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Requiem for a browser: Netscape Navigator 1993-2008 RIP

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4th Jan 2008
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In the week between Christmas and New Year, AOL quietly announced that it was abandoning support for Netscape Navigator, the browser that kick-started the web revolution. John Stokdyk reports.

Netscape Communications was a Silicon Valley start-up that took on commercial development of the Mosaic browser originally developed in the early 1990s by Eric Bina and Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Andreessen was recruited in 1993 by Silicon Graphics founder and former Stanford University professor Jim Clark to set up Netscape, which distributed the revamped Netscape Navigator free over the web to gain almost immediate domination of the browser market. Netscape's business model was based on the idea that once everyone was surfing the web with Navigator, it would sell server and authoring tools to corporations and website developers.

Then Microsoft entered the market with Internet Explorer. By copying Navigator's functionality and free distribution model, Microsoft 's eventually succeeded in its ambition to "kill" Netscape - triggering an expensive anti-trust suit by US regulators.

The online community AOL acquired Netscape in 1999, and subsequently merged with Time Warner in 2001. Within such a huge media empire, focus turned away from the browser and server products, leaving the way open for Microsoft and the open source Firefox browser developed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

Netscape staffer Tom Drapeau explained in the company's blog on 28 December: "AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox."

As a result, he added, the company will cease support for Navigator 9 and all previous Netscape browsers from 1 Feburary 2008.

AccountingWEB's traffic figures over the past four years confirm Netscape's inexorable decline. By 2004 it had been pushed into third place among site visitors behind Internet Explorer and Firefox, with just over 1% of total traffic. In December 2007, it had dropped behind Safari, Opera and Java the seventh most popular broswer, with just 0.2% of the site's traffic compared to IE's 84% and Firefox's 10%.

Although work will cease on Netscape's browser, there is a strong link to Mozilla, which was set up in 1998 with $2 million backing from Netscape and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.

In answer to the question, "Now that Netscape is stopping support, what do I do?", Drapeau said the Netscape team was "fully behind the fine work being done by the Mozilla Foundation. We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try."

There will also be an online archive of all the old Netscape Navigator versions, but the company recommended that the "nostalgic out there" download Firefox and add the Netscape theme and extensions available from Mozilla's library.

The Netscape Unofficial FAQ and Netscape Community Forum will continue to offer advice and information about Netscape browsers after 1 February, Drapeau added.

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By kuriyan
12th Jan 2008 13:54

Firefox with embedded IE addin
David, I use Firefox with an 'embedded IE' addin. I understand this ensures that sites optimised for IE, or which are IE only, will 'see' me as an IE user.

Would your site count me as a Firefox user or IE? If the latter, then perhaps this explains the low Firefox user numbers you mention.

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By daveforbes
09th Jan 2008 16:31

IE still dominant
The accounting web stats are very similar to what we find on our websites - internet explorer still dominating with a far higher percentage than it should have according to what you read about the popularity of firefox. We have a slightly higher safari percentage - possibly due to the fact we sell Mac software as well as PC.

David Forbes

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John Stokdyk, AccountingWEB head of insight
By John Stokdyk
09th Jan 2008 16:24

As mentioned in the story
Our internal figures for the last complete month (Dec 07) are as published in the seventh paragraph - 84% of the browsers used to visit the site were versions of IE, 10.7% were Firefox, and then there was a big gap before you got to Safari (0.7%), Clearware (0.5%), Opera (0.4%) and Netscape (0.2%).

These are not definitive figures, but a snapshot of browser traffic collected from our internal logs, which also includeactivity from search engine spiders and other domains. I checked them out of curiosity. When I went back to confirm the also rans, I also noticed that we are beginning to get significant traffic from BlackBerrys and other smartphone browsers - it's still only about 0.1% of our total traffic, but represents a really interesting development.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

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By Martyn.Shiner
09th Jan 2008 10:43

Browser stats
So what are AccountingWeb's latest browser stats?

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