Netscape: An End of an Era

[Asher]

Netscape died because it was crap.

If it was a decent browser, people would still use it.

It's a combination of crap products and crap business decisions that killed them off. MS' bundling of IE played a part, because it forced browsers to be free and once 4.0 and 5.0 came around, completely showed up the shoddy, bloaty, and slow Netscape code.

Then they decided, brilliantly, to stew with the 4.x code for years while they recoded Netscape from scratch (Mozilla). That's all it took to give MS 90% marketshare.

I'm tired of people blaming Netscape's demise MS, Netscape died because it was a company who made repeated boneheaded business moves with an uncompetitive product. End of story.

[Drake Tungsten]

Netscape died because it was crap.

If it was a decent browser, people would still use it.

'Bout time you showed up. I thought the corpse of Netscape was never going to get pissed on.

[Asher]

I hope its still alive with wounds severed as I piss on it.

You, too, should be pissed off for all the taxpayers money they wasted over the years.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[Q Classic]

netscape was badly run.
it was a great browser for its time, but ran into coding limitations and the bad decisions were the final nail.
it definitively lost the wars when ie became better with version 5.
before, there was pretty good parity between the 4s, and netscape 3 was superior to ie 3 and below.

[Drake Tungsten]

You, too, should be pissed off for all the taxpayers money they wasted over the years.

I am. All that money wasted to prove Microsoft was abusing its OS monopoly, only to allow MS off the hook with a slap on the wrist. Good job, DOJ.

[Sikander]

I said goodbye to Netscape when AOL bought it also. I switched to IE, but I didn't like it that much, and couldn't abide Messenger or whatever that mail program is. I switched to Mozilla, but it bugs me sometimes too. Still I like it better than IE, it's free, and it keeps the fire to MS's feet to continually improve their browser.

[Dis]

I lost my internet virginity with netscape.

so long

[St Leo]

Originally posted by Asher
Netscape died because it was crap.

Yep. That's also why MSIE6 is dead.

If it was a decent browser, people would still use it.

I think you are overestimating people. A browser already ships with their OS. Why would they bother downloading a different one?

Then they decided, brilliantly, to stew with the 4.x code for years while they recoded Netscape from scratch (Mozilla). That's all it took to give MS 90% marketshare.

That was the only feasible way of doing DOM right. Yes, they could have stuck with platform specific interfaces instead of XUL, but the engine did need a rewrite.