95. We've had 4 iterations since then. And the way Netscape went out, becoming a shitty browser, driving people to IE or other solutions - left a bad taste in people's mouths.

(I do remember... I was 15 in 1997, working for an ISP who installed Netscape as a default browser)

blink

[dgun]

<blink>:(</blink>

Re:blink

[lohphat]

I blame Lou.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[WizMaster]

Yes, because everyone that wasn't a fetus was online. My first computer was a 98SE (and Red Hat thanks to a "For Dummies" Book) and not exactly during Netscapes hayday. As a matter of fact, AOL is probably the most popular version of Netscape known (well, it's not known it's Netscape). 11 years is a long time and these past 11 years in particular have drastically changed the face of the net. Like I said, I'm probably too young to care.

Do it the AOL way

[TaoPhoenix]

Or they could just blanket the world with more coasters labeled "You've Got Code!"

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Slashdot user WizMaster, who is Exhibit 193062847 in the series "What's Wrong With America Today."

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[WizMaster]

WooHoo! I'm famous! On topic: Not like I missed much of an experience as far as I can tell.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[turgid]

Windows 95

Speak for yourself, monkey boy, I first used Netscape back in '94 or '95 (it was a long time ago) on Solaris. Prior to that, I'd been using NCSA Mosiac.

Re: Fetuses

[TaoPhoenix]

That's because the Fetuses were the CEO's, who were responsible for "spend so far into the hole maybe we'll be profitable in China" business plans.

http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6278387-1.html

Netscape is not dead

[BenoitRen]

It lives on in SeaMonkey. Not only in the concept, but also the default theme, which looks just like Netscape 4.

Re:Netscape is not dead

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pinin' for the fjords.

I actually paid for it

[jbrower]

I distinctly remember buying Netscape Navigator (or was it Communicator) from a local "Stop 'n Save Software" store which later turned into an EB Games. I suppose it was back in 1996 and the price was something like $40-$60. I still have the 5 diskettes it came on stuck in a drawer somewhere. Prior to that I used Mosaic.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[sconeu]

NCSA Mosaic (I think it was 2.7b1 or something like that) on SCO OpenServer. This was oldSCO, before they sold the Unix division to Caldera.

I believe it was about '97 or so.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most. We all know how cool everyone who uses unix is, so there is no reason to point it the fuck out at every fucking opportunity.

AOL blew it

[Anonymous Coward]

When they first acquired Netscape, I thought for sure they were going to release AOL branded PCs running Linux with a Netscape browser. Imagine if they could ssh into your box and fix problems for you (perhaps after you boot off a recovery cd if things were really borked); basically they could have marketed it as a "zero maintenance" pc. They could have bundled the cost of the machine and internet at a reasonable monthly cost (PCs were running about $1000 at the time). It would have been interesting indeed if this had happened.

Throbbers.

[phooky]

Ah, I miss the throbbing "N". From the FAQ:

Q. What's up with that throbbing "N"?

A. We are in the process of having a new logo designed, and the throbbing "N" is a placeholder. It's apparent that it's not going to win any aesthetics awards, although a very vocal 2% minority really likes it a lot.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Doctor Faustus]

Remember the operating system it was running on for most users - Windows 95.
Windows 3.11 was probably more popular than 95 for as long as NetScape had a lead over IE. Ah, Trumpet Winsock...

Not just a browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Netscape for a long time, and when I say that, I refer to not just the Netscape browser, but to the Netscape "bundle", if you will. To this day, the Netscape (and later Mozilla) interactive HTML editor is my favorite tool for creating web pages. Granted, I've never tied to create fancy-dancy AJAX pages with it, but it has always served my needs, with simple use where composite previews, GUI-mode editing, and ASCII HTML editing only tabs away, and the modes were fully interchangeable at any time. In fact, just the day before yesterday, I was hunting through my disto's packages for a good HTML editor, and didn't find one that I liked as well.

I also, to a lesser extent, enjoyed using the Netscape email and browser clients for a long number of years, and was satisfied with them. Other people reported horror stories about them, but for some reason, I don't recall ever having an issue with them (maybe it depends on browsing habits), aside visiting occasional Microsoft whoring site where IE is the only browser allowed. But thats a different topic called "How to Design a Web Site Like an Idiot".

What about

[Inqy]

The Amazing Netscape Fishcam?

Re:What about

[Ant P.]

