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AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development

Posted by Zonk on from the lizard-had-a-good-run dept.

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."

8 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Damn it, for a second I thgouht by microbee · · Score: 4, Funny

    AOL was shutting down!

  2. Long live.. by loconet · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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    [alk]
  3. The Daily WTF by tieTYT · · Score: 5, Funny
    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".

    1. Re:The Daily WTF by swillden · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

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      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  4. blink by dgun · · Score: 5, Funny

    <blink>:(</blink>

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    FAQs are evil.
  5. Re:I think I'm too young to care. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  6. I actually paid for it by jbrower · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  7. AOL = King Anti-Midas by theurge14 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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: ?