Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California. The name Netscape was a trademark of Cisco Systems.
Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the first browser war. By the end of 2006, the usage share of Netscape browsers had fallen, from over 90% in the mid 1990s, to less than 1%.
Netscape is credited with developing the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) for securing online communication, which is still widely used, as well as JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages.
Netscape stock traded between 1995 and 2003, subsequently as a subsidiary of AOL. However, it became a holding company
following AOL's purchase of Netscape in 1998. The Netscape brand is
still extensively used by AOL. Some services currently offered under the
Netscape brand, other than the web browser, include a discount Internet service provider and a popular social news
website. In December 2007, AOL announced it would no longer be updating
the Netscape browser. Tom Drapeau, director of AOL's Netscape Brand,
announced that the company would stop supporting Netscape software
products as of March 1, 2008.
The decision met mixed reactions from communities, with many arguing
that the termination of product support is significantly belated.
Internet security site Security Watch stated that a trend of
infrequent security updates for AOL's Netscape caused the browser to
become a "security liability", specifically the 2005–2007 versions, Netscape Browser 8. Asa Dotzler, one of Firefox's
original bug testers, greeted the news with "good riddance" in his blog
post, but praised the various members of the Netscape team over the
years for enabling the creation of Mozilla in 1998.
Others protested and petitioned AOL to continue providing vital
security fixes to unknowing or loyal users of its software, as well as
protection of a well-known brand.
Early Years
| Netscape Communications wants you to forget all the highway metaphors you've ever heard about the Internet. Instead, think about an encyclopedia—one with unlimited, graphically rich pages, connections to E-mail and files, and access to Internet newsgroups and online shopping. |
| —Netscape Navigator, Macworld (May 1995) |
Netscape advertised that "the web is for everyone" and stated one of its goals was to "level the playing field" among operating systems by providing a consistent web browsing experience across them. The Netscape web browser interface was identical on any computer. Netscape later experimented with prototypes of a web-based system which would enable users to access and edit their files anywhere across a network, no matter what computer or operating system they happened to be using. This did not escape the attention of Microsoft, which viewed the commodification of operating systems as a direct threat to its bottom line, i.e. a move from Windows to another operating system would yield a similar browsing experience thus reducing barriers to change. It is alleged that several Microsoft executives visited the Netscape campus in June 1995 to propose dividing the market (although Microsoft denies this as it would have breached anti-trust laws), which would have allowed Microsoft to produce web browser software for Windows while leaving all other operating systems to Netscape. Netscape refused the proposition.
Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic). Microsoft quickly released several successive versions of Internet Explorer, bundling them with Windows, never charging for them, financing their development and marketing with revenues from other areas of the company. This period of time became known as the browser wars, in which Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer added many new features and went through many version numbers (not always in a logical fashion) in attempts to outdo each other. But Internet Explorer had the upper hand, as the amount of manpower and capital dedicated to it eventually surpassed the resources available in Netscape's entire business. By version 3.0, IE was roughly a feature-for-feature equivalent of Netscape Communicator, and by version 4.0, it was generally considered to be more stable on Windows than on the Macintosh platform. Microsoft also targeted other Netscape products with free workalikes, such as the Internet Information Server (IIS), a web server which was bundled with Windows NT.
Netscape could not compete with this strategy. In fact, it didn't attempt to. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998, while Internet Explorer and IIS have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for the bugs in its products; critics claimed that the company suffered from 'featuritis' – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making them work properly. This was particularly true with Netscape Navigator 2, which was only on the market for 5 months in early 1996 before being replaced by Netscape Navigator 3. The tide of public opinion, having once lauded Netscape as the David to Microsoft's Goliath, steadily turned negative, especially when Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of lay-offs in January 1998. Netscape chief financial officer Peter Currie described the mid 1990s as "hectic and crazy" and that the company was undone by factors both internal and external.
Open Sourcing
January 1998 was also the month that Netscape started the open source Mozilla project. Netscape publicly released the source code of Netscape Communicator 4.0 in the hopes that it would become a popular open source project. It placed this code under the Netscape Public License, which was similar to the GNU General Public License but allowed Netscape to continue to publish proprietary work containing the publicly released code. However, after having released the Communicator 4.0 code this way, Netscape proceeded to work on Communicator 4.5 which was focused on improving email and enterprise functionality. It eventually became clear that the Communicator 4.0 browser was too difficult to develop, and open source development was halted on this codebase. Instead, the open source development shifted to a next generation browser built from scratch. Using the newly built Gecko layout engine, this browser had a much more modular architecture than Communicator 4.0 and was therefore easier to develop with a large number of programmers. It also included an XML user interface language named XUL that allowed single development of a user interface that ran on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against Microsoft in May 1998. Netscape was not a plaintiff in the case, though its executives were subpoenaed and it contributed much material to the case, including the entire contents of the 'Bad Attitude' internal discussion forum. In October 1998, Netscape acquired web directory site NewHoo for the sum of $1 million, renamed it the Open Directory Project, and released its database under an open content license. Source
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