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Netscape Finally Put Down
Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released. "Nearly 14 years after the once mighty browser made its first desktop appearance as Mosaic Netscape 0.9, its disappearance comes as little surprise. Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years."
Its GOT to be worth something.
Besides, there is one banking site that I need that still doesn't like firefox / linux, but works perfectly with seamonkey.
I loved Netscape back in its day, but this really isn't going to be overly painful for the world in general.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Netscape was doing well until AOL bought them. Months ago, AOL announces that dialup is no longer profitable. That's enough proof for me! The CDs are like death spores.
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And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Thankfully, this will increase Firefox market share. I am a Firefox enthusiast, having first used it on the RedHat system at work and then forcing it down the throats of all who ask me for free (as-in-I-get-free-beer) Windows support. While Firefox is not without its flaws, it IS without the flaws of Internet Exploder, and in that the project is a respectable and fruitful mix of public service and development enterprise. Firefox is the child of Netscape, and children must bury their parents. Hail, Farewell, and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
FairTax baby!
I'm pretty surprised it hung on for as long as it did. I found it practically unusable in recent years, every time I gave it a shot out of nostalgia (and amazement that it was still being worked on). I had one Mac user in my office a couple of years ago who insisted on using Netscape Mail 7.0 for her email, despite its many, many pitfalls.
Still, it is sad that MSIE didn't suffer a similar fate, but Firefox is doing a great job in that area...(i.e., killing IE)
Long Live the King!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Consign her to the briny deep.
And sing a doleful sea shanty.
Yar!
The headline: "Put Down" It's like they shot Barbaro. Netscape was not retired out of sympathy (empathy for those of you in Rio Linda) for the browser; The Old Blue N died of natural causes. May she rest in Bittorrent.
FairTax baby!
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
How many times is Netscape going to die?
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12
Gonna have to try Seamonkey I guess.
11 years... man that was quick.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Someone should seriously look at the business side of what happened to Netscape over the past decade. Clearly, IMHO, there is probably a good case to be made that bureaucracy and mis-management killed the beast. How could something so cool, in it's day, navigate (no pun intended) itself into oblivion? I've seen similar things happen with other cool products being absorbed into bureaucratic companies, only to loose market respect and following. I think there is probably enough evidence out there, somewhere, to have several college business and management courses re-written.
I remember well those days. IE was no competition to Netscape, Netscape was much superior. IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had, I guess it didn't even support tables, for sure it didn't have frames, Javascript, etc.
IE3 was the worst piece of software I have seen. EVER!
The fact was that Netscape was its own enemy there. Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE. Then they launched Netscape Communicator. Man, was it slow. They made the only possible download the bundle of browser, mail, news reader. Even Mozilla when they got the code from Netscape they had it bundled, further on they split it again to launch Phoenix (then Firebird then Firefox) to start getting some success again.
Netscape didn't die from competition of IE, at least not in terms of features. If Netscape wasn't the only one to blame for its own death, Microsoft's part in it was only by bundling the browser into the OS, not by making a product that could compete with Netscape.
Great, what about IE now?
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Check out my blackbox styles
Ha. How ironic. I get my Slashdot RSS feed from the Netscape website, which is also my homepage. I'm hoping they won't close the portal down.
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
I remembered getting on the Internet back in 1994. The browsers available was Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 with the "beating" N. This was on Windows 3.1 with a dial-up connection. There no screen backgrounds yet and the best of all, no annoying pop-up ads. Web pages actually had useful information instead of useless marketing drivel especially looking for technical information on company web sites.
Around the time of Jul 1995, I left Indiana and took a job at MCI in Colorado Springs, CO. We had Sun Solaris machines running Solaris 2.4 and I ran Netscape on the machine. It was Netscape 0.94. At home, I ran Win 3.11 WFW and Linux with kernel 1.1.59. I downloaded a copy of Netscape but the version was 0.94. I didn't quite have Linux working with a dial-up Internet connection yet so I was stuck running Internet on Windows.