That's been dead since 2004 or earlier. The site was still up last time I checked, but the webcam shots are static jpegs.

Re:What about

[Inqy]

Wow. I'm waay behind the curve! :)

soon to be followed by another death

[circletimessquare]

netscape's death will soon be followed by the death of another relic of the early internet

namely, AOL

Re:soon to be followed by another death

[that this is not und]

AOL is NOT a relic of the 'early Internet.' It was the blight of the middle-years Internet. The early Internet predates the whole WWW.

Re:soon to be followed by another death

[RobDollar]

I would consider AOL, alongside compuserve (If they had just got rid of those 12kmer9fskmf234kjr@compuserve.com names!!) relics of the old internet, as we know it today.

AOL Needs to Loosen Their Grip

[Jekler]

The one time they let one of their projects breathe, it turned into Mozilla. Once they realized it wasn't their property that was inherently faulty, they tightened that grip right back up figuring if they just squeezed hard enough maybe they could make another diamond. They're so desperate to turn everything they own into a revenue generator, they'll do it at the expense of the product itself. Yes, every company needs its projects to make money for them, but you can't sacrifice your racing horse for good luck in the race.

They only think of their products in terms of themselves, they don't look at them from a customer viewpoint. I don't think the people in charge at AOL ever stopped to ask "Why would someone want Netscape?" they ask "How can we make Netscape represent us?"

It's like they think of their products as sales reps. Forget that big deal you landed 5 years ago, how are your numbers this week? They want it to make another big score, but without any resources. Coffee is for closers.

Netscape had numerous chances to work its way into people's hearts and minds but they never added a single feature people would actually want. Every feature they added was self serving. The company is just all backwards; they don't want to make great products, they want their products to make them great.

Re:AOL Needs to Loosen Their Grip

[Jekler]

You think my knowledge of the history of Netscape and the browser wars is faulty?

Even in viewing my post, I can't seem to locate any mention at all of the browser wars. Upon further review, I also don't see where I mentioned any bit of the history of Netscape, save for the bit about spawning Mozilla. Being that was the only mention of Netscape history, I can only infer you're asserting they did not create Mozilla, is that what you're saying?

My post was almost entirely about AOL and their treatment of the brands they acquired.

Re:AOL Needs to Loosen Their Grip

[KlomDark]

Don't worry, I couldn't make much sense or find much relevance about that guys reply either. I wonder if he somehow replied to the wrong message?

Re: Brilliant AC this time!

[TaoPhoenix]

You gotta hand it to the HoldenFohoot this time.

Yahoo: We did not find results for: "worst netscape bug".

Google: Your search - "worst netscape bug" - did not match any documents.

MSN live search: We did not find any results for "worst netscape bug".

Ask: Your search for "worst netscape bug" did not match with any Web results.

Another netscape nostalgia

[RobDollar]

Further to other replys, Netscape was my first browser, and with this news post it does bring back a lot of memories. (A fair few of "pron" admitedly, before we had to type typos of words so lycos and altavista wouldn't misreport) It's also very interesting to realise how prevelent Netscape was back in the day, and just how far it's fallen. I'm also still convinced that if you hovered your mouse cursor over the little "key" icon in the bottom right toolbar, somehow magically your nude pictures of ladies will load up faster. All those memories are gone now, like tears in the rain, time for Netscape to die.

Thanks to them browsers are free

[ToasterTester]

Netscrape started the whole free browser thing with free betas and previous versions, the current version was the only one technically that cost money. Then they threw fits when MS released IE for free. Then they got bloated and other free competition outpaced them. So they got trampled by the market they created.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[bbroerman]

Well, personally, my first browser was NCSA Mosaic. I was very happy, though, when Mozilla 0.99 was released, and then followed by Netscape 1.0N. I still have copies of all of them on a CD, enshrined in my cabinet, along with Trumpet Winsock and WS-FTP. Of all these, I still use WS-FTP. Damn I feel old....lol...

Netscape is pretty old....

[dbolger]

...but the first web browser I used was Lynx.

