AOL kills Netscape off for good
Shorty
Manchester, UK Icrontian
Jobless levels in the USA reached their highest point for twenty years this week, and the mother lode of the "Long Boom", San Francisco, has just been declared the fastest-shrinking city in the nation.
Now AOL-Time Warner added to the pyre by making most of its Netscape browser division redundant. Netscape's public flotation in 1995 marked the start of the Internet frenzy. But in the blink of an accountant's eye, the great emblem of California's vitality as an engine for technology-led prosperity disappeared, and contractors were seen peeling the logo off the corporate buildings early yesterday afternoon.
Netscape has had it's day :thumbsdow
On the one hand, the corrupt suits at AOL failed to appreciate the majesty of the Mozilla code, pulled features (such as blocking pop-up windows which AOL's advertisers loved, but users hated), forked willy-nilly, adding adware where they could, and generally betrayed the Great Project.
On the other hand, when a killer app was needed in haste, the Mozilla team wandered off into Lotus-eating land and spent four years creating esoteric frameworks and note-perfect bug tracking systems that only a nerd could appreciate.
Choose ya poison well when you surf.
Read the rest at The Register
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Comments
Booo Hissss
Booo Hissss
:bawling::bawling::bawling:
Looks like MS won the Browser War for good this time.
'tis a sad day indeed.
Wonder if I could purchase a giant Netscape logo off E-Bay..... to help pay AOL's creditors
Never displayed it as it was intended by what program?
If you were using FrontPage, I'm not surprised. It is hardly secret that MS put stuff in FP that was only compatible with IE, another move designed to force Netscape out of business as revenge for them saying NO to Bill Gates a few years prior.
Dexter...
Without at all meaning it personally towards anyone (in any way), I started using Netscape when IE 2.0 was out. I thought IE at that point stunk. And thought that the Netscape email\newsclient, when it first came out, was better than OE.
IE has gotten better, with better privacy, though the current Netscape now is pretty comparable to IE-- although it also has tabs, spell check in composer which can save html files as well as email, has a nice child window blocker, has a trainable spam filter, and a few other things. It also has survived two corp sponsors that I know of and been imitated by many at least in parts (as has also IE).
At a guess Opera and Firebird will survive as IE competition, and what Mozilla's own developers consider too pondersome a code set will be dissected and the best parts used somewhere.
There are a few things with IE, Microsoft might be shooting itself in the foot by eliminating IE for Mac. It does not particularly like w3c standard html, which a large part of the geographic world adheres to and a decent percentage of the web "universe" uses.
Nothing can fully do both Microsoft's way of doing things and the w3c standard way. So browsers biased toward each are likely to remain available by some name.
What I think is going to happen is this-- Netscape by name will vanish. Netscape's and Mozilla's codebase, in part, will end up blended with IE algorithms in AOL's browser. If that works, what do you bet Microsoft will license for the kept and compatible non-IE code to stick into IE ot that Microsoft will (um) buy AOL???
Firebird will be a different project run by independent developers. Or Opera will end up with Firebird's code base.
Just a guess, but given that Microsoft is porting their server stuff to *nix compatibility through partners, what are the chances the IE browser as it is now as a standalone will be also ported??? And that what Microsoft keeps will be fully integrated into Windows??? 3-5 years from now???
See, Microsoft is being unusually licensing with IE right now-- AOL has licensed it and AFAIK AOL is still an MSN competitor. They want to squash the little guys, and not get into legal trouble. One course of least resistance would be to make IE ubiquitous across many platforms-- and then start SELLING the standalone.
It would not be surprising to me to discover a quid quo pro for letting AOL use IE code in its AOL product was use of Netscape's code base for features Microsoft wanted for IE. Not at all would that surprise me. And since Microsoft likes exclusive things, I would look for IE to become more like Netscape in terms of some features-- tabs, multilingual spell checking, trainable spam filtering, etc.
Microsoft IS planning on using the RAVAntivirus algortihms in server AV products. They like to buy and own things. Why not apply that to browser code also???
I am not saying I like this, but it is kinda probable.
John Danielson.
Go get a virus!
Heh.
I did at first use FrontPage, then I started using CuteFTP's Cute HTML, then started and I am still using Microsoft Script Editor included in MS Office, MSE7 will tell me whether or not tags are compatible or not with the WC3 standard using tooltips.
located in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\MSE7.EXE" if you have OfficeXP
:thumbsdow anything else.
IE6
Hello gentlemen.
IE6 + Crazy Browser = tabs, popup stopper AND no funny rendering = AWESOME.
IE + Tabs is nice.