The Netscape browser turns 10 years old on Wednesday as a shadow of its former self, but the lights haven't gone out yet on one of the most storied brands in Web history.
America Online, which has see-sawed over its pricey
Netscape acquisition for years, is once again readying
the brand for a comeback try, CNET News.com has
learned.
News.context
What's new:
Netscape, the browser that brought the Web to the masses and then virtually disappeared, is 10 years old. Now it's getting ready for an AOL makeover.
Bottom line: Microsoft's dominant IE browser hasn't enjoyed a significant feature update in years, opening up opportunities for small challengers. But AOL will have to fight to keep its faded brand in
the spotlight.
Even so, sources familiar with the plans said the
Time Warner unit is putting the finishing touches on
new versions of the Netscape browser and Web portal.
The company expects to unveil them with a recharged
marketing strategy in December or January.
AOL declined to detail the new Netscape's features,
but sources familiar with the company's plans said
this browser was a distinct effort from the IE-based
release also in the works. AOL also kept mum on
details of the portal or the marketing push beyond
promising a launch near the New Year.
"Netscape continues to be one of the most valued
brands and one of the most valued products on the
Internet," said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein. "And
the Netscape team is working hard to take advantage of
those strong attributes to re-energize the brand and
its products."
Key dates in browser history
March 1993 Marc Andreessen announces the Mosaic browser, written in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Mid-1994
Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen found Mosaic Communications (later Netscape).
July 2003
The Mozilla Foundation is created and AOL spins off Mozilla as an independent foundation.
September 2004
Preview of Mozilla's Firefox 1.0 is released.
Netscape celebrates a decade on the Web this week
amid signs of an unprecedented browser renaissance.
But AOL will have to fight to keep its faded brand in
the spotlight.
Microsoft's dominant IE browser hasn't enjoyed a significant feature update in years, opening up opportunities for small challengers including Netscape progeny Firefox, Opera Software's Opera and Apple Computer's Safari browser.
Even as a glimmer of competition opens up in the browser market, a weakened Netscape could find itself sidelined after years of abuse at the hands of Microsoft and subsequent neglect after AOL agreed to purchase the company for about $5 billion in 1999.
"It certainly was one of the most powerful brands
on the Internet at one point," said Jupiter analyst
Michael Gartenberg. "However, that brand has been
severely tarnished over the last several years. It's
hard to see how they're going to (revitalize the
brand) at a time when there's been such a decline in
terms of consumers' perception of what Netscape is all about."
Microsoft maintains its stranglehold on the browser market. But the company is beginning to feel momentum for change thanks to mounting dissatisfaction with features and severe security problems with IE. Major computer security groups such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team recently recommended Web surfers switch from Microsoft's browser, although some of that criticism has since been blunted with last month's release of a major IE security update for users of Windows XP.
In an intriguing twist, the major catalyst for competition has come not from commercial browser efforts but rather collectives of open-source programmers. Open-source project licenses let others both use the software at no charge and contribute to its development.
Netscape's pioneering Navigator browser turns 10. Read all the stories, and the original press release, and share your thoughts.
Although Netscape gave birth to the most important open-source browser group, Mozilla, AOL has yet to capitalize on Mozilla's recent successes. While Mozilla and its Firefox preview releases win raves, AOL continues to use IE as the default browser for its proprietary online service and as the basis for its planned standalone browser. In recent months AOL has barely promoted Netscape 7, which was based on pre-Firefox versions of Mozilla and most recently updated in August.
Even Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who last year dismissed the state of
browser navigation as "an embarrassment," recently weighed in with praise for Firefox, which he said along with open-source based Safari could threaten IE.
One of Andreessen's cohorts from the early Netscape
days called that wishful thinking, noting that
Microsoft has the resources to defend its browser
dominance should a serious threat ever develop.
"I think it is basically a lost cause," said Jon Mittelhauser, one of Mosaic's five original authors and a founding Netscape engineer. "I keep hearing quotes from people like Marc about how these independent little browsers are going to challenge IE since it is stagnating. I wish them all the best, but I don't think they have learned from the past. Microsoft won that war because they can outspend anyone.
"The browser is not advancing because (Microsoft isn't) being challenged. I hope that someone does start to challenge them just to get Microsoft to invest in the browser again, but nobody could ever actually retake the crown. If Microsoft starts to feel some pressure, they will just crank up the spending again and crush whoever it
is."
Still, given the stasis that has gripped IE for the
past three years, analysts credited Firefox with
reawakening AOL's interest in its browser.
