The Beast Collapsed, Yet It's Decedents Were Stronger Then Ever...

Netscape Blog | End of Support for Netscape web browsers

(Image from the Netscape Blog, splash screen of the last version of Netscape)
The AOL Netscape teem posted a notice that they are ending all development and support
for Netscape beginning Feb 1st, 2008. Sure is sad news, but somewhere back there, Netscape has been long dead, and the recent AOL Netscape team is mostly a skinning and modifying teem instead of a development team.

Netscape Navigator brings back a lot of fond memories that date way back to Netscape 1.0 on Windows 3.1. Yes, I do remember, as a child, sitting there watching the big N on that hill, with shooting stars flashing over the dark green sky, while the websites slowly load on the screen. I also remember when the big N changed to a ship navigation wheel, when they added the name "navigator" to the name of the browser part and added email and many other tools to the package. Then came the light house with 4.0. Yeah, as a kid, I don't remember much of the difference between versions but the icon differences. But those were days when Netscape underwent rapid development, and Dad would install the latest coolest version whenever it came out.

The exciting pioneer days of the web also saw the release of Real Player 1.0, introducing streaming audio, which was jumpy and crappy, but still made people back then excited. There were also Quicktime and Shockwave, which provided multimedia interactivity to webpages. A big Q stylized as a clock on a four colored square with the hand turning showed Quicktime loading; while Shockwave had gray vertical bars jumping on the screen (Shockwave later developed into Shockwave Flash, and then Flash).

I was stuck on Netscape when everyone started jumping ship to IE. I stuck with Netscape 4.7 enduring all the crashes just because I am biased against Microsoft. Killing Netscape by bundling IE with Windows was the one unethical act that turned me anti-MS. IE4 & IE5 also had an ugly tool bar, and the more modernized IE6 was at the time only available with Windows XP. I was happy and excited when Netscape 6 finally came out, brand new with new code and a new look. Yet it was even more unstable then 4.7. It took until 6.2 that it became usable and Netscape 7.1 was when it became truly stable. Yet, by then, most of my friends have no idea of the browser wars, and only know of "the big blue e" as the symbol of the web. Yet I was happy to use tabbed browsing and drag-n-drop bookmarking on Netscape 7 while others have no idea how great the non-IE world was.

I jumped from Netscape 7.2 to Firefox 0.7 because of the extensions and themes of Firefox are much easier to manage. It wasn't a painless jump, but as Firefox was developed from Netscape code, and the UI is in a similar logic, it was manageable. And Firefox started the exciting 2nd browser wars that we now know of.

Recent versions of Netscape are slightly modified versions of Firefox, thus there is not much difference. I still have Netscape installed just for nostalgic reasons. But Firefox is my main browser now. It is sad to see the "official end" of Netscape, yet starting from version 6, the main development was shifted to the open source Mozilla project, and the remaining development teem was dismissed after version 7.2. Thus Netscape is nothing left but a brand after version 7.2.

Netscape RIP, yet Firefox is getting better and better.