A moment of silence, please.
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions,” Tom Drapeau, director of AOL’s Netscape Brand, writes on The Netscape Blog.
“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,” Drapeau writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Our first real browser, Netscape Navigator, is a fond memory. Netscape got a really raw deal as Microsoft abused their monopoly position to kill them off by bundling the shiteous Internet Explorer into Windows. But, what’s done is done and, really, Navigator’s been unofficially dead for years. We moved to Safari nearly four years ago (with occasional ongoing Firefox use and some dabbling with Camino, Shiira, Opera, and others for testing and to keep up-to-date).