Hello everyone! After a well deserved break, I'm back and blogging once again. Ok, so it wasn't a break so much as it was a whole heck of a lot of work squeezed between three holidays, but you get the point.
Unfortunately, this post comes in the wake of a tragedy of sorts. It is with great sadness that I pass along a piece of news that will make many a seasoned Web developer weep. Last week, Tom Drapeau, a former principal software engineer and now the director of Propeller Social News for AOL, Announced the end of life for Netscape Navigator in his blog.
(Read his blog post here.)
Think what you will of Netscape Navigator. Lord knows it's had its ups and downs. It's been highly regarded as a vehicle for Web innovation, And more than a few Web designers have cursed its existence over the years too (NS4.x, your memories haunt me to this day). But Netscape is an institution, and its passing comes with much sorrow.
That being said, I know I'm not the only one who has a less-than-favorable opinion of AOL (I have personal reasons), and one could argue AOL's purchase of Netscape eight years ago is really when the browser began to die. Honestly, it's been a long time since I've cared about Netscape and its browser, but that doens't mean it doesn't have a place in my heart. Sure, Netscape has been dead for years, but its name has always lived on as a symbol of the Internet in its infancy through today. Sadly, not through tomorrow.
R.I.P. Netscape. You'll be glad to know your legacy is thriving in Firefox. You will be missed.
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Like you said Liam, Netscape died a long time ago, in March '99 when the Sun/ AOL acquisition occurred to be exact. And it isn't a coincidence that I left right at that time.
The aol/ sun deal. Why did they buy Netscape? At the time, AOL had no plans to use the netscape browser code. They had a multi-year deal utilizing microsoft internet explorer code for the aol browser and some marketing muckity muck at Netscape tried to confuse me/ explain to me that it made no sense to, although they were going to own the codebase, tear out the IE and replace with Netscape. Did AOL eventually incorporate the Netscape code base? i guess so. when did they do it? i don't know. someone please inform me.
On the Server Side, the side I worked on, Why did Sun buy them? They had
-a mail server
-a web server
-an ldap server
-an application server
It was the greatest company I ever worked for. And, for the Netscapers at least, we came out of that deal the best. Jim B sold us at a high. There is no such thing as "the browser business" anymore. It was a pleasure to work for Jim B(arksdale) and Marc A(ndreessen). Heck, up until but a number of years ago I would email Marc thanking him and reminiscing and he had no idea who i was, and he would email me back:-)
The Beer Fridays. The engineers bringing their dogs to work and then getting into the server room running amok, bringing down the Netscape Website. Jim Barksdale, the CEO, serving me Cake to me in my cubicle. Those were the days!