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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.
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
AOL was only able to buy them because they weren't doing well. The only part of Netscape that was worth anything by that point was the netscape.com portal site, which is generally cited as the reason AOL bought them at all. The browser wars were over by that point, and the source code had already been opened up. AOL made a half-assed effort to keep Netscape the browser alive, but I believe even at that point IE was the default browser for AOL clients.
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
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.
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.
Wasn't Netscape a whole internet suite? Why not direct people to SeaMonkey?
Second System Effect. Basically, you make a first version that is lean, does a few things well, and release that. Then in the second system you add a bunch of "it would be cool if..." things, making the second version huge, bloated, and not as good as the first version.
Vista, as compared to Windows 2000, for a big example.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. The dot com bust came, IIRC, two years later. There was no way they were viable as an independant entity. When NS was at 3.x, they had the advantage of not crashing your entire Windows as IE4 installs did. That was why I preferred NS. However, when I got a chance to work with Netscape's customization kit for ISPs, and compare it to the counterpart Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK, or "Eeek!"), it was no contest. IEAK was easy and fast. NS was horribly slow, and when I dug into it I saw the most awful thing: the app you worked with when customizing was the same app the user saw when installing--with lots of JavaScript if statements to detect whether you were an admin deploying, or a customer installing. Yes. The same code. I'm sure this wasn't the only reason they were slow, but it was the most miserable hack I ever saw, and I didn't want to look any further. As MS sorted the kinks out of IE installs, and integrated it into the OS (thus eliminating the risk of what was essentially an OS upgrade), the last advantage of NS evaporated. Their contemporary 4.x offering, Communicator, was just a lot of bloat nobody really needed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This reminds me, I wonder what Lycos is doing these days.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Horseshit! Are you saying that people eat animals?! We need to get this onto the front page of Slashdot, neigh, the Times!!! Is there a gallop poll regarding Japan's or the United States' horse meat consumption? And does it give you the trots?
For Barbaro's sake... the horse had a good run. Making hay from an article about web browsers is to saddle the issue with an agenda; please do not bridle our argument by being a horse's ass. This is a discussion about software, and to jockey animal rights into it is just putting the cart before the horse. So slow down there, cowboy... Reign it in. While I am sure you're chomping at the bit to get this kind of information out, I am fresh out of insensitive horse puns and we will have to put this discussion out to stud.
Polo!
FairTax baby!
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."
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!
As I recall, this happened around the same time IE was built solid into Windows 98 and Microsoft's "embrace / extend / extinguish" strategy pumped full blast with "IE Active Channels." Microsoft started MSN as an internet service provider and AOL was a little nervous about Microsoft making Windows rely on MSN. So AOL bought Netscape and kept the browser alive as a bargaining chip. At the time AOL was the #1 internet provider and if AOL made everyone use Netscape, Microsoft's internet strategy would be dead in the water. This threat kept the AOL icon on the desktop of default installs of Windows.
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Hippie Logger Jock
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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.
Compare e.g. NT3.51 with NT4.0, especially after all 7 Service Packs are applied to the latter.
Then compare Windows 2000, which was a decent rewrite to integrate the features of NT into a stable codebase, with its follow-ups XP and Vista.
Yeah, I think the history of NT is a fine example of the Second System Effect.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Bye bye Netscape
> Reign it in.
The correct phrase (and the one most suitable for the horseplay) is "Rein it in".
Go somewhere random
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade