On Friday, roughly a decade after Netscape’s fortunes started to slide, AOL announced it is finally pulling the plug on the Netscape browser. “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,” Tom Drapeau, AOL’s director of development, wrote on the Netscape Blog.
The start of the saga dates back to 1994, when a University of Illinois student named Marc Andreessen founded a company called Netscape Communications, after taking the world by storm with the NCSA Mosaic browser. For a time, it looked like Netscape would be the dominant player on the Web, as Microsoft seemed to regard the Internet as somewhat irrelevant.
In 1995, Netscape had a stellar IPO, with shares almost tripling in value on the first day of trading, and the dot-com boom was born. Soon enough though, Microsoft got in the game and released its Internet Explorer browser. By 1997, Microsoft was already up to Internet Explorer 4, with significant advances over its three earlier versions.
By 1998, not coincidentally, Netscape’s financial results had turned south and the company started laying off employees. A year later, America Online bought the struggling company for $4.2 billion, in what now looks like an exorbitant waste of money, but it was 1999, after all.
At the time of the acquisition, Netscape had started building an open-source version of the browser called Mozilla, an effort that in 2003 produced the independent Mozilla Foundation. Before the Foundation’s creation, Drapeau said, “AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded…