Netscape Navigator
Encyclopedia
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary
web browser
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s.
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
and Netscape
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
.
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
and a student at the University of Illinois
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
and there met Jim Clark
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
Netscape announced in its first press release (October 13, 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and Beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were indeed freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994. Netscape's initial corporate policy regarding Navigator is interesting, as it claimed that it would make Navigator freely available for non-commercial use in accordance with the notion that Internet software should be distributed for free.
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
, which became the name of a Godzilla
-like cartoon dragon mascot
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
successor to Netscape Communicator.
When the consumer Internet
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
standard, particularly on the Windows
platform. Internet service provider
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies
, frames, proxy auto-config
, and JavaScript
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
s, including Windows (3.1
, 95
, 98
, NT
), Macintosh, Linux
, OS/2
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
, IRIX
, AIX, and HP-UX
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
With the success of Netscape showing the importance of the web (more and more people were using the Internet due in part to the ease of using Netscape) Microsoft then saw a new profitable market they could take over. Anti-Microsoft banter and talk of Netscape Constellation eliminating the operating system further forced Microsoft's hand. Following Netscape's lead, Microsoft started a campaign to enter the web browser software market. Like Netscape before them, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. (University of Illinois). Using this basic code, Microsoft created Internet Explorer
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
) and IE, Version 2.0
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
There were two versions of Netscape Navigator 3.0; the Standard Edition and the Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with e-mail, news readers, and a WYSIWYG
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
At decade's end, Netscape's web browser had lost dominance over the Windows platform. On other computer platforms, it was threatened by open-source browsers, and the August 1997 Microsoft financial agreement to invest one hundred and fifty million dollars in Apple
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
layout engine
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
and Thunderbird
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008. Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary
web browser
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's Brief History Retrieved on 02-16-2009
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
and Netscape
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
.
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
and a student at the University of Illinois
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
and there met Jim Clark
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
Netscape announced in its first press release (October 13, 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and Beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were indeed freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994. Netscape's initial corporate policy regarding Navigator is interesting, as it claimed that it would make Navigator freely available for non-commercial use in accordance with the notion that Internet software should be distributed for free.AOL.com - Netscape
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.AOL.com - Netscape
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
, which became the name of a Godzilla
-like cartoon dragon mascot
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
successor to Netscape Communicator.
When the consumer Internet
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
standard, particularly on the Windows
platform. Internet service provider
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies
, frames, proxy auto-config
, and JavaScript
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
s, including Windows (3.1
, 95
, 98
, NT
), Macintosh, Linux
, OS/2
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
, IRIX
, AIX, and HP-UX
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
With the success of Netscape showing the importance of the web (more and more people were using the Internet due in part to the ease of using Netscape) Microsoft then saw a new profitable market they could take over. Anti-Microsoft banter and talk of Netscape Constellation eliminating the operating system further forced Microsoft's hand. Following Netscape's lead, Microsoft started a campaign to enter the web browser software market. Like Netscape before them, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. (University of Illinois). Using this basic code, Microsoft created Internet Explorer
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
) and IE, Version 2.0
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
There were two versions of Netscape Navigator 3.0; the Standard Edition and the Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with e-mail, news readers, and a WYSIWYG
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
At decade's end, Netscape's web browser had lost dominance over the Windows platform. On other computer platforms, it was threatened by open-source browsers, and the August 1997 Microsoft financial agreement to invest one hundred and fifty million dollars in Apple
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
layout engine
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
and Thunderbird
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008.BBC News Article retrieved 29th February 2008 Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary
web browser
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's Brief History Retrieved on 02-16-2009
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
and Netscape
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
.
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
and a student at the University of Illinois
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
and there met Jim Clark
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
Netscape announced in its first press release (October 13, 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and Beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were indeed freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994. Netscape's initial corporate policy regarding Navigator is interesting, as it claimed that it would make Navigator freely available for non-commercial use in accordance with the notion that Internet software should be distributed for free.AOL.com - Netscape
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.AOL.com - Netscape
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
, which became the name of a Godzilla
-like cartoon dragon mascot
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
successor to Netscape Communicator.
