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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."
For my nostalgia we have the old Netscape icon as a slashdot category image. That's more than enough for me.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Have collapsible toolbars.
Really, the only thing I miss in Firefox that was in Netscape since 4.something.
Seamonkey has it, though.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!