The Zapper!: "Leave it to Netscape"
Posted: Thursday March 6th, 2008
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Citing their "focus on transitioning to an ad-supprted web business" and the "size of the investment needed" to bring the Netscape browser back to form, AOL ended support for the Netscape browser as of March 1st. AOL and the Netscape Team are encouraging Netscape users to adopt Firefox.
Source: Netscape Blog [ more info ]
The news that AOL was abandonning Netscape was initially released back in December. But, having avoided Netscape myself since 1998, I had no idea that the browser was hitting the zapper. I found out while reading my monthly porn (Maximim PC).
While I was ogling the pictures reading the articles, I found this one little blurb with picture of a gravestone that read "Netscape 1994-2008 AOL finished the job that Microsoft started". I immediately popped open IE and started digging through the internet for information. Initially I couldn't find anything substantial, so I finally just hit the damn netscape site like a true journalist **rolls eyes** and found the info there.
When I first started availing myself of the internet, I used Netscape exclusively. That slowly changed; and by the time I left college, I wasn't using it at all. This caused issues when I went into web development a year later because I kept forgetting to produce markup that addressed the stupidity that was Netscape's interpretation of web standards.
From a webdev standpoint I could care less that it has gone poof. From a nostalgia standpoint, I'm almost, kind of, partially sad to see it go. But, meh, the "spirit" of Netscape (post 2000) lives on in Firefox anyway. So I guess it's not that big a loss.
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