When the consumer Internet
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
standard, particularly on the Windows
platform. Internet service provider
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies
, frames, proxy auto-config
, and JavaScript
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
s, including Windows (3.1
, 95
, 98
, NT
), Macintosh, Linux
, OS/2
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
, IRIX
, AIX, and HP-UX
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
With the success of Netscape showing the importance of the web (more and more people were using the Internet due in part to the ease of using Netscape) Microsoft then saw a new profitable market they could take over. Anti-Microsoft banter and talk of Netscape Constellation eliminating the operating system further forced Microsoft's hand. Following Netscape's lead, Microsoft started a campaign to enter the web browser software market. Like Netscape before them, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. (University of Illinois). Using this basic code, Microsoft created Internet Explorer
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
) and IE, Version 2.0
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
There were two versions of Netscape Navigator 3.0; the Standard Edition and the Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with e-mail, news readers, and a WYSIWYG
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
At decade's end, Netscape's web browser had lost dominance over the Windows platform. On other computer platforms, it was threatened by open-source browsers, and the August 1997 Microsoft financial agreement to invest one hundred and fifty million dollars in Apple
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
layout engine
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
and Thunderbird
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008.BBC News Article retrieved 29th February 2008 Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
From version 6 the name became "Netscape" dropping the "Navigator" portion from the title.
Version 9 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
As per official announcement: "Official support ended on March 1st, 2008"
, most often with Netscape Navigator 4 and Netscape Communicator, to their web sites. Today, many web developers simply do not choose to support these old versions, due to their extremely small market share and lack of standardization as well as not being able to run on current machines.
Netscape's own contributions to the web of this sort haven't always been of frustration to web developers. JavaScript
(which has little to do with Java
) was, for example, submitted as a new standard to Ecma International
, resulting in the ECMAScript
specification. This move allowed it to be more easily supported by multiple web browsers and is today an established cross-browser
scripting language, long after Netscape Navigator itself has dropped in popularity. Another example is the FRAME tag, that is also widely supported today, and even ended up becoming incorporated into official web standards such as the "HTML 4.01 Frameset" specification.
In a 2007 PC World
column, the original Netscape Navigator was considered the "best tech product of all time" due to its impact on the Internet.PC World - The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
Flagship
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag...
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s.
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Netscape
Netscape (web browser)
Netscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
.
The creation
Netscape Navigator was based on the MosaicMosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...
and a student at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and there met Jim Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
Mozilla (mascot)
Mozilla was the mascot of the now disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation.Mozilla takes the form of a green and purple cartoon lizard. Programmer Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. Mozilla was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.The name "Mozilla"...
, which became the name of a Godzilla
Godzilla
is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
-like cartoon dragon mascot
Mascot
The term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
successor to Netscape Communicator.
The rise of Netscape
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
standard, particularly on the Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
platform. Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
Dial-up access
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a dialled connection to an Internet service provider via telephone lines...
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
HTTP cookie
A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
, frames, proxy auto-config
Proxy auto-config
A proxy auto-config file defines how web browsers and other user agents can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server for fetching a given URL....
, and JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s, including Windows (3.1
Windows 3.1x
Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...
, 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
, NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
), Macintosh, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, OS/2
OS/2
OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
Berkeley Software Design
Berkeley Software Design Inc. was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS , a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems...
, IRIX
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
, AIX, and HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
The fall of Netscape
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
Browser wars
Browser wars is a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during...
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
Internet Explorer 1
Internet Explorer 1.0 is a graphical web browser that made its debut from Microsoft on August 16, 1995. It was a reworked version of Spyglass Mosaic which Microsoft had licensed, like many other companies initiating browser development, from Spyglass Inc. It came with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95...
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
) and IE, Version 2.0
Internet Explorer 2
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 is a graphical web browser released on November 22, 1995 by Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT and in April 1996 for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1....
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
Internet Explorer 3
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 is a graphical web browser released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS . It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war...
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
Internet Explorer 4
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 was a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. It was one of the main participants of the first browser war...
