Netscape Navigator

Netscape Navigator was a web browser, the first commercial product of the Netscape Communications company created by Marc Andreessen (one of the authors of Mosaic) when he was at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA: National Center for Supercomputer Applications) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Netscape was the first commercial browser.

The original browser was once the dominant one in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser wars, it lost virtually all of its share to Internet Explorer.

History

Its beginnings

Netscape announced on October 13, 1994 that it would make a browser available free of charge to all its non-commercial users, and that versions beta 1.0 and beta 1.1 would be they will be available for download in November 1994 and March 1995. Version 1.0 final was available in December 1994. Netscape made its software available free of charge because it had in its policies the notion that software for the Internet there should be no cost. In 1997, Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the first browser to include a script language in web pages, introducing JavaScript in its version 2. Originally, it was barely useful for anything. more than to validate forms, but it quickly expanded.

By adding capabilities to read and send messages, both email and netnews, the Communicator version appears. The Netscape Composer page editor, introduced in 'version 3, gives rise to the Gold designation for distributions that include it.

He was widely criticized by supporters of Internet standards for introducing a large number of proprietary extensions (or netscapisms) into HTML, that is, created by their authors, without respecting the recommendations of World Wide Web Consortium, which damaged the compatibility of the pages between browsers and the objective of reaching the semantic web. Proprietary extensions introduced by Netscape include frames and layers.

Version 4 introduced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and dynamic HTML via JavaScript and a proprietary HTML extension called layers. Unfortunately, this version was riddled with bugs, and its implementation of dynamic HTML was inferior to that of Internet Explorer 4. This, coupled with the integration of Internet Explorer into Microsoft Windows, led to the so-called "browser wars" between the two companies., which introduced plenty of their own, incompatible extensions to HTML and JavaScript. This forced many to create two versions of their pages, one for each browser.

The result of this 'war' was the victory of Internet Explorer, which achieved a share of 98% in the use of browsers, and the subsequent disappearance of Netscape Navigator. This victory was mainly due to the inclusion of Internet Explorer as one more component of Microsoft Windows, which meant that the vast majority of users had it even if they had not installed it as such, and did not bother looking for another.

The version 5 was in development for years, but the difficulty of modifying the source code to allow the modification of the pages after loading, together with the progressive economic losses of the company, meant that never went on the market. Thus, Netscape lost the browser war in favor of Internet Explorer, which was already on version 5. Finally, its code was released, so that the community of free software developers could help finish it. This gave rise to the Mozilla Foundation, which rewrote almost all of the code, creating the Mozilla Application Suite browser.

Versions 6 and 7 were based on code from the Mozilla project. Currently, as Netscape has abandoned the development of its browser, Mozilla Navigator can be considered as its successor.

Release the project

In March 1997, Netscape released most of the Netscape Communicator code under the Free License. The project was called Mozilla. It was estimated that completing the source code (proprietary copyrighted elements had to be removed) in a new version of the browser could take a year, and so it was decided that the next version of the Netscape browser, version 5.0, would be based on this. Netscape assigned its browser development engineers to help out on the project.

After a year, it was apparent that Mozilla's development was not as fast, so Netscape reassigned some of its engineers to version Netscape Communicator 4.5. This had the effect of redirecting some of the effort into a dead line, while Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 5.0, was still in development. Mozilla engineers decided to throw out the Communicator code and start from scratch. Mozilla's first public release, two years later, was not widely accepted as many mid-tier computers were too slow to run a browser that used its own customizable graphical user interface with the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Version 5 was avoided because Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 had been available for a year and a half. There were plans to release a 5.0 version based on the 4.x code, but this idea was scrapped and all resources were used to work on the Mozilla Netscape 6.0 version, in what some Netscape employees still consider one of the biggest bugs. in the history of the company.

With much publicity, the company AOL as the new owner of Netscape, released Netscape 6 on November 14, 2000, based on the code of the previous version of Mozilla. The product was a colossal disappointment: it was huge, slow, unstable, and visually unappealing (for the vast majority). None of this was a surprise, since the Mozilla kernel was nowhere near being available as a new version on its own, and was highly unstable.

Netscape 6.1 and Netscape 6.2, released in 2001, fixed stability issues, but they were too big and slow, and didn't improve Netscape 6's bad reputation, so they were generally ignored by the market.

In 2002, AOL released Netscape 7: based on the Mozilla 1.0 kernel, more stable and noticeably faster, it had several extras like integrated AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ and Radio@Netscape. The market responded that it was essentially a repackaged version of Mozilla with a number of built-in tools that allowed access to services managed by AOL, so it was again ignored. Competition between mature and competent non-Microsoft alternatives like the Opera browser and the Mozilla distribution was another deciding factor. The Netscape 7.1 version (based on Mozilla 1.4) was also ignored.

On the Windows platform, the Netscape browser has been irrelevant for quite a few years. There are still some users of recent versions, but most are people who are unwilling or unable to switch browsers from 4.x versions, as newer browsers typically require more computing power machines for acceptable performance. On other platforms, which do not have the ability to install Internet Explorer, such as GNU/Linux, Netscape maintained its position as the dominant browser for longer. Only in the last few years, the appearance of other alternatives such as Mozilla and Konqueror have meant an increase in competition.

End of Netscape

AOL announced on July 14, 2003 that it was retiring all development staff working on Mozilla's version of Netscape. Combined with the agreement between Microsoft and AOL to use the version of Internet Explorer in future software releases, it marked the end of Netscape as an entity. The Netscape brand name as a dial-up Internet service provider.

Netscape 7.2 was released on August 17, 2004; AOL claimed not to have continued with the Netscape browser division.

In May 2005, a new version was published, Netscape 8.0, based on Mozilla Firefox, but also offering the Internet Explorer engine to display certain pages.

In October 2007, the Netscape 9.0 version was released, which, in addition to other features, allows the integration of Firefox 2 plugins.

AOL discontinued support for Netscape as of March 1, 2008. This means that no security patches or new versions of the browser will be released after that date.

Initially it had been announced that technical support and development of the browser would end on February 1, 2008, but the date was extended until March 1 to create a plugin that would allow migrating to Netscape 9.0.x and 8.x users to a special version of Flock, or to Mozilla Firefox. Thus, on February 20, the latest version of Netscape Navigator was released, 9.0.0.6. The next day, the browser was patched, closing a long history on the Internet.

Forks and replicas

Some users, using Mozilla Firefox code, have tried to revive Netscape Navigator. Among these projects are Netscape Reloaded and Netstep. These add similar functionality, tools, and aspects to those used by Netscape through extensions.