AOL Buries Netscape Browser Next Year
America Online (AOL) announced that it would no longer support its Netscape Internet browser as of February 1 citing a declining share of the browser market.AOL will continue to release security patches for the most recent version of Netscape until February 1. After that, there will be no “active product support” for any version of the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape was the original mass-market Web browser and helped to popularize the Internet in the mid-1990s, but it has long taken a back seat to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.Firefox itself traces its roots back to Netscape software that was made into open source. The Mozilla Foundation was founded in 2003, with support from AOL, and has released successive versions of Firefox while AOL continued to develop Netscape on top of the same platform. While once commanding 90 percent of the browser market, Netscape Navigator now accounts for less than 1 percent, and AOL had no interest in spending what it would take to revive the brand. Instead, the company, which was once a subscriber-supported portal, preferred to spend its resources on its transition into an ad-supported Web business. The change left “little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” wrote Tom Drapeau, director of development, in a Netscape blog post.Netscape will still be available for download from the Netscape Archive, but no support will be offered. AOL recommended that users instead download Firefox and add the Netscape theme and Netscape extensions.
