RIP Netscape
Earlier today, the Netscape group at AOL announced that they were going to shut down their development work.
Perhaps the largest of AOL's acquisitions was the 1999 acquisition of the Netscape Communications Corporation. (If you don't include the purchase of Time Warner.) Netscape was the original Internet browser and had been developed into a suite of tools for Internet development and even included an e-mail program.
Of course, at the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla. AOL launched the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that in 2000. In 2003, an independent foundation was created to support the continued development of Mozilla. AOL also continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation.
The Netscape group decided that it should cease production and support the Mozilla Foundation in development of FireFox.
An era has truly ended. In my mind, it was Netscape's announcement that it would one day replace Windows as the computer system interface that the got Microsoft's attention and caused them to react in such away that they caused Netscape to loose the influence that they had. It proves that Apple is correct in keeping its projects unwraps until the last possible moment. (Of course Osborn was the original example of pre announcing too early.)
See the full announcement here.
here.
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