End of the road for Netscape

As of 1 February 2008, AOL will stop supporting Netscape Navigator - the iconic web browser that ruled the internet in the late 1990s.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator,” writes Netscape director Tom Drapeau on his blog, “these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. “Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions,” he adds.

Netscape was fighting a losing battle by the time AOL took the company over in 1999. Despite a lot of investment, and the inherent flaws of Internet Explorer at that time, it never made an impact.

The arrival and success of Mozilla Firefox showed it was possible to create a credible alternative to Microsoft’s offering, and many felt AOL should have terminated Netscape at that point.

Source: PCPro

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This entry was posted on 31/12/2007 at 05:12 pm and is filed under Software, Technology News, Web Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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