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale was the president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corporation from January 1995 until the company merged with AOL in March 1999.-Early life:...
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
Crash (computing)
A crash in computing is a condition where a computer or a program, either an application or part of the operating system, ceases to function properly, often exiting after encountering errors. Often the offending program may appear to freeze or hang until a crash reporting service documents...
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
Brandable software
Brandable software is typically software created by one company for the purpose of allowing other companies to obtain resell rights or giveaway rights to the software, change the brand associated with it, and sell it as if it were their own...
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
Gecko (layout engine)
Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....
layout engine
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008. Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
Release history
- Mosaic Netscape 0.9 – October 13, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.0 – December 15, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.1 – March 1995
- Netscape Navigator 1.22 – August 1995
- Netscape Navigator 2.0 – March 1996
- Netscape Navigator 2.01 – March 18, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 2.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.0 – August 19, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 3.01
- Netscape Navigator 3.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.03
- Netscape Navigator 3.04 – October 4, 1997
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
Flagship
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag...
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's Brief History Retrieved on 02-16-2009
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Netscape
Netscape (web browser)
Netscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
.
The creation
Netscape Navigator was based on the MosaicMosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...
and a student at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and there met Jim Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.AOL.com - Netscape
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
Mozilla (mascot)
Mozilla was the mascot of the now disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation.Mozilla takes the form of a green and purple cartoon lizard. Programmer Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. Mozilla was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.The name "Mozilla"...
, which became the name of a Godzilla
Godzilla
is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
-like cartoon dragon mascot
Mascot
The term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
successor to Netscape Communicator.
The rise of Netscape
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
standard, particularly on the Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
platform. Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
Dial-up access
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a dialled connection to an Internet service provider via telephone lines...
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
HTTP cookie
A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
, frames, proxy auto-config
Proxy auto-config
A proxy auto-config file defines how web browsers and other user agents can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server for fetching a given URL....
, and JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s, including Windows (3.1
Windows 3.1x
Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...
, 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
, NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
), Macintosh, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, OS/2
OS/2
OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
Berkeley Software Design
Berkeley Software Design Inc. was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS , a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems...
, IRIX
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
, AIX, and HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
The fall of Netscape
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
Browser wars
Browser wars is a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during...
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
Internet Explorer 1
Internet Explorer 1.0 is a graphical web browser that made its debut from Microsoft on August 16, 1995. It was a reworked version of Spyglass Mosaic which Microsoft had licensed, like many other companies initiating browser development, from Spyglass Inc. It came with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95...
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
) and IE, Version 2.0
Internet Explorer 2
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 is a graphical web browser released on November 22, 1995 by Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT and in April 1996 for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1....
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
Internet Explorer 3
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 is a graphical web browser released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS . It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war...
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
Internet Explorer 4
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 was a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. It was one of the main participants of the first browser war...
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale was the president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corporation from January 1995 until the company merged with AOL in March 1999.-Early life:...
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
Crash (computing)
A crash in computing is a condition where a computer or a program, either an application or part of the operating system, ceases to function properly, often exiting after encountering errors. Often the offending program may appear to freeze or hang until a crash reporting service documents...
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
Brandable software
Brandable software is typically software created by one company for the purpose of allowing other companies to obtain resell rights or giveaway rights to the software, change the brand associated with it, and sell it as if it were their own...
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
Gecko (layout engine)
Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....
layout engine
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008.BBC News Article retrieved 29th February 2008 Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
Release history
- Mosaic Netscape 0.9 – October 13, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.0 – December 15, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.1 – March 1995
- Netscape Navigator 1.22 – August 1995
- Netscape Navigator 2.0 – March 1996holgermetzger.de
- Netscape Navigator 2.01 – March 18, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 2.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.0 – August 19, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 3.01
- Netscape Navigator 3.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.03
- Netscape Navigator 3.04 – October 4, 1997
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship
Flagship
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag...
product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's Brief History Retrieved on 02-16-2009
The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.
The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, which was later renamed SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Netscape
Netscape (web browser)
Netscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...
versions 6 through 9.