That might sound like I'm trying to show old school creds, but that was the only browser the desperately old computer that I was using up to 1999 would run ;)

Re:Netscape is pretty old....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck that, I just telnet to port 80 and render the HTML in my head. Anything more is bloat, as far as I'm concerned.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[DCTooTall]

See here young whippersnapper... BACK in my day we didn't have no fancy internets. We used DOS programs like Procomm 2.4.2 and QMODEM to dial into a BBS....Run by a guy down the street. We didn't even have any fancy GUI's. Just Command line! And we didn't have no fancy MMPORPG, we had TradeWars! (or yankee Trader). And we were lucky if our BBS had an echonet like RIME, or InterLink....or FIDO...So we could talk to people in Europe without paying ma bell major $$$$. And back then people actually spelled like real people, unless they used fancy acronyms like YMMV, TANSTAAFL, RTFM, etc.. And best of all.....people who thought spelling with ASCII and numbers were cool plainly labelled themselves "K-RAD" and stayed on their own BBS well away from where they could bother anybody.


ok... I'm under 30. I'm WAaaaaaaaaaaayyyy Too young to feel this old all of a sudden...

Try SeaMonkey

[Kelson]

Version 6 was a piece of shit. I was using 4.08 at that time. That was the last one I found to be stable until 7.1. I like the email and browser together... but I guess I'm gonna have to go the Firefox - Thunderbird route soon.

Actually, it sounds like you'd be more interested in SeaMonkey than Firefox+Thunderbird. It's a continuation of the Mozilla suite that was the basis for Netscape 7, and still has the combined browser & email. It's also still being developed as a Mozilla project, so it's current as far as capabilities & security fixes go.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell a bitter Windows user! Don't fight it dawg, just go install Linux! Actually, you better make several partitions and also put in FreeBSD and BeOS so you can really be cool. We support you in your efforts to join the coolest of the cool.

Coming from the NCSA...

[mackermacker]

I am sad to see it go too. It doesn't really matter what the 'state' of Netscape is today. It made its mark, in a tremendous way. Mark worked down the hall, in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Sciences, in what we call 'the fishbowl'. Many of us worked in the Viz, REL, and Numerical lab, and CAVE. We were all SGI based, and grew up on Netscape. Back in the day, IE was unheard of.

The accomplishments of Netscape will live on, no matter there present state (anyone remember that silly car called, oh Deloreon). I won't loose sleep over Netscapes fall, it's their time, but give credit where credit is due. They were the true leaders.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[OECD]

I first used Netscape back in '94 or '95 (it was a long time ago) on Solaris. Prior to that, I'd been using NCSA Mosiac.

lynx FTW! Fortunately, *that* hasn't gone away. (It is a great "covert at work" browser.)

oh

[Anonymous Coward]

Finaly! Thanks God!

from the Book of Mozilla, 2:1

[CjKing2k]

And so the Creator looked upon the beast and buried it deep within the earth. Its mourners looked up into the sky and joined their kin under the wings of the great bird, and the people rejoiced.

Re:from the Book of Mozilla, 2:1

[qupada]

Ask and ye shall receive... boredom really is an awful thing. (It's all in the jar files in chrome/ in case anyone cares, mozilla.dtd and mozilla.xhtml)

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/1177/firefoxpe5.png/

2:1 seems fair to me. I was going to use today's date.

What about the Brandname? Give it to Mozilla?

[Qbertino]

Can't they just pass the NS brand to the Mozilla Foundation? Let them think of a nice use for it. Maybe rename themselves to Netscape Foundation? It would be fitting.

My 2 cents.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Penguinisto]

god i remember that - and sitting on a 2400 baud modem.. what a wonder the web was at that time..

Heh - I recall being stuck with a 2.4k modem once (my 'fast' 14.4 had busted for some odd reason and I was waiting for its replacement to ship to the local geek shack I'd bought it from).

I clocked this version of www.discovery.com loading in just under 42 minutes.

...and to think of all the FPS gamers today whining to the Heavens about, oh, ~40ms of lag... Heh.

/P

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Penguinisto]

WooHoo! I'm famous! On topic: Not like I missed much of an experience as far as I can tell.

Give it 10 years, then tell that crop of users something about, oh, what it was like to have to install a driver.

You'll understand, eventually. :)

(trust me - compared to Mosaic, "Nutscrape" was [i]the shit[/i]...)

/P

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[DCTooTall]

You mean like it is now with telling people what it was like to have to worry about configuring an INIT string in order to do ANYTHING with your modem.

