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Loading ...Netscape will officially cease its long and miserable existence on February 1, 2008. Good Riddance. While it was a good browser at one time, it failed to evolve itself and compete with other browsers, and the company so hated Microsoft that it refused to integrate it properly into the Windows Operating System.
Netscape was such a crappy product with the stink of failure surrounding it that it eventually caused AOL to lose business and waste tons of cash on it. Even when AOL purchased the buggy and bloated software for 4.2 Billion dollars, it didn’t bother to integrate it into its own AOL bundled software. It preferred Internet Explorer instead!
It should have never been bought by AOL and should have been allowed to die in 1999. That it lasted almost ten more years is a joke. And that AOL wasted billions on a product it never used is a laughingstock, and proof of why that company constantly swam in “Lake Fail.”
There will be no requiem for this crappy browser from me. I might dance on its grave.
From TechCrunch here:
Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, will die on February 1, 2008. AOL, which acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion, will announce today that they will discontinue development of the browser, currently on version 9.
In an email exchange yesterday with Tom Drapeau, Director of AOL/Netscape development, he said that only a handful of AOL engineers are still tasked with keeping the browser updated. Most of their efforts have been aimed at creating a Netscape-skinned version of Firefox with the Netscape look and feel.
The team has been unable to gain any significant market share against Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This, of course, is the same browser that once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial.
I used to get hate mail for my views on Netscape in this really old article I wrote here. I just want to take a moment to say I told you so.
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3 people responded in this post
That’s great news to those of us in the web design world, one less piece of crap browser’s quirks to deal with. I have a friend that used to call it “Nutscrape.” It always seemed appropriate.
I was never a fan of IE but Netscape was just horrible.
As a web developer you must have wanted to strangle anyone who insisted that you code for a browser that less than 3 percent of the population used.
I used to get loads of tech support emails based on my old article too, especially asking me how the hell do you wipe Netscape off the hard drive for good since it wouldn’t uninstall. I would just tell people to reformat the drive and reinstall.
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