Netscape Help: Netscape Composer

Netscape Composer was a WYSIWYG HTML editor initially developed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1997, and packaged as part of the Netscape Communicator, Netscape and Netscape 7 range of Internet suites. In addition, Composer can also view and edit HTML code, preview pages in Netscape Navigator, check spelling, publish websites and most major formatting support.

It was initially developed by Netscape as a component of its internet suites, however after the company was bought by AOL in 1998, further development of it’s codebase was made open-source and overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Subsequent releases of Netscape Composer were based upon Mozilla Composer, the same utility within the Mozilla Application Suite.

The last version of Netscape Composer was released with the Netscape 7.2 suite. It did not feature in later releases as Mozilla decided to focus on stand-alone applications, and as such Netscape released the stand-alone browser, Netscape Browser 8 in 2005 and Netscape Navigator 9 in 2007, both based upon the stand-alone Mozilla Firefox.