AOL Ends Netscape

(TheForceField.net ) December 28, 2007 — AOL, LLC announced today that it will end development of Netscape Navigator. According to the company's blog Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape's browser development, stated that development on the broswer would end as of February 1, 2008.

AOL purchased Netscape in 1999 during the height of the browser wars, when the two biggest browsers with the most market share were Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Microsoft quickly took market share away from Netscape and within a short time AOL's browser took a back seat to IE.

In 2003 AOL created the Mozilla foundation to continue support for Navigator and was its largest contributor.

This year AOL announced a major change in its business model, moving away from a subscription based platform to an advertising based company. According to Drapeau, dropping support for Netscape is a result of the transition.

"AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be.", Drapeau wrote in the blog. "Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.", he said.

Drapeau said Netscape would continue to release security patches for the browser until February 1. After that date support for Navigator will end. He added that although Navigator will no longer be supported, the web site www.netscape.com "will still continue to serve as a general use Internet portal".

Reaction from the Netscape community was one of resignation. "This is very sad!" one Netscape forum poster with the handle of "egnsln" said. Another known as "UncleDuck" said "I was somewhat brokenhearted when AOL did buy Netscape as I expected the demise of a great product.  NN9 changed my opinion on that.  Guess my mind-changing was a bit premature.  It's really sad that AOL won't promote a product that they actually own." Other posters agreed.

Drapeau encouraged users to contact Mozilla and move to Firefox in the future.

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