RIP Netscape
Techcrunch is reporting that development on the Netscape browser will officially end on February 1st, 2008. This kind of signals the end of an era. Those of us who were on the web early on, remember the great advance Netscape was over other browsers such as XMosaic. I remember when Netscape 2.0 came out, and the great advance tables seemed to be in HTML.
However, the Browser Wars were not kind of Netscape, and by the late 90’s even I had switched to Internet Explorer. By then, Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess that I remember crashing about every five minutes no matter what I did. It became unusable, and I, like so many grudgingly moved to IE.
What seemed like a desperation move (and it really was), Netscape was bought by AOL and soon open sourced the browser, creating the Mozilla Foundation. Years later, I was still using IE as the project had nothing had come of it. I did use Netscape a little here and there, but it never really worked right. Finally came Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2002 and we finally had a modern browser to use. IE was forced to update to catch up to Firefox, and we’re all better for it.
Netscape has long been left behind, and no one I know really uses it. I can’t remember when I last actually used a Netscape branded browser. Though its spirit lives on in Mozilla and Firefox, it still stings a little to see Netscape come to the end.