ATDT8675309

ATZ
NO CARRIER

What's the point? There's still no mail

[gelfling]

I retrofitted Seamonkey onto all my users who absolutely would not move from 'Netscape' after NS8 dropped an integrated mail client. I looked with interest in returning to NS9 but still no mail client and there were some notes on Netscape's web page that there was a mail client in beta. But I guess that's dead. In either case, for NS groupies and the untrainable who absolutely CANNOT learn anything new Seamonkey is a good option. It handles multiuser profiles better than FF/T-Bird and it incorporates most of the extensions used in FF as well including IEtab. There's even an NS theme (No throbber though). In fact I have better time with complex webpages that use a lot of Flash using Seamonkey compared to FF even with IE tab.

Re:What's the point? There's still no mail

[RobDollar]

I still genuinely don't understand why these people can't switch to FF, and also why the remaining Netscape users havent already. Especially as it's essentially very much the same, and stable.

Re:What's the point? There's still no mail

[operato]

ff is a standalone browser. a lot of people quite like the all-in-one package and they tend to use netscape 7 rather than 8 or 9.

Re:What's the point? There's still no mail

[gelfling]

I have users who don't know what rebooting is or how to turn off the computer and back on again. I have users who don't know how to click on a collapsed menu list in Seamonkey mail to make it 'magically' appear. I have users who have created EVERY single document they have ever worked on in a SINGLE document in MS Word that goes on for thousands of pages.

These people are not retarded. They are attorneys and all of them are women. You can scream at me about that but it's fact. Some people go out of their way to become intentionally helpless when it suits them to feel good about their 'professional' skills at the expense of our mere 'technical' skills.

Re:What's the point? There's still no mail

[bill_mcgonigle]

In either case, for NS groupies and the untrainable who absolutely CANNOT learn anything new Seamonkey is a good option.

How did these untrainables learn Netscape? Or is there stupid juice in the water cooler recently?

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[that this is not und]

mMosaic is still available as a buildable package in the NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc.) Just on a whim, I launched a build a minute ago. *bip* It built, in less than a minute.

Here's a screen capture of mMosaic.

And here's a screen capture of the Slashdot homepage in mMosaic.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

so are you saying you would rather have used Internet Exploder than Netscape?

shouts

[eneville]

So long as AOL keeps shoutcast alive I don't really care..

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[ConceptJunkie]

Ah, Trumpet Winsock...

Now that's something I haven't thought about in years. I eventually picked up Windows 95 when there was too much software I couldn't run on Windows 3 that I actually wanted, but after a few months I switched over to NT... and booted Win 9x only for games, until XP came out and I didn't need Win 9x any more for anything.

I bought Netscape 1

[Newer Guy]

I bought Netscape 1 for Windows 3.1 at Comp USA for 35 bucks many years ago. It came on one floppy disk. BOY was it better then Mozilla! Then version 2 came, which they charged you to download (I think it was ten bucks if you were upgrading). Then from Netscape 3 on, it became free. I used Netscape 3 for quite a long time. It was far better then Internet Explorer-until IE 4.something came out that blew it way. I still have that original floppy about somewhere.

Re:I bought Netscape 1

[loadrunner]

You mean Mosaic -- not Mozilla, right? Mosaic was the first browser, Mozilla was an internal code name used by Netscape for a a "Mosaic killer". The name was not used externally until they open-sourced their browser code.

I still use the 7.2 suite for OS X

[themadplasterer]

That was the last useful version for a quick free html tool. I better back up the installer.

Re:I still use the 7.2 suite for OS X

[Ilgaz]

That was the last useful version for a quick free html tool.

I better back up the installer. Seamonkey upgrade which is EXACTLY the same thing you use just with like thousands of bugfixes is way to go.

You can even use your Netscape 7 theme with it.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Stop using OS X Netscape 7.2- Use Seamonkey, if AOL guys have a tiny respect to their users, they should write it to their webpage.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[zakezuke]

god i remember that - and sitting on a 2400 baud modem.. what a wonder the web was at that time.. I don't know which was worse, those stuck at 2400baud or those without a math-co for .jpg decoding.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in college, one of my UNIX text books had a section dedicated to grabbing
info off the Internet. There was a brief piece on FTP, gopher and telnet. In the second edition,
there was a page or two dedicated to this new fangled thing called Netscape Navigator that
would combine all the above (and more!) in one large program. It's amazing
how far the web has come since then.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[zakezuke]

People would say "open up Netscape" instead of "open up your browser" just ten years ago. I was going to address some of the Internet in a Box type solutions using mosaic 10-13 years ago.

