The Death of Netscape.
As of March 1st, Netscape Navigator, the world's first widely used graphical web browser, will be laid to rest. AOL, the owner of the Netscape brand, has decided to no longer support patches or security updates. The date was originally supposed to be February 1st but AOL has granted the browser a 1-month repreive.
I've had a tumultuous relationship with Netscape. The first version of the browser was developed by a fellow alumnus, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and was released in 1993. It was based on the code for NCSA Mosiac, the first graphical web browser to gain popularity in academic circles. NCSA, or the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is a unit of the University that provides cutting edge resources for the students and faculty to use as they develop software projects. I wasn't around back then (I was 13), but the excitement at the potential for the World Wide Web generated by those first steps was still in the air when I got there in 1998.
By that time, Microsoft had released Internet Explorer. Through successive iterations from 1995 to 1998, IE had met and exceeded the features of Netscape, leveraging the massively scaled distribution power of Microsoft by being bundled free with Windows 95. Interestingly enough, IE was also based on Mosiac, but on a version of the software built by Spyglass, a company owned by the University of Illinois whose mission was to try to develop UIUC's software projects into being commerically viable. Spyglass licensed the Mosaic code to Microsoft, which used it as a base for Internet Explorer 1.0.
By Version 4.0 of IE, Netscape was done for. Over the course of several attempts to outdo each other, Netscape and Microsoft fought what web nerds like me refer to as the first Browser War. Both companies raced to add new features, but they were so frantic to get code out the door that both products were quite unstable and incompatible for some time. I flirted with using Netscape a few times, but by this time it was so buggy that I got frustrated and stuck with IE.
Developing websites for these browsers was a huge pain in the neck, and lead to the old trick of "browser sniffing." These techniques used JavaScript to detect the user's browser type by examining the User-Agent string and by testing for the presence of certain features and DOM methods. Things have gotten a lot better for us web developers, but ensuring cross-browser compatiblity is still an issue which steals a lot of project time. Recently announced Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to more web standards than any previous version, and that's something to celebrate.
Under the threat of being squashed completely by Microsoft, Netscape created the non-profit Mozilla Foundation in 1998. This was an effort to "protect" their code base by making it completely open source. The happy ending here is that Mozilla took the next few years to develop what became Firefox, which rose from the ashes of Netscape and became the first browser to really challenge Microsoft's domination. (Mozilla, by the way, was internal Netscape slang from way back in the early days...it's short for Mosiac Killer.)
AOL bought out Netscape shortly after the Mozilla Foundation was formed and has been using the brand ever since, until their announcement this month that they would retire it.
Alas, Netscape, I knew ye well. R.I.P.
P.S. -- If you still want to use Netscape, you can always get the Netscape skin for Firefox :)
