Microsoft saw Netscape's success as a clear threat to the dominant status of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It began a wide-reaching campaign to establish control over the browser market. Browser market share, it was reasoned, leads to control over internet standards, and that in turn would provide the opportunity to sell software and services. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc., an offshoot of the University of Illinois, and turned it into Internet Explorer.
The resulting battle between the two companies became known as the browser wars. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of IE were vastly inferior in almost every way to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator; IE 3.0 (1996) began to catch up to its competition; IE 4.0 (1997) was the first version that looked to have Netscape beaten although it did not overtake Netscape. With IE 5.0 (1999), with many bug fixes and stability improvements, that saw Navigator's marketshare plummet below IE for the first time.
Netscape 3.04
Netscape Navigator 3.0 came in two versions, Standard Edition and Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with mail and news readers and a web page WYSIWYG composition tool integrated into it. The extra functionality only made the software program larger, slower, and more prone to crashes, and the decision to integrate all these features together was widely criticized. But this integrated version became the only version when it was renamed Netscape Communicator in version 4.0; the product's name change (Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale insisted that Communicator was a general-purpose client application which contained the Navigator browser) diluted its name recognition and confused users.
Netscape Navigator 4.07
The aging Communicator 4.x code could not keep up with Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become graphics-heavy, often JavaScript-intensive, and were constructed with increasingly complex HTML code that used features designed for specific narrow purposes but redeployed them as global layout tools (in particular this applied to HTML tables, which Communicator struggled to render). The Netscape browser, once regarded as a reasonably solid product, came to be seen as crash-prone and buggy. It didn't help that some versions of it tended to re-download an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was resized, a considerable nuisance to dial-up users, and would usually crash when the page contained anything but the most simple Cascading Style Sheets. In addition, the browser's somewhat dated-looking interface didn't have the modern appearance of Internet Explorer.
By the end of the decade, Netscape's web browser had unquestionably lost its former dominance on the Windows platform. Even on other platforms it was threatened, both by the gradual rise of open source browsers and by the August 1997 agreement that resulted in an investment of $150,000,000 by Microsoft in Apple, which included a requirement that Apple switch the default browser in new installations of Mac OS from Netscape to Internet Explorer. The latest IE mac release at the time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but IE4 was released later that year. Of greatest significance, though, was Microsoft's massive and ultimately successful campaign to get ISPs and PC vendors to distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape. This was helped in part by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable, such that it was a quick operation to create a customized version of IE. Also, web developers increasingly used proprietary, browser-specific extensions in the web pages they wrote. Both Microsoft and Netscape were guilty of this behavior, having added substantial proprietary HTML tags of their own into their browsers, the result of which was that users were forced to choose between two competing, almost entirely incompatible web browsers.
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for Communicator under an open source license. The product named Netscape 5, which was intended to be the result, was never released, as managers decided that the poor quality of Netscape's code made a complete rewrite their only viable option. This product, taking growing contributions from the open-source community, was dubbed Mozilla, once the codename of the original Netscape Navigator. Netscape programmers gave Mozilla a different GUI and released it as Netscape 6 and later Netscape 7. After a lengthy public beta, Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002. The same code base, most notably the Gecko layout engine, became the basis of several standalone applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird.
These products, however, suffered from a protracted development process that took several years to provide results, in the meantime America Online had bought out Netscape and released Netscape 6 from a pre-beta quality build of the open source Mozilla browser. As a result, many users continued to migrate to Internet Explorer, and the Netscape browser itself has largely been abandoned.
On December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL has canceled development for Netscape Navigator and as of February 1, 2008 is unsupported. After then, archived and unsupported versions of the browser will be available for download.
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The rise of Netscape
Netscape Browser – The Creation
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End of Support for Netscape web browsers