10 years ago IIRC there was at least I.e. 4.0 IIRC. I remember in 1999 pseudo geeks promoting netscape over I.E. claiming it was faster, but I simply didn't see it. But when win95 was new, Netscape was top of the pops.

Pre win95 you either were able to download Winsock, or had to resort to buying something like internet in a box which often came with a custom version of mosaic. I remember Quarterdeck had a solution which seemed to out perform the Trumpet's solution.

AOL = King Anti-Midas

[theurge14]

Q: When you're the largest ISP in the nation and you acquire both Netcsape and Winamp and all the developers from Mozilla and Nullsoft, how is it that you manage to monumentally fuck it all up?

A: ?

Re:AOL = King Anti-Midas

[Anonymous Coward]

A: Manage it all by committee.

Complete Netscape archive here

[theurge14]

Pick you favorite version for your favorite OS here:

http://browser.netscape.com/downloads/archive/

Ten years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, Netscape was the leading browser. Look at this

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-512100.html/

We "the non-Microsoft" camp are still trying to recover from IE. Bundling it with OS and then providing it for free was an effective way of killing any competition. That's way Microsoft hates Linux. They cannot give away their OS for free unless they are fighting for their life. Hence they cannot kill of Linux like they did to Netscape. Netscape might be bloat but reason it was bloat was to give users more choices when IE had the equal footing with Netscape and came for free. Would anyone download a free software if you had a similiar free software installed ?

Re:AOL is killer

[realwhz]

netscape, icq, winamp ... AOL appears to be a IT company killer

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[mr_mischief]

As long as we're pissing, I used to use Lynx on a direct dumbterm dialup (no PPP or even SLIP) to a Vax machine at a public library from DOS using Telemate for my terminal emulator and modem control.

I had no storage on the library system. The connection was all 8-bit clean though, so I'd use Lynx to open a telnet session to my shell at Concentric Research. I'd run FTP, WAIS, Archie, or Lynx again from there to download to the shell account, then fire up Zmodem from the shell to get files to my PC.

My friends and I were doing this in 1992-1994 before there was commercial net access in our local calling area. A $10 a month shell account was much cheaper than long distance charges for downloads at 2400 or 9000 bps.

I spent $135 for my first fax modem, 2400 bps with 9600 send and 4800 receive fax. Then I went to 28.8k, then 56k (which was supposed to be limited to 53k but was usually more in the 41kto 48k range). My last analog modem was a 56k hardware modem with a real RS232C-compatible link to the PC. It cost all of $55 and was much nicer than waiting an hour per megabyte with the 2400 bps.

Now I'm on 6 Mbps down and 384 kbps up and people bitch about how slow that is. I used to work in the ISP field and had a testing machine with a burner hooked up to a burstable DS3. The truth is, unless there's a particular file I need in a hurry and the other end has enough bandwidth and server power to actually keep up with demand (which is pretty rare for large popular files) then I don't really miss it.

BitTorrent comes in handy sometimes, but I'm usually downloading stuff that's just popular enough to stress the small number of mirrors it's on but not so popular that I find many seeds. I usually end up uploading two or three times what I download, and with such an unbalanced asymmetric plan it's kind of more pain than pleasure. And no, I've never made an illegal download over BitTorrent and certainly never seeded anything illegal over it.

Kids these days....

[raehl]

I remember when chat, porn and printer drivers all had different phone numbers.

AOL Cluestick

[Brandybuck]

Dear AOL, here's a clue for you: Stop trying to pick a freaking browser for your users! It's like a gas station choosing the model of car for its customers.

Browser wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody else think that the "browser wars" of the 90s was utterly ridiculous?

Microsoft had no choice but to distribute IE free with Windows. Nothing else would have made any sense.

Users have a basic expectation that an OS will contain viewer programs for all major types of files. You've got Notepad/Wordpad for text files, MediaPlayer for media files, Paint for image files, etc. -- and they all come standard with the OS.

Windows would have been stupidly incomplete if it came, out of the box, with no way to view HTML files.

Netscape had only two choices: Get Microsoft to buy its browser, or else give up any hope of making revenues on its browser. The very day they found out that Microsoft was definitely not going to bundle the Netscape browser, Netscape should have called an emergency board meeting and totally turned the company in a new direction overnight.