I remembered when Netscape got bought out by AOL, it was a sad day. In my mind, I knew that AOL was going to ruin it and in some ways, they did and now, Netscape is no more. Before Netscape got bought out, I would have enjoyed working for them especially at the start of the Dot-Com era.
for from the ashes, firefox was born.
Wasn't Netscape a whole internet suite? Why not direct people to SeaMonkey?
Oh I dunno. How about just the fact that the software firm that made 98% of all desktops entered the market with their own browser which they (1) gave away for free and (2) bundled with their OS and (3) gave a few nonstandard tricks to, which everyone used (cf. that 98% of desktop), which made lots of stuff not quite Just Work(TM) unless you were using IE?
Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate. No doubt, superior management could have eked out more from what cash they did have, but a company that has to rely on gifted management and programmers who work 14 hours a day for mere glory is just not going to last, human nature being what it is.
The other reason is that for government sites that used to only post support for Internet Explorer and Netscape like this one: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/formspubs/help/adobenotice-e.html, I can see them mentioning Firefox, which will be good for Firefox. Do you see in the text that mentions Netscape, denying Firefox its rightful place?
Barbaro? At least he didn't suffer the same fate 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand:
http://news.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=17051
See you win 3.8 million dollars and still end up the main course at Benihana.
This reminds me, I wonder what Lycos is doing these days.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
For me, Netscape died four or five years ago when they tried to sell dial-up service with the Netscape name. "Introducing Netscape!" the commercials proclaimed. How freaking sad...the former champ of the web browsing world, its brand no longer recognizable, selling dial-up in the broadband era.
Was some guy supposed to say, 'Hey, I remember Netscape from back in my days in the college computer lab, searching for Jenny McCarthy scans! I think I'm going to bypass cable or DSL and get this Netscape Internet service!"
:q!
They should suggest that people switch to Seamonkey, not Firefox. It's (a) suite, after all :) .
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
AOL has killed a lot of projects ... Netscape has been a good old mutt but like most dogs they have to get put down once the get old and can't walk.
I love the title of this article !
What do you mean finally? I've been putting down Netscape for years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Netscape deserves to DIE DIE DIE, for what they did to Mosaic.
It took awhile for me to come around to using Netscape. Back in the day I preferred using Lynx from a dummy terminal because it was very fast and efficient. At the time the graphics on websites were not very interesting so I didn't feel a need to switch to a graphical browser. Eventually, I started to use Netscape, to surf the web. I can still remember the shooting stars passing by the "N" as my browser perused the ether of the Internet.
It wasn't long after that I became a Netscape bigot. Even after Netscape Communicator came out with its bloated bundled package and IE 4 and 5 started running more efficient I still stood behind Netscape. AOL bought Netscape and things started to slide downhill from there. Remember when AOL was still significant enough to buy out good software companies and rape them? LOL Remember the name AOL-Time Warner? Times have changed. I still continued to use Mozilla up until the Firefox uprising started.
Anyways, sorry to have rambled. Thanks for listing an old man reminisce.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
I remember the throbbing blue N. It used to drive me nuts because the perspective was wrong.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
"It's not dead, it's just restin'."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Put it away Balmer...it's over
Back in 1995-97, I was working for a major European media/publishing company. We were one of their (Netscape's) largest customers having bought around 200 Netscape Publishing System Licenses (NPS) for around USD 80k each! - well those were the good ol' days.
... no, not slap, a fist? A hit with a 10-ton-fist in the face... I was so furious that I stood up and said: "You know guys, with this attitude I think you'll be dead as a company at latest within two-to-three years." - and immediately left the meeting.
... I dunno, it was the httpd-server, which was the basis for Apache later on (a-patchy server); we dumped all Netscape software, even including the browser.