"What's interesting is the real center of gravity
isn't around the Netscape brand anymore," Jupiter's Gartenberg said. "It's about Firefox. Without a doubt, the Firefox stuff has been one of the most interesting things to happen in the browser space since 1999. They may be very well trying to leverage some of that popularity to popularize the brand."
A long plummet If Netscape's decline was precipitous, that's
because it had so far to fall.
Netscape had its seeds in the Mosaic Web browser
created by University of Illinois graduate Andreessen and a small group of others. Unlike the browsers that preceded it, which were used primarily by academics and computer
enthusiasts, Mosaic boasted ease of use for people accustomed to the common Windows and Mac graphical user interfaces.
(Andreessen is sometimes falsely credited with
inventing the Web browser--that distinction belongs to Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.)
When Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark put his
fortune and entrepreneurial energy behind Mosaic, Netscape
Communications was born.
The start-up's meteoric rise was fueled by rapid
adoption of its browser and an apparent lock on a
market that could threaten Microsoft's operating system franchise. That rise reached a climax with Netscape's spectacular initial public offering, which began the inflation of the Internet financial bubble and made multimillionaires out of Netscape's investors, founders and employees.
To hear them tell it, those early employees earned
every penny.
The first order of business for the start-up was to
rewrite the browser from scratch and rename it in
order to avoid intellectual property claims by the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which had sponsored Andreessen and friends' Mosaic efforts.
That rewrite involved the marathon coding sessions
and cubicle sleepovers that have become part of
Silicon Valley lore. Amid knuckle-crunching stress,
chronic sleep deprivation and copious caffeine and sugar abuse, coders credited Andreessen with helping keep up morale as nerves began to fray.
"You need someone like Marc around to overcome the
soul-sucking blackness that sets in when you've agreed
to impossible goals," programmer Jamie Zawinski wrote
in his diary three weeks before the launch. "We've finally
announced a public beta to the Net, and there are loads of bugs, and they're hard bugs, sucky, hardware-dependent ones...We're doomed."
When Oct. 13, 1994, rolled around, Netscape
released a browser that had been rewritten from the
ground up. It would not be the last time.
In terms of its code, the browser that celebrates
its 10th birthday on Wednesday bears little or no
relation to the browser called Netscape today. That's
because once Microsoft caught up to Netscape with
IE--based on technology it acquired from
Spyglass--Netscape found itself at a marketing and
technological disadvantage. Before long, the browser
would have to be rewritten a second time.
While Microsoft's antitrust prosecution at the
hands of the federal government found the company
guilty of abusing its monopoly operating system
position to dominate the browser market at Netscape's
expense, Netscape insiders credit the company's loss in the
browser market to the company's own mistakes both
strategic and technical.
"I think there were definitely instances that
people could hold up and say, here's where Microsoft
was playing unfair," said Netscape founding engineer
Chris Houck, now a programmer for Palo Alto, Calif., high-tech start-up LiveOps. "And in each instance you could also
make a strong argument that here's where the Netscape
guys f***ed up. Given that, it's hard to take a moral
stand on that one way or the other."
Well I don't think I bought the initial release of Netscape, but I believe I have lying around somewhere a floppy version 1.2. I've been using Netscape for a good 9 plus years. While I do use the IE browser for pages that don't open in Netscape, I've never used Outlook Express for my email. I think back on some of the upgrades and versions 3 and 4.7 stand out. Version 6 was horrible and I somehow held onto 4.79 for the longest time before the release of version 7 and subsequent 7.1 and now 7.2. If the new Netscape the scum bags from AOL are touting is dirived in any way shape or form from IE, I'll switch immediately to Firefox and Thunderbird.
AOL can't give up the ghost, can it? Almost no one uses Netscape these days. For years, the browser daddy has been MSIE. Now, people are leaving Internet Explorer in droves and trying out Firefox, and like me, loving it.
Friends are also trying out other browsers and find much to like. Microsoft stopped development of MSIE about three years ago. They stopped developement on Mac MSIE about the same time. Now, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, OmniWeb have stepped up and do a better job.
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The Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 S6500 could make its debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, according to a leaked promotional image.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
Microsoft's dominant IE browser hasn't enjoyed a significant feature update in years, opening up opportunities for small challengers. But AOL will have to fight to keep its faded brand in
the spotlight. 
Netscape these days. For years, the browser daddy has been
MSIE. Now, people are leaving Internet Explorer in droves and
trying out Firefox, and like me, loving it.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/more/" target="_newWindow">http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/more/</a>
netscape_is_10_not_a_10_heres_the_1_browser/
Friends are also trying out other browsers and find much to like.
Microsoft stopped development of MSIE about three years ago.
They stopped developement on Mac MSIE about the same time.
Now, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, OmniWeb have stepped up
and do a better job.