But instead, Netscape dicked around for a long, long time before they were finally forced to admit that a browser (like all applications that view or play common files) must inevitably be free. (Even Microsoft understands this -- that's why they give you "Word Viewer", "Excel Viewer", etc. for free.)

It was just astonishing to me to see one of our supposedly best and brightest Silicon Valley companies just turn totally stupid overnight. Even back then, the freeware movement had progressed to the point where we had free viewers for all common file formats. What made Netscape think that the HTML format should be treated differently from all other common file formats? They expected people to pay them for a file-viewer program that can't even edit the damn file? They seriously didn't have a clue about the way software markets work.

Yeah, Microsoft is a vicious monopolist. But the plain fact is that anyone who wanted to could easily install the Netscape browser on Windows. That simple, elegant fact made it impossible to seriously claim that Microsoft was being unfair to Netscape. As a result, Netscape's legal claims sounded whiny and pathetic to my ear -- especially since every version of the Netscape browser sucked about 10 times harder than the previous version.

Re:Browser wars

[aqk]

You forgot how Andreeson crowed that he was gonna "wipe out" Microsoft with web apps including Netscape.
"Windows is DEAD! MWAAAHAA Ha Ha HAAA!"

That's when Gates &co. woke up and silently declared war on Netscape.
IE3 wasn't much, but by IE4 they were at least equal to NS4.
And when IE5 came out, I knew it was the end for Netscape

And then-
And then, astonishly, Time-Warner/AOL BOUGHT netscape! LOL!

What a drunken party those guys must have been at! Would've liked to see the cocktail-napkin scribblings!

All I can say (again) is "Die AOL, DIE!"
Be smothered to death by your own billions 'n billions of floppies and CDs! Ha ha ha....!

Re:Browser wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape was my first browser on Windows 3.1. I can't remember the version now but it came on the CD with my dial up internet connection here in New Zealand. This version was great and much nicer to use than IE at the time, but when it came time to move on to Windows 95, NS seemed to loose the plot, IE 6 was more stable, and the latest version of Netscape had to be paid for. As poor student, I stuck with the free IE browser on my pirated OS on my old 286 laptop. Then with faster PCs and broadband internet connection, and browsing taking more system time than any other application on my home PC, I downloaded and tried Firefox. Nice logo, and felt much less "American" than any other browser, and one legal app on my desktop). It even had a "British English" version so the menus were spelt correctly, and had a proper English spell checker as a plugin. Bye bye IE for all personal use. I still had to use IE at work though.
I always felt AOL had the kiss-of-death for anything it touched, and smelt of a large US corporation, only doing things for the US market. Even the name of it's parent company is a turn off for me. At least the Mozilla Foundation seems to think there is an internet outside of America.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Adam.Steinbaugh]

Yeah, well, as recently as 1996, Clinton was running for President!

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Amouth]

god i remember that - and sitting on a 2400 baud modem.. what a wonder the web was at that time.. I don't know which was worse, those stuck at 2400baud or those without a math-co for .jpg decoding. sadly i was both..

About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

This should have happened many many years ago. Netscape has never been a browser to be proud of. Every 12-18 months for years, I've downloaded the latest version just to see what they've been up to. The last version I tried still couldn't properly render the simplest pages. Funny enough, enabling the embedded IE rendering was the only thing that made half-decent browsing possible. True, this was after the AOL takeover, but I don't remember much greatness existing prior to that either.

The main thing I remember about the earliest versions of Navigator were those reeeeeaaaaalllly annoying javascript error popups -- you know, the ones where you had to scroll horizontally for 5 minutes to find the "OK" button to dismiss the window? Mostly I just remember switching back and forth between Navigator and freenet. :)

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who forget the past, something something something...

DIE, AOL! DIE!

[aqk]

And that goes for the Pudgy loudmouth Andreeson Netscape also!

I don't know how many times I was told several years ago to stop installing IE5 on users' PCs, and reinstall Netscape by pointy-haired bosses and "consultants", because "Netscape was the standard"
F---ng morons!

I could have paid for it in 2007!

[Kelson]

Back in February I was browsing the aisles in Micro Center and found an ancient jewel case of "Netscape Basics" that had been marked down to 42 cents. It contained a copy of Netscape 4.5 and advertised compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98.

They also had a somewhat less-ancient version of Opera in a box. Would you believe that 1.5 years after Opera had stopped charging for their browser, this store still wanted $39.99?

