R.I.P. Netscape

[Ken Oath]

Saw this on the Beeb.....here's the story link

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web icon set to be discontinued

I suppose sad for some.........

Part of the story.

The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users. Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said.
In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%.
In particular, the browser has faced competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which is now used by nearly 80% of all web users.

All good things must come to an end........although later in the story it says that MS is preparing a new version of IE for release in 2008.

Hope it is better accepted than Vista

[Barfridge]

RIP to good old nutscrape. While it didn't kick things off (Mosaic was the first fully featured graphical browser), it was the first one to become mainstream.

Of course I'm such a nerd that I'm surfing on my Apple Newton via Lynx.

[Davey]

oops ur right bf.

reminds me of a story my dad told me, he coulda been talking shit but..

he was at the 2nd international World Wide Web conference in chicago, (mosaic days) and was drinking in the lobby with some nerd, they got talking shop and Dad got offered a job at the ground floor at some startup web company.. He was all like 'hells naw i like teaching uni in Australia for fuckall money byebye' - turns out it was one of the founders of netscape.

[Cbr1k]

Ahh I remember good ole lynx. (This was when the internet was all text based kiddies)

[Davey]

when i was like 5 my dad had an apple II with a modem.. like the whole handset in the suction cup deal - he dialed up some bbs in the usa and i played some text based helicopter combat game. That's when i became a nerd.

[Triton]

Bummer, I remember using Netscape on my parents computers.. Macs.. those were the days.. and the time there was a $250 phone bill because it kept dialing when we were asleep.. thank fsuck for broadband..

IE6 was fine and dandy, lacked features but worked. Firefox then appeared and I haven't wanted to use IE since then and especially after I was beaten up by IE7 and its cousins every time I wanted to use a page that used a plug-in, I had to lower my 'security settings' and then still get messages.. and more messages.. and.. well yeah.

Firefox.

[thro]

May i be the first to say this is about 8 years over due.


Netscape 1.x was OK. netscape 2.x was decent. Around Netscape 3-4ish they totally lost the fucking plot.

I haven't had any issues with IE7 on vista (other than it using a few hundred megs of ram, which kinda shits me, but i have multiple GB, so who gives a fuck).

Use Firefox on FreeBSD otherwise. Which has lost the fucking plot as well (firefox i mean, not freebsd. Freebsd is great ).


How hard can it be people? It's a fucking web browser, there's well published standards...

[lee]

2nded thro. Netscape has been shit for as long as I can remember.

[thro]

The trouble started when they started trying to re-invent an operating system in the web browser.

Netscape started doing this to try and make the O/S irrelevant and de-throne microsoft. Hence, microsoft decided to kill netscape.

However, along the way, we've ended up with countless incompatible, broken, half-arsed feature sets, whilst complying with standards has gone by the wayside.

Writing semi-stylish html that actually works everywhere (/anywhere) is a fucking nightmare, and it's largely netscape's fault. It's microsoft's fault too, but netscape started it

Netscape has been dead, and the corpse has been smelling bad for a long time. AOL was just using the name for brand recognition, and even AOLers have now figured out that the product sucks balls....


Supposedly IE8 is actually standards-compliant.... finally.... again, about 8 years late...