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Netscape is dead, Long live Mozilla!
It looks like AOL finally knifed Netscape. This is not surprising in the least but it is really damn depressing.
AOL purchased Netscape a while ago but they never really supported them to their fullest. AOL squandered Netscape and wasted potential in regaining the browser market from Microsoft. AOL laid off the fifty programmers who were working on the Netscape web browser and the open source Mozilla project. They said they are going to keep around the Netscape name but are only going to use the brand name on the portal that will shrink over time.
Netscape was the Dot-com revolution and this truly is the end of a era. Netscape was the first internet company to have a massively successful IPO and they made the first commercial Internet Web Browser based on Mosaic the first web browser ever. Now I know people who made web pages for Netscape and I hope that his is going to be able to move to another group in the company.
Now this does not kill Mozilla and the project will continue as planned under the support of a newly formed non-profit Mozilla Foundation and the open source community as a whole. Mozilla is tied to Linux at the hip. Mozilla is the major browser for every distribution of Unix except for Mac OSX. Sun, IBM and Redhat have pledged support to the new non-profit organization. This might be a major delay for the next version of Mozilla but loosing AOL as a sugar daddy will not destroy the project.
Mozilla is a browser designed with standard compliance from the ground up. Hopefully with the commercial demise of Netscape will not cause web developers to turn away from cross platform and browser independent web standards.
Hopefully the good news to come out of this is that the ten remaining Netscape 4.0 users can finally upgrade their browsers and there will be no excuse to avoid CSS based designs. My father was one of those hard core Netscape 4.0 users and last year I upgraded him to Mozilla and all is well.
In retrospect you can't blame the commercial decision to end Netscape on Microsoft for this one for the forced bundling and vendor intimidation. If AOL based their client on the Mozilla technology they could have actually gotten by with not relying on Microsoft for anything but the OS. On a side note AOL for Mac OSX is based on the Netscape Mozilla core. This whole thing is no big surprise now that AOL and Microsoft have settled their legal battle over the whole anti-trust browser war fight. Steve Balmer and company are cutting some pretty big checks for $750 million to make sure that things are cool between AOL and Microsoft. You think that AOL would be putting more in the pot to get the Mozilla Foundation on their own than $2 Million and keeping $748 million for themselves.
If you look at the alliance that Netscape made with Sun back in version 2.0 of Netscape they sort of struck first at Microsoft claiming that $500 network computers were going to make operating systems platforms obsolete and put Microsoft out of business. I am still waiting for that to happen and for Java to change the world. And while I am ranting would a web browser for Xbox and Playstation 2 kill you people? I mean the damn Sega Dreamcast had one? Ah well, moving on.
I can go on all night on really good open source projects that are just as good as commercial programs. Open Office, Apache, MAME, GIMP, GAIM and Linux still doing fine. I guess we all knew that AOL would stop putting money into Netscape at some point. Luckily there is a world wide community of open source developers who love this program as much as I do.
To sum things up Netscape is dead, long live Mozilla.
Jake at July 18, 2003 
WebDev
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Comments
Come to think of it, I installed a copy of NS4 for a couple a few years ago. Silly me. ^_^;;
I might talk to them 2morrow and convince them to upgrade.
Posted by: Matt at July 18, 2003 3:02 PM