I took pictures of both as proof.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[i.of.the.storm]

Uhh, back when I was 8 netscape was the most amazing thing ever, and IE sucked. That was only 10 years ago too... I'm sure a lot of younger people with more technically oriented families used netscape a lot. Heck, Firefox is the legacy of netscape and without the work that netscape did we probably wouldn't have as cool of an internet as we do now.

I sold Netscape 1.01 for Mac OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I sold Netscape 1.01 for Mac OS many many many years ago :) I still have one set of those floppies.

m10

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am amazed at how poor todays youth understand history, even when it was only 10 years ago. Netscape made a great browser until their infamous version 4 was released, I certainly would not have called them overly innovative, They made the coolest browser at the time was all, they were ahead of the curve (until version 4). Netscape engine became a pile of poorly maintained buggy piece of poo, much of it had to be rewritten completely for firefox (although yes firefox still does owe a lot to netscape). by Netscape version 4 IE was already well ahead in stablity speed and features, sadly netscapes demise was simply that they SUCKED! they ignored there consumer feedback and released poor quality shit and they payed the price for it.

The origin of species

[houghi]

http://houghi.org/Fun/Netscape.zip That is Netscape 1.0 for you. Sorry, only Windows. The download is 394.1k, which is less then the average webpage nowadays.

Re:The origin of species

[chipfrye]

Thanks for the post! It was like finding a still living dinosaur. By the way, Mozilla was the name of the Netscape mascot before it became a browser.

Re:The origin of species

[Dwedit]

Wow, this version is so old it fails to load any website with "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1", instead of plain old "text/html". No google.com for you.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[WizMaster]

You do bring up a good point, sir, but such is the world. The young never really appreciate what they have because they have it and always have. I've only really used Netscape as AOL's browser or from this SOlaris box I worked on. We must have come a long way beause that in no way shape or form felt like a good program (of course one was AOL and the other was running on SOlaris so my limited experience doesn't count for much). Either way, it's been dead for people for years now unless they happened to know AOL was Netscape. Here's to hoping AOL dies soon.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[WizMaster]

Technically oriented families are the key words. Sure, nowadays everyone and their mother has a cheap computer to check MySpace or some other social network but it wasn't as obiquitous 10 years ago. The dot com boom changed that (IMO) but that doesn't mean there were computers everywhere. I was around 10 and the computers I used were at school (Macs but we hardly ever used them. Waste of school funds IMO since we couldn't use the new computers they got) and probably didn't get a PC till about a year or two later. Then it was AOL/IE (unless I was trying out a linuk distro) until Firefox and Opera.

In NN4, Turn CSS off to avoid crashes

[martrootamm]

I used Netscape 4.08 so much, that I managed to observe the following rendering issues, most of which are listed below:

• I once realised that turning off CSS support did the actual trick and stopped most crashes. Most sites would just crash Netscape 4.x (if style sheet support was turned on), alone because of poorly deployed CSS implementations, whereby not many websites actually cared to use the @-rule.
  
  
• Another crash cause was when people were using an older computer and writing too long texts in textareas. I thought that there was some predetermined buffer set for just one textarea and if someone kept writing too much into it, the browser eventually crashed.
  
  My solution to this was to use Notepad in Windows or gnotepad+ in Linux to write longer texts, then paste them into a textarea and then submit the text.
  
  
• Another thing that keeps hanging Netscape 4.x may indeed have something to do with nested tables. While nested tables with text actually rendered okay after they were downloaded, then the infamous Netscape Table Choke was caused by having inaccessible images in them -- Tables with images wouldn't render before Netscape 4.x had information about the images' dimensions, which is why it was very important to specify image dimensions in code, so that the table would render before one or another image was downloaded.
  
  Those smart enough to specify image dimensions in HTML were able to avoid this issue in part, because tables with inaccessible images (if a server went down or somesuch) wouldn't render until there was a request timeout done for all images.
  
  
• Netscape 4.x in part supported text antialiasing (in Windows 98, I remember) and this might also have caused crashes, probably due to buggy video drivers, which I didn't know to update at that time.

Re:In NN4, Turn CSS off to avoid crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

Also their terrible Java implementation was pretty much browser roulette.

We tried to do something AJAXy with it in like 1997 and it was pretty much infeasible due to bugs.

