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

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".

blink

[dgun]

<blink>:(</blink>

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: ?