RIP Netscape
Category: Internet...
Posted Friday, January 04, 2008 at 08:37 PM [GMT-6]

AOL has announced that it will cease development and support of the Netscape browser on February 1, 2008.

Netscape usage had dwindled into irrelevancy over the past few years – according to most stats it has less than a 1% market share – so its demise will directly affect very few people. However, the company and the browser will always have a solid place in the history of cyberspace. Netscape was arguably the first company to make the World Wide Web the centerpiece of its business plan. Netscape's ability to produce a browser with an interface that looked and behaved pretty much identically on any computer was also arguably the catalyst that exposed Microsoft's dark side to the world, as Redmond deemed this strategy a threat to its own business plan and launched what we fondly remember as "The Browser Wars."

Netscape was also the first dotcom IPO with any kind of substantial splash. I was in the headquarters offices of an oil company in The Woodlands in 1995, on the day Netscape's stock went public. I was trying to negotiate a deal with the company (it never worked out) and I can remember idle chitchat about Netscape. I was the only person in the room who knew anything about it, and I'm pretty sure no one took my advice to go buy as much of the stock as their brokers could get their hands on. (Of course, I didn't follow my own advice either.)

I was a loyal Netscape user right up until Firefox was released. I even built a few websites using Composer (*shudder*). As a web designer, I had mixed emotions about it. I hated the way it choked on CSS; my consolation was that Internet Explorer was usually even worse. In a way, I was relieved when Netscape's market share dropped to the point that I didn't have to test new designs using it.

As nostalgic as those memories may be (if indeed one can be nostalgic about a phenomenon that's less than 15 years old), I won't mourn the passing of the company. (And for those who feel an inexplicable need to continue using Netscape, it will still work; you just will never see any upgrades or fixes. And, eventually, technology will completely pass it by.) With the continued improvement of Firefox, and the news that the next version of Internet Explorer passes Acid2, the web browsing world has never been in better shape, for both users and developers.