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft, NS3 Gold on Windows 3.11, about three times on MacOS System 7, then NS4.x was the only browser I had on RedHat 6.x for years, my lad. And we were grateful!

I didn't switch to Mozilla until something like 0.8 or 0.9, I think.

Nokia S60

[DanJ_UK]

I wonder what this will mean for S60 based Nokia phones? The inbuilt browser is Netscape based.

Re:Nokia S60

[Dionysus]

I wonder what this will mean for S60 based Nokia phones? The inbuilt browser is Netscape based.

They're moving to khtml/webkit

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely!

Together with Al Gore, Netscape actually invented the internet!

Netscape

[uxbn_kuribo]

Anyone remember a few years back when Netscape tried to reinvent themselves as an ISP or some crap like that? So long, Netscape, there was a time when you were our IE alternative.

In Spanish we say "navegar"

[Anonymous Coward]

In Spanish we say "navegar en internet" (browsing the internet) because of Netscape Navigator! (f*** M$, we don't 'explore' the web, jerks). Yeah, NS had an impact on more than 400 million people!!!

Adiós, Netscape, te extrañaremos...

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Raenex]

You speak blasphemy, sir! Netscape was a GREAT browser in its heyday (how quickly people seem to forget). In fact, it was pretty much the ONLY browser for a time. How quickly people forget indeed. NCSA Mosaic was quite popular before Marc Andreessen left NCSA to start Netscape. People also forget that Netscape extended and broke web standards left and right, and enjoyed a monolopy on the web as the de facto standard before Microsoft came along and beat them at their own game.

Netscape engineers are weenies!

[Anonymous Coward]

!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN

1990s Flashback

[MrPaul]

AOL seems to be the graveyard for many once-popular Internet programs: * Netscape Navigator * ICQ * Winamp I guess I can download these programs anytime I feel nostalgic for the 1990s. I haven't used these programs in years. And it's funny to see the goodriddance tag applied to this story. Netscape was once the hero of the anti-Microsoft crowd, much like Linux, OpenOffice, and Google are today.

My first browser was before Netscape

[TAZ6416]

I first surfed the net on a VaxStation VLC http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/vax4000-vlc.html using NCSA Mosaic for VMS http://vaxa.wvnet.edu/vmswww/vms_mosaic.html back I think in 1994.

While it had a 19" Monitor which was cool, it was Monochrome so looking at pictures was a bit disapointing ;)

I think I next used Enhanced Mosaic from Spyglass for VMS which then correct me if I'm wrong turned into IE1.

First Netscape I used was on a DEC Alpha running NT4, I think it was version Netscape 3.01, was a hell of a lot better than the IE bundled with the OS which was IE2 I think.

Now get off my lawn ;)
Jonathan

http://www.irvtheswerve.net/

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[milsoRgen]

or those without a math-co for .jpg decoding. HAHAHAHAHAHA, you my friend are a giant among men!

Yes, Mosaic...

[Newer Guy]

It was Mosaic, not Mozilla. Mozilla came years later....and then kind if evelved into Firefox (though the Mozilla browser is still being developed as well). Thanks for correcting me :)

Never mind that . . .

[hawk]

When does Mosaic 3 finally leave beta???

hawk

Lynx got a glitch

[hawk]

I used lynx fairly late as my primary browser. But somewhere along the way, it developed a bug (about 5 years ago?) that wasn't fixed for a couple of years. It was fairly subtle, but until then, I had . set to open a link withg a command, something to the effect of "xterm -e lynx %", so that I could read newssites in my usual manner (launch a new window for everything interesting, and then close the windows as I read them [yes, this *did* predate the first browsers with tabs]).

Eventually it was fixed; I may have been the only one to support it. I want to say that it actually got fixed after I stumbled across a developer in another context.

hawk

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[everphilski]

Oh, yeah, I remember installing WinSock on 3.11 for Workgroups - my point was, he said 1996, and most of our customers in '96 had 95. Of course Netscape was around before then.

Man, though, I hated Winsock. PITA to troubleshoot over the phone with noobs who didn't know what they were doing :).

Re:I think I'm too young to care.

[Doctor Faustus]

Were these individuals, or businesses? I don't think most individuals I knew had Windows 95 much before 1998 (most went directly to 95c), and I didn't get Win9x at work until late 1998 (I was mostly doing DOS programming before that, though).