The software was very primitive but it was a solid basis for what we needed - in our company I was responsible for the platform so I came up with a solid specification of what we needed and how Netscape should add this to NPS. We had a meeting on a very high level with Netscape management in Mountain View in September 1996(!) to discuss my paper, which I had already discussed in with Netscape Europe and managed to actually get through to Netscape US.
The meeting was a revelation for me. By that time, the term "Intranet" was becoming a hip-term. There we were, three or four people from our company (by that time, I was "Director International Technology Co-operations" - what a title, isn't it?) - and about five or six people from Netscape.
We explained all our needs again and told them, that we would be of course willing to pay for all these enhancements. I specifically had collected input from another ten or fifteen other media companies from Europe to come up with a neat spec for Netscape - i.e. I did all the job, which they should've done in the first place.
After the explanation and discussion of the paper (three hours or so), one top Netscape manager said: "You know, there are only about 20-30 publishers around the world - but hundreds and thousands of companies needing Intranet solutions. So, therefore, we have decided to go for the Intranet market and thus will drop the media/publishing business. I'm sorry, but we can't implement the spec because it's just a too small market!" (not withstanding the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of media companies around the world...)
I was furious - it was like a
My boss came after me and tried to convince me to come back to the meeting (though not wholeheartedly as I could see he was furious as well). So, I actually left the office, the building and waiting outside of the Netscape building in the sun - waiting for my colleagues to come out.
In the end, we left Netscape, went home and I and a small team have implemented what we needed by ourselves and completely dumped Netscape software, including Netscape Web Server (what was it's name), switching to
That was my experience with Netscape... It was not Microsoft, it was not AOL - it was their arrogant, stupid, high-horsed, customers-don't-count attitude that killed them. It was their f***ed-up management!
You are right up till 4.0
IE 4.0 was finally better than Netscape 4.0
I was a die-hard N user up till 4.0 put me off it for good. IE WAS crap, IE4 was finally better than Netscape 4 from a user perspective when Netscape took a sharp down-turn in quality and stability.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The sad truth about modern software is with operating system derivatives constantly changing, unless a piece of software is constantly updated & rereleased, it won't work anymore.
Does that mean that I have to stop using Netscrape 1.1?
When will it all end!
Microsoft were giving away a kit for ISPs that installed and configured dial-up networking for new users. The kit also installed the latest version of IE, with ISP customisations: "Microsoft Internet Explorer - provided by BT Overpriced Dialup World". Netscape could have (should have) done something like that too, but Microsoft had a natural advantage since they could provide all the parts of the solution together: browser and dial-up configuration in one place. Lots of people got IE that way, since all the ISPs used the kit. (Presumably the Netscape branded dial-up service would be the only exception.)
I remember trying to fight Netscape's corner, trying to explain why everyone using one browser wasn't a good thing, going around and installing Netscape for people. I found it increasingly difficult, since even by that time it was obvious that Netscape was not improving, and since you still had to pay for Opera there wasn't another alternative. I used the monopoly argument to justify the install: the security monoculture argument never occurred to me as I had no idea that IE would turn out to be so insecure.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I loved all the Netscape throbbers. On dialup you had to watch a helluva lot of those comets fly by that "N". You could change the throbber easily. I usually went with the "running puppy" one.
Man, that was serious web browsing, lol.
Bye bye Netscape
[quote]
the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition
[/quote]
There was no competition involved, Internet Explorer 3.0 came preinstalled with Windows 95. When you're online at 14.4 and you've already got a browser, downloading Netscape is a hard sell. There was no way Netscape could overcome that regardless of technological merit. IE3.0 festered with huge market share and really, really painful layout problems for years because it came preinstalled on Windows 95, and the general public wouldn't download a new browser, even to get the latest internet explorer. It was after 2000 before the market share for ie3 got small enough that we didn't need to support it.
Consider the fact that a number of the people left using Netscape nowadays are more or less "diehards" to the brand name. I've spent the past three years attempting to convince my father, who's used Netscape since the dark ages of the graphical Internet, to switch to Seamonkey from Netscape 7.2.
