RIP: AOL Buries Netscape Navigator
Remember the early days of the WWW? There were a handful of browsers. I remember starting with Mosaic, but ended up moving on to Netscape Navigator. Most early web users did.
In 1998, AOL purchased Netscape Communications for $4.2 billion, what was at that point a major moment in the web explosion.
Netscape also prompted the creation and free inclusion of Internet Explorer into Windows, which led to an anti-trust suit that Microsoft eventually had to settle.
But times have changed. Now, Time Warner is looking to sell off AOL and AOL is killing off Netscape.
The browser, which made it up to version 9 earlier this year, has not been able to take on Internet Explorer or Firefox in recent years. In fact, it had basically been reduced to a stripped-down version of Firefox that is co-branded with AOL. Presently, only 0.6% of all web users utilize Navigator.
There was an attempt to make the Navigator into a Digg-esqe clone, but that venture has since been renamed Propeller.
Technorati Tags: netscape, aol, mosaic, firefox, propeller, time warner
