Netscape (web browser)

Netscape
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Netscape_7.2.jpg


Netscape 7.2 under Windows
Developer Netscape Communications Corporation, AOL
Latest release 7.2 / August 17, 2004
OS Cross-platform
Genre Internet suite
License Proprietary
Web site No longer available

Netscape, or Netscape Suite, is a proprietary cross-platform internet suite created by AOL for replacing the outdated Netscape Communicator. In the last version, it consisted of the following major components:

The suite was superseded by Netscape Browser.

Contents
1 History and development

1.1 The rebirth
1.2 The fall
1.3 Release history

2 See also

History and development

The rebirth

In March 1998, realizing that the browser market was lost and hoping that a non-Microsoft web browser might gain some attention in the open source community, Netscape Communications Corporation split off most of the Communicator code and put it under an open source license. The project was dubbed Mozilla. It was estimated that turning the gutted source code (all proprietary elements had to be removed) into a new browser release might take a year, and so it was decided that the next release of the corporate Netscape browser, version 5.0, would be based on it. Netscape assigned its browser development engineers to help with the project.

Later that year it was quite evident that development on Mozilla was not proceeding quickly, so Netscape reassigned some of its engineers to a new Communicator 4.5 release. This had the result of redirecting part of the browser effort into a dead-end branch even while Internet Explorer 5.0 was still building momentum.

The version 5 of the browser was skipped, at the time when Internet Explorer 5.0 had been available for a year and a half. There were plans to release an almost-ready version 5.0 based on the 4.x codebase, but this idea was scrapped. The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and start over from scratch. All resources were bound to work on the Mozilla-based Netscape 6.0 release, which some Netscape employees still deem one of the bigger mistakes in the company's history.

The first public builds of Mozilla two years later were rather disappointing, with many mid-level PCs too slow to run the bloated browser (which used its own custom set of graphical user interface widgets and had a customizable UI built in a custom XML dialect known as XUL). With much fanfare, Netscape's new owners AOL released version 6 on November 14, 2000, based on pre-release Mozilla code. The product was a colossal disappointment: it was huge, slow, unstable, and (in the eyes of most) visually unappealing. None of this was surprising, as the Mozilla core itself was nowhere near release-ready and itself unstable.

Versions 6.1 and 6.2, released in 2001, addressed the stability problems but were still large and slow, which could not overcome Netscape 6's bad reputation. They were generally ignored by the market.

In 2002, AOL released version 7.0. It was based on a more stable and notably faster Mozilla 1.0 core and bundled with extras like integrated AOL Instant Messenger, integrated ICQ, and Radio@Netscape. The market responded to what was essentially a repackaged version of Mozilla – swollen with integrated tools to access proprietary services owned by AOL – by ignoring it. Competition from mature and competent non-Microsoft alternatives such as the Opera browser and the regular Mozilla distribution was a major factor. A point release of version 7.1 (based on Mozilla 1.4) was similarly ignored.

The fall

On the Windows platform, the Netscape suite has long since become irrelevant. There are still some users of recent versions, but most of them are people who are unwilling or unable to switch from the outdated and crash-prone 4.x versions, since the newer browsers generally require more powerful machines for decent performance. On other platforms which do not have Internet Explorer bundled (such as Linux), the Mozilla suite was often used instead of Netscape. The rise of alternatives like Mozilla Firefox and Konqueror also given it strong competition.

AOL announced on July 15, 2003 that it was laying off all its remaining development staff working on the Netscape version of Mozilla. Combined with AOL's antitrust case court settlement with Microsoft to use Internet Explorer in future versions of the AOL software, this seemed to mark the effective end of development on Netscape Navigator, the open source projects not withstanding. Many believed that no further versions of the browser would be released and that the Netscape brand name would live on only as the name of AOL's low-cost dialup internet service.

Netscape 7.2 was released on August 17, 2004, though AOL is not re-starting the Netscape browser division. It was very similar to Netscape 7.1 and the only new feature in it was the Netscape Toolbar, which was developed by mozdev.org.

Release history

See also

See also: Netscape (web browser), 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, AOL Instant Messenger, Address book