Netscape

Early years Mosaic was developed at the tax payer funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992. Mosaic became a private venture as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins as investors. The first meeting between Clark and Andreessen was never truly about a software or service like Netscape, but more about a product that was similar to Nintendo. Clark recruited other early team members from SGI and NCSA Mosaic. Jim Barksdale came on board as CEO in January 1995. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen created a 20-page concept pitch for an online gaming network to Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 console, but a deal was never reached. Marc Andreessen explains, "If they had shipped a year earlier, we probably would have done that instead of Netscape." The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9, released on October 13, 1994. Within four months of its release, it had already taken three-quarters of the browser market.) on November 14, 1994, to avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser. The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code. The internal codename for the company's browser was Mozilla, which stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. A cartoon Godzilla-like lizard mascot was drawn by artist-employee Dave Titus, which went well with the theme of crushing the competition. The Mozilla mascot featured prominently on Netscape's website in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to this being removed. Netscape eventually became the first company to attempt to capitalize on the emerging World Wide Web. The success of this IPO subsequently inspired the use of the term "Netscape moment" to describe a high-visibility IPO that signals the dawn of a new industry. During this period, Netscape also pursued a publicity strategy (crafted by Rosanne Siino, then head of public relations), packaging Andreessen as the company's "rock star." The events of this period ultimately landed Andreessen, barefoot, on the cover of Time magazine. The IPO also helped kickstart widespread investment in internet companies that created the dot-com bubble. It is alleged that several Microsoft executives visited the Netscape campus in June 1995 to propose dividing the market (an allegation denied by Microsoft and, if true, would have breached antitrust laws), which would have allowed Microsoft to produce web browser software for Windows while leaving all other operating systems to Netscape. Netscape refused the proposition. Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic). This era would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998, while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998. Former Netscape executives Mike Homer and Peter Currie have described this period as "hectic and crazy" and that the company was undone by factors both internal and external. In January 1998, Netscape started the open source Mozilla project. Netscape publicly released the source code of Netscape Communicator 5.0 under the Netscape Public License, which was similar to the GNU General Public License but allowed Netscape to continue to publish proprietary work containing the publicly released code. The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against Microsoft in May 1998. Netscape was not a plaintiff in the case, though its executives were subpoenaed and it contributed much material to the case, including the entire contents of the 'Bad Attitude' internal discussion forum. Acquisition by America Online On November 24, 1998, America Online (AOL) announced it would acquire Netscape Communications in a tax-free stock swap valued at US$4.2 billion. By the time the deal closed on March 17, 1999, it was valued at US$10 billion. one of its most prominent critics was longtime Netscape developer Jamie Zawinski. Disbanding During Netscape's acquisition by AOL, joint development and marketing of Netscape software products would occur through the Sun-Netscape Alliance. In the newly branded iPlanet, the software included "messaging and calendar, collaboration, web, application, directory, and certificate servers", as well as "production-ready applications for e-commerce, including commerce exchange, procurement, selling, and billing." In March 2002, when the alliance was ended, "iPlanet became a division of Sun... Sun retained the intellectual property rights for all products and the engineering" On July 15, 2003, Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) disbanded Netscape. Most of the programmers were laid off, and the Netscape logo was removed from the building. However, the Netscape 7.2 web browser (developed in-house rather than with Netscape staff, with some work outsourced to Sun's Beijing development center) was released by AOL on August 18, 2004. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in January 2010, Oracle continued to sell iPlanet-branded applications, which originated from Netscape. Final release of the browser The Netscape brand name continued to be used extensively. The company once again had its own programming staff devoted to the development and support for the series of web browsers. Additionally, Netscape also maintained the Propeller web portal, which was a popular social-news site, similar to Digg, which was given a new look in June 2006. AOL marketed a discount ISP service under the Netscape brand name. A new version of the Netscape browser, Netscape Navigator 9, based on Firefox 2, was released in October 2007. It featured a green and grey interface. In November 2007, IE had 77.4% of the browser market, Firefox 16.0%, and Netscape 0.6%, according to Net Applications, an Internet metrics firm. On December 28, 2007, AOL announced that it would drop support for the Netscape web browser and would no longer develop new releases on February 1, 2008. The date was later extended to March 1 to allow a major security update and to add a tool to assist users in migrating to other browsers. These additional features were included in the final version of Netscape Navigator 9 (version 9.0.0.6), released on February 20, 2008. ==Software==