Netscape Navigator

~ what it was ~

Netscape Navigator was first released on December 15, 1994, by a Mountain View company called Mosaic Communications, soon renamed Netscape Communications Corporation. It was based on Marc Andreessen's earlier work on Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Within a year of release it had over 75% of the web browser market. By 1996 it was the gateway to the internet for most North Americans and many Europeans.

On March 1, 2008, AOL (which had bought Netscape in 1999) ended all support for Netscape browser products. The brand had been on life support since 2003. The product had been irrelevant since about 2001. The death notice was a formality.

But the death notice does not capture what Netscape was. For a five-year window between 1994 and 1999, Netscape was the World Wide Web for most users. It was simultaneously: the browser, the company that had IPO'd into a $2.9 billion valuation overnight, the inventor of HTTPS via SSL, the originator of JavaScript, and the first major target of an antitrust action against Microsoft.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what netscape invented ~

A surprising amount of the modern web is Netscape's work. The team at Netscape, between 1994 and 1998, shipped:

• The cookie. Lou Montulli at Netscape invented HTTP cookies in 1994. Every modern session, login, shopping cart, and ad-tracker on the web descends from his work.
• SSL/TLS. Secure Sockets Layer was Netscape's invention, the foundation of HTTPS. Every secure web transaction since 1995 uses Netscape's protocol concept.
• JavaScript. Brendan Eich wrote the first JavaScript implementation in ten days at Netscape in May 1995. The language has spent thirty years escaping that decade-and-a-half schedule.
• The browser as the OS. Netscape's vision (Marc Andreessen famously said in 1995 that Netscape would reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers") prefigured the modern web-as-platform model. The vision lost in the short run. Chrome OS, Progressive Web Apps, and the SaaS economy proved it correct.
• Mozilla. When Netscape lost the browser war in 1998, they open-sourced the codebase as Mozilla. That codebase is the direct ancestor of Firefox. Without Netscape's death, modern open browsers would not exist.

~ the browser war ~

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped in August 1995 as part of the Plus! pack for Windows 95. By IE 4.0 (1997), Microsoft had a competitive browser, because by IE 5.0 (1999), bundled free with Windows and pre-installed on every desktop sold, IE had a market share Netscape could not overcome.

The 1998 antitrust case (United States v. Microsoft) revolved largely around this bundling. The court found that Microsoft had used its operating-system monopoly to crush Netscape illegally. The remedy was not the breakup originally proposed; Microsoft kept all its products. Netscape never recovered.

But the deeper problem was strategic. Netscape spent 1996 to 1998 trying to add server-side products, intranet tools, and groupware features to its browser line, fragmenting their attention, which is why microsoft, focused only on browser-OS integration, won. The lesson is taught in business schools: focus beats diversification when your enemy can subsidise indefinitely.

~ the AOL years ~

AOL bought Netscape in March 1999 for $4.2 billion in stock. The buyout was widely viewed as defensive: AOL wanted Netscape's portal traffic and the search business that came with it. AOL did not want a browser, and they did not invest in keeping the browser competitive.

Netscape Communicator and its successor, Netscape 6 (released 2000, based on Mozilla code), were technically deeper products than IE but slower, buggier, and bloated with AOL features. By 2001 Netscape's market share was below 10%. By 2003 it was below 5%. AOL kept up cosmetic releases through Netscape 9 (2007) but the brand had no marketing investment and no developer attention.

The 2008 retirement was widely considered overdue. AOL spun the Mozilla Foundation off as an independent non-profit in 2003, and Mozilla's Firefox 1.0 (2004) had already become the spiritual successor that mattered.

~ what disappeared ~

The browser as a thing you bought. Until 1998, you could buy a copy of Netscape Communicator on a CD at a computer store for around $50. The browser was a product. The fact that browsers became free, then "free with the OS," is part of what produced the current platform-monopoly dynamic. There is no functioning paid browser market.

The independent browser company. Netscape was, briefly, a billion-dollar standalone browser company. Today browsers are sustained by Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), or non-profits (Firefox via the Mozilla Foundation). There is no commercial browser market.

The open standard as a competitive moat. Netscape championed open standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) as a way to compete against Microsoft's proprietary extensions. The strategy worked: open standards survived. But the company that won the bet did not survive to enjoy it.

~ from the comments below ~

"i installed netscape 2.0 from a CD that came with a magazine in 1996. it took 35 minutes. when it loaded a webpage for the first time my mother thought we had broken the computer."; m.k. 49

"the netscape n logo with the meteor; the loading animation, the blue and the orange; i can still see it when i close my eyes. it is one of the most-watched-loading-animations of my life.", e.t. 42