AOL formally stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008, when AOL canceled technical support. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. Moreover, AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
.
The creation
Netscape Navigator was based on the MosaicMosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...
, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...
and a student at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and there met Jim Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...
, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.
However, within 2 months of that press release, Netscape apparently reversed its policy on who could freely obtain and use version 1.0 by only mentioning that educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.AOL.com - Netscape
The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on March 6, 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use. Gone was the notion expressed in the first press release that Navigator would be freely available in the spirit of Internet software. Some security experts and cryptographer found out that all released Netscape versions had major security problems with crashing the browser with long URLs and 40 bits encryption keys.
The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.
During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla
Mozilla (mascot)
Mozilla was the mascot of the now disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation.Mozilla takes the form of a green and purple cartoon lizard. Programmer Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. Mozilla was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.The name "Mozilla"...
, which became the name of a Godzilla
Godzilla
is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
-like cartoon dragon mascot
Mascot
The term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...
used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
is now a generic name for matters related to the open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
successor to Netscape Communicator.
The rise of Netscape
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
revolution arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s, Netscape was well positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
standard, particularly on the Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
platform. Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.
An important innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this often made a user stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up
Dial-up access
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a dialled connection to an Internet service provider via telephone lines...
connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.
HTTP cookie
A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
, frames, proxy auto-config
Proxy auto-config
A proxy auto-config file defines how web browsers and other user agents can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server for fetching a given URL....
, and JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
(in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.
In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share
Usage share of web browsers
The usage share of a web browser is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser. This figure can only be estimated, typically by determining the proportion of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser...
. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s, including Windows (3.1
Windows 3.1x
Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...
, 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
, NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
), Macintosh, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, OS/2
OS/2
OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
, and many versions of Unix including DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, Sun Solaris, BSDI
Berkeley Software Design
Berkeley Software Design Inc. was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS , a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems...
, IRIX
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
, AIX, and HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.
Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
The fall of Netscape
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
(IE).
The war between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the Browser Wars
Browser wars
Browser wars is a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during...
. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0
Internet Explorer 1
Internet Explorer 1.0 is a graphical web browser that made its debut from Microsoft on August 16, 1995. It was a reworked version of Spyglass Mosaic which Microsoft had licensed, like many other companies initiating browser development, from Spyglass Inc. It came with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95...
(shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
) and IE, Version 2.0
Internet Explorer 2
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 is a graphical web browser released on November 22, 1995 by Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT and in April 1996 for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1....
(the first cross platform web browser supporting Windows and Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0
Internet Explorer 3
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 is a graphical web browser released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS . It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war...
(1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0
Internet Explorer 4
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
(1997) further improving in terms of market share. IE 5.0
Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 was a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. It was one of the main participants of the first browser war...
(1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
web page compositor; however these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.
This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator
Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale
Jim Barksdale was the president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corporation from January 1995 until the company merged with AOL in March 1999.-Early life:...
insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose client application, which contained the Navigator browser.
The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x code was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone
Crash (computing)
A crash in computing is a condition where a computer or a program, either an application or part of the operating system, ceases to function properly, often exiting after encountering errors. Often the offending program may appear to freeze or hang until a crash reporting service documents...
and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
. Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
, requiring that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.
Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable
Brandable software
Brandable software is typically software created by one company for the purpose of allowing other companies to obtain resell rights or giveaway rights to the software, change the brand associated with it, and sell it as if it were their own...
, such that a customized version of IE was offered. Also, web developers used proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape were found guilty of supporting this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. The product, Netscape 5, used open-source community contributions, and was known as Mozilla
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, Netscape Navigator's original code name. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI, releasing it as Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko
Gecko (layout engine)
Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....
layout engine
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
.
However, these web browsers took years to yield results. Meanwhile, America Online had bought Netscape, and released Netscape Navigator 6 from a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008.BBC News Article retrieved 29th February 2008 Despite this, archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.