Not painful for the world in general, sure, I'd take that. Not painful for those that have to deal with the leftover FUD? Different story.
The Netscape is dead! Long live the Netscape!
Netscape lost the browser war and threw away their massive lead over IE because they refused to listen to users. They focused solely on proprietary features with no regard for HTML standards and CSS. They didnt WANT html standards. They wanted Netscape-only HTML. IE won because they had superior CSS support and implemented more of HTML 4.0 with less bugs. It has nothing to do with IE being on the desktop, i used all 4 browsers (IE, Netscape, Mosaic, Opera) and IE and Opera were my faves because they displayed HTML and CSS more correctly with fewer bugs.
As others have pointed out Seamonkey is more Netscape than Firefox. Why not give the name "Netscape" to the open source project Seamonkey? I was a little disappointed in the Mozilla Foundation for taking the name Mozilla away from the browser-suite, but I think naming the Seamonkey Project "Netscape" would be a nice gesture on AOL's part.
This is not the last we have seen of Netscape. Some overzealous person or corporation will buy the brand and resurrect it with some new code under the hood. It's too well-known of a brand to go into retirement. It's simply too juicy of a target. However, resurrecting the brand will not be a good move for said overzealous corp. It would be like rebranding Blu-Ray as Betamax. Netscape reminds people of the bad old days of surfing the net at 14.4.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
Out of curiosity, does anybody know why Wikipedia doesn't post charts and graphs of the useragents visiting Wikipedia? It seems that would probably be more accurate than the charts and graphs they have up now.
Maybe not
THERE! fixed it for you:
http://archive.netscape.com/history
AOL has a long checkered history on the internet, of being the home of clueless users, being one of the first companies to really get people online and then cutting their connection every 10 minutes. Throughout AOL's lifetime, it has been involved with a number of high profile scandals, perhaps the largest of which was the 1999 hostile takeover of the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was known to many as the leader in web browsing at the time, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools. That had to be stopped. So, as we continued to use an IE back end for our AOL branded browser, we were then allowed to, at our leisure, slowly and quietly strangle the Netscape suite in to irrelevance.
At the time of the acquisition, the newly demoralized Netscape team had been working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla in a foolish bid to attempt to minimize what they (correctly) perceived as a move to kill the legendary browser. AOL played a significant role in the launch of the NEW IMPROVED(TM) Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded browsers. In 2003, an "independent foundation" was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite. AOL was a major source of interference for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the "foundation".
While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to sabotage the now, beleaguered Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been totally successful. Gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer had to be ultimately crushed (mainly because the Netscape developers were, as we perceived, "weenies"). Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of former Microsoft "engineers" tasked with stuffing the browser with obsfucated bloat and then creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus of providing ad riddled social site rip offs and, with the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers forever, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox. Because, mainly, we've been unsuccessful at infiltrating that organization at this time.
To our shareholders: This day has been long in arriving, and looking back (mission accomplished) - it was WORTH IT!
The King is dead - long live the King.
Windows Internet Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9ae91ebe-3385-447c-8a30-081805b2f90b&DisplayLang=en
Whoa there cowboy. Step 3 is a secret that one must discover on one's own.
Step 1: about:config
Step 2: general.useragent.extra.firefox=Netscape/6.2
Step 3: ?
Step 4: profit!
I made the move from Mozilla to Netscape, life rocked until 4.0... Still, I wish the name could stick around to something, too many good memories.
I use Lynx!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
We still have an old MSWindows system running Netscape 6.2 (I think; it could be 6.1).
:).
It's totally secure.
Because the old system it's on isn't connected to the 'net
Why do we keep that system at all? Because it's the only system we have that runs PageMaker 6.5, and there's no reason to update that.
It creates PDF files that we can print perfectly well from our otherwise Linux network.