Friday, December 28,2007 @ 2:45pm
Netscape browser support to end in February
All support for Netscape web browsers will stop as of February 1st, the AOL-owned company has announced. Security updates will continue to be developed until that date, but afterwards, users will only be able to download archived versions of browsers such as Navigator. The company is instead pushing users towards Mozilla's Firefox, as the group was a creation of Netscape reaching back to 1999, to which AOL soon decided to provide backing. Firefox and Navigator have often shared close connections, to the extent that Navigator 9 became little more than a re-skinned version of its cousin.
Netscape's web browser was at one point dominant in the public space, and for many people the first browser they ever used. Its death knell was sounded with the introduction of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which came bundled with Windows 95, and eventually matched its rival's features. Navigator thus became redundant, although not before triggering an infamous anti-trust case that saw Windows opened more widely to third-party software.