Release history
- Mosaic Netscape 0.9 – October 13, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.0 – December 15, 1994
- Netscape Navigator 1.1 – March 1995
- Netscape Navigator 1.22 – August 1995
- Netscape Navigator 2.0 – March 1996holgermetzger.de
- Netscape Navigator 2.01 – March 18, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 2.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.0 – August 19, 1996
- Netscape Navigator 3.01
- Netscape Navigator 3.02
- Netscape Navigator 3.03
- Netscape Navigator 3.04 – October 4, 1997
- Netscape Navigator 4.0 – June 1997
- Netscape Navigator 4.01
- Netscape Navigator 4.02
- Netscape Navigator 4.03
- Netscape Navigator 4.04
- Netscape Navigator 4.05
- Netscape Navigator 4.06 – August 17, 1998
- Netscape Navigator 4.07
- Netscape Navigator 4.08 – November 9, 1998
- Netscape Navigator 4.78 –
- Netscape Navigator 4.79
From version 6 the name became "Netscape" dropping the "Navigator" portion from the title.
- Netscape 6.00
- Netscape 6.01
- Netscape 6.1
- Netscape 6.2
- Netscape 6.2.1
- Netscape 6.2.2
- Netscape 6.2.3
- Netscape 7.00
- Netscape 7.01
- Netscape 7.02
- Netscape 7.1
- Netscape 7.2
- Netscape 8.0.2
- Netscape 8.0.3.3
- Netscape 8.0.4
- Netscape 8.1
- Netscape 8.1.2
- Netscape 8.1.3
Version 9 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Netscape 9.0
- Netscape 9.0.0.1
- Netscape 9.0.0.2
- Netscape 9.0.0.3
- Netscape 9.0.0.4
- Netscape 9.0.0.5
- Netscape 9.0.0.6 – Last Official Release.
As per official announcement: "Official support ended on March 1st, 2008"
Criticism
Netscape has been criticized for not meeting then-current web standards, often lagging behind or supporting them very poorly or even incorrectly. This criticism wasn't very loud during the days of its popularity as web designers then often simply developed for Netscape Navigator, but came to be an increasing annoyance to web designers who wish to provide backward compatibilityBackward compatibility
In the context of telecommunications and computing, a device or technology is said to be backward or downward compatible if it can work with input generated by an older device...
, most often with Netscape Navigator 4 and Netscape Communicator, to their web sites. Today, many web developers simply do not choose to support these old versions, due to their extremely small market share and lack of standardization as well as not being able to run on current machines.
Netscape's own contributions to the web of this sort haven't always been of frustration to web developers. JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
(which has little to do with Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
) was, for example, submitted as a new standard to Ecma International
Ecma International
Ecma International is an international, private non-profit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities...
, resulting in the ECMAScript
ECMAScript
ECMAScript is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web, in the form of several well-known dialects such as JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript.- History :JavaScript...
specification. This move allowed it to be more easily supported by multiple web browsers and is today an established cross-browser
Cross-browser
Cross-browser refers to the ability for a website, web application, HTML construct or client-side script to support all the web browsers. The term cross-browser is often confused with multi-browser...
scripting language, long after Netscape Navigator itself has dropped in popularity. Another example is the FRAME tag, that is also widely supported today, and even ended up becoming incorporated into official web standards such as the "HTML 4.01 Frameset" specification.
In a 2007 PC World
PC World (magazine)
PC World is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal-technology products and services...
column, the original Netscape Navigator was considered the "best tech product of all time" due to its impact on the Internet.PC World - The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
See also
- Browser timelineBrowser timelineA time line of web browsers from the early 1990s to the present. Prior to browsers, many technologies and systems existed for information viewing and transmission...
- Comparison of web browsersComparison of web browsersThe following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.-Historical web browsers:...
- List of web browsers
- NetscapeNetscapeNetscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
- MosaicMosaic (web browser)Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
- MozillaMozillaMozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
- Lou MontulliLou MontulliLouis J. Montulli II is a programmer who is well known for his work in producing web browsers. In 1991 and 1992 he co-authored a text web browser called Lynx with Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac while he was at the University of Kansas...