The Browser Wars Loses a Player

A once mighty competitor has decided to go into oblivion. Since just after its first release in October 1994 Netscape has been a household word in the computing world. At one point in time it commanded at least 80% market share.

Netscape was and is merely a teenager, just 14 years old and has now seen its last release. The final release distributed is 9.0.0.6 and will no longer be supported after May 1, 2008.

A little background:

Born in 1994 as Mosaic it became Netscape and was sold to AOL for around $9 billion dollars. By the time Internet Explorer and Netscape had reached the fourth generation it started losing market share. Today the market share of Netscape is less than 1%.

As of July 2003 AOL Mozilla (Mosaic and Netscape based browser) was allowed to become independent and Mozilla became an open source project into a non-profit organization. Since then Mozilla has become an active player in the browser wars.

As a web designer, one of the activities that I perform when building a web site is to make sure the web site views the same in a variety of web browsers. Now I won’t have to be testing with Netscape any more. I’ll still be testing with FireFox (Mozilla), Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

It’s time to bid a fond farewell to an application that allowed for the every day internet user and lay person to enjoy the experience of surfing the web.

Darrell Mishler

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