Yesterday, something happened on the internet that was historic, yet, hardly anyone noticed. A web browser, one of the very first, died a very quietly in a corner with very few friends. Netscape, one of the first browsers that you could buy at a computer store, has finally ceased to exist after AOL decided to finally cut off the leg that twitched a little too much.
When AOL first bought Netscape, they had to pay extra money to the developers that where still there when they officially took over - they begged them to stay. At first news of the buyout, the Netscape development team abandoned ship faster than a horde of rats could. No one wanted to work for AOL, and in my opinion, rightly so. During it’s peak, Netscape had roughly 90% of the browser market. Lately, it had less than 1%. The cultures between AOL and the Netscape team where far worse than Night and Day…
Netscape’s loss isn’t something to cry over. AOL did something very smart by allowing code from Netscape to move into the Mozilla project, which in turn, helped Firefox. Oddly, Mozilla’s code replaced the actual Netscape code and, since the project was so young, it was very buggy. Soon after, Netscape’s market share started to dive. Netscape was also betrayed by AOL since it was used as a bargaining chip in a lawsuit. After AOL got paid more than $700 Million from Microsoft and a 7 year license to redistribute IE without fees, Netscape started to die, very quickly. There was no need to keep working on it - Firefox was coming to light, AOL got a free IE and they profited from the anti-trust lawsuit.
All this history of a browser that, I’m willing to say, half the people on the Internet have never heard of. Ask a kid what Netscape is - they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. Want to really throw someone through a loop? What’s Mosaic?
