the death of netscape-goodbye to the innovator of the 90's

web history class-the death of netscape thanks to aol and microsoft

by rob mullins

way back in the day...i'm talking net days...that's..oh, about six years ago...
there was this great great browser called netscape navigator. i remember when it came out.
no one had seen anything like it before. those of us who were the pioneers at aol were very happy people
when netscape navigator rolled out and started taking the online world by storm.
in the early days, aol's browser was called "webcrawler." someone i once knew called it the "dogpaddler"
because of how slow it was.
nothing could beat the early aol browser for slowness and the need for frequent cache emptying. if you don't
know what cache emptying is you might want to read something besides this article rofl.
netscape navigator kicked butt. it was fast, had cool features like incorporating mail into the browser along with
usenet and other cool stuff. netscape was about 50 bucks. you could get it through snail mail, or download it from
their site. revolutionary for that time. needless to say, aol was not too happy about this major renovation. why?
they didn't own it, it didn't get on well with their system, and it allowed people to use its mail system which was a lot better
for getting out to the web if you were logging on via tcp/ip.
so....what do you think happened? microsoft (ms) was getting its internet explorer together and saw that it could take over
the browser market if it partnered up to aol and made some kind of a deal. i don't know what the specific terms of the deal were, but
the next thing i knew, there was this mediocre thing out there replacing the webcrawler for aol. enter internet explorer.

II.

the thing that i hated most about internet explorer (ie) was that it became the new aol browser and that there was no charge for it.
how was the ruling ns-a small company from northern cal-going to compete with the behemoths in that market when aol was giving away
ie for free incorporated into the newer versions of aol. yes, i remember aol 2.5. i still have a copy of it somewhere just to remind me how far
we've come in such a short period of time. a lot of the people i knew on aol had stock in netscape, and they were mad. ie didn't work as well as ns
and it was free, so everyone coming online for the first time was getting it, and using it. then the crushing blow came not too long after that.
it was announced that aol was going to buy ns. bye bye the worlds' coolest browser by a great cool small company of rebels.
i remember seeing jim barksdale on cable with such a gleam in his eye talking about the future of the web, the future of ns, the things they were going to
be able to do, and i was proud of that man. i didn't know him from adam. i just knew i felt his spirit, his innovative spark, his genius.
when aol took over ns, to me it didn't matter how much jim made from the deal, all i could feel was his sadness in having to give it up to the giant
corporate forces and say goodbye to his baby.

III.

ie quickly took all of ns's cool features and named them something else and attached a ton of code to them so that they appeared more convenient, more savvy, more cool. they beefed up the cookie features. they beefed up the problems. they put prompts in there that kept on asking you if you wanted to make
them your default browser. these prompts would (and still in 2001 six years later) come up every time you open ie. what a pain in the butt.
if i had a dollar for every time i said no to that question.........
in the meantime, netscape was still around, just being carefully held in place by aol so that it wouldn't continue its dominance, its brilliance, its beauty.
i watched as ie continued to ms out and get more and more cody, more and more clunky, more and more ms'y. every once in awhile i would go to the netscape site, and read their lame news about what new features they had. i just felt the program being held back. there is nothing i hate more than that really, holding something beautiful and strong back because of money. the netscape site would send cookies over to aol when you went there. ie would get mad and try to set more cookies to see what you were doing. it sucked man. now this many years later, i wonder what netscape could have been had it not been killed by the giant
need of ms and aol to absorb and utilize it. for god's sakes, look at how the logo ended up.

rip ns, you were one of a kind.