AOL gives Netscape last-minute reprieve
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Just two days before it was to&#160;end support for Netscape Navigator,&#160;on Wednesday AOL gave the browser a last-minute reprieve, saying it would extend support until March 1.At the end of December, Tom Drapeau, the director of AOL&#39;s Netscape brand, surprised users when he stopped development of the browser and set Feb. 1 as the date when his team would stop issuing security updates.Yesterday, Drapeau pushed out the support end date a full month, saying that Netscape and its partners needed more time to wrap up work on tools designed to help users migrate to the Mozilla Firefox or Flock browsers.&quot;Mozilla, Flock, and AOL are working together to provide tools to ease the migration of existing Netscape browser users to our recommended Flock and Firefox alternatives,&quot; said Drapeau in an explanatory post to the Netscape blog. &quot;AOL support for Netscape browsers has been extended one month, to March 1.&quot;In addition, an upgrade will be issued to Netscape 9 users through the browser&#39;s integrated update feature to &quot;streamline the process of choosing from these two great browser alternatives,&quot; Drapeau said.Flock was a new recommendation from Drapeau, who last month cited only Firefox -- the code successor to Navigator -- as an alternative, but Flock had been touted by others on the Netscape team earlier this month. Flock, a free browser that stresses social networking features, is built on the Firefox code base.Drapeau didn&#39;t specify what tools were in the works, but presumably they will include some kind of Netscape-to-Firefox migration assistant. Currently, the only way to move a user profile from the former to the latter is to manually copy the Netscape &quot;profiles.ini&quot; file and its folder to Firefox&#39;s directory. Flock, on the other hand, recently unveiled version 1.06, which includes Netscape migration features.Nor did Drapeau elaborate on the reasons for Netscape&#39;s demise. In December, he named &quot;AOL&#39;s current business focus&quot; and an inability to revive Navigator&#39;s moribund market share as motivators for the move. At the time, however, sources close to Netscape called out AOL upper management&#39;s lack of interest and funding as the real reason why Drapeau pulled the plug.According to one source, the lack of resources meant &quot;we would not have been able to offer releases in a timely manner, which would have been a disservice to the brand as well as the end user.&quot;Coincidentally, Mozilla celebrated its 10th anniversary just last Tuesday, Jan. 22. Several months before it was acquired by AOL, Netscape Communications Corp. in early 1998 announced it would release the browser&#39;s source code, a move that led several weeks later to the formation of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and eventually the creation of Firefox.Last month, Asa Dotzler, currently Mozilla&#39;s company&#39;s director of community development, and one of the first paid employees of the Mozilla Foundation, said good riddance to Netscape on hearing Drapeau&#39;s news. &quot;I&#39;m glad that sad beast has finally been put down,&quot; Dotzler said in a post to his blog. He also didn&#39;t buy Drapeau&#39;s explanation for putting Netscape to rest.&quot;The real truth is probably closer to &#39;we weren&#39;t building a compelling enough product to be able use it to bring users to our ad-supported world and it doesn&#39;t make sense spending more on browser development than we recoup in increased ad revenue as a result of that browser work&#39;,&quot; said Dotzler.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Following the complete revamping of its Netscape portal to a Digg-like social-driven news site where users submit links to content elsewhere on the Web, AOL has relaunched My.Netscape in beta as a customizable homepage after taking it down months ago.
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Also: iPhone lawsuit on hold. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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America Online Inc. (AOL) on Tuesday released a preview version of a new Netscape Web browser that is based on the open-source Firefox Web browser, but also supports Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser engine.
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Two years ago today, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik confirmed the purhase of two prized enterprise products from AOL - Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. He also noted than Red Hat intended to open source the products within 12 months.  Red Hat paid $25 million for the assets. You could say that was pretty good considering that in 1998, AOL paid more than $4 billion for Netscape. Matthew's purchase represented the last divestiture of Netscape's assets by AOL. If you wander on over to the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server. This isn't your older brother's directory server. Aside from open sourcing the Netscape server, you'll find an abundance of documentation to help you learn and operate a stellar product. In the case you have little familiarity with FDS, it has features you will not find in other open source LDAP servers.  These include: Multi-master replication  Hot-backups and restores  Integration utility for Microsoft Active Directory users and groups  A graphical management console and web available administration
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On the same day AOL announced plans to stop development on the Netscape Navigator browser, Microsoft cited the browser as evidence that the 2002 antitrust consent decree had served its purpose and didn't need to be extended.
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An AOL user who logged on to check his online financial portfolio was given access to someone else's data and is calling on AOL to correct what he sees as a security breach. AOL acknowledged an "issue," but said corrective action has been taken.
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Netscape Communications upgraded its namesake browser on Tuesday to version 7.2, a rare sign of life at America Online&#39;s moribund browser division.
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A vulnerability in AOL's instant messenger could allow attacks. Also: A new Bagle variant rumbles across the Net.
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AOL will restore Netscape.com to a traditional Web portal format, 15 months after turning it into a social news site,
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Awarapan: Preserved your ticket and await a refund.
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AOL (Quote, Chart) developers have rolled out a new version of its venerable Netscape browser, version 7.2.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL's venerable Netscape.com site, given an extremeÂ Web 2.0 makeoverÂ 15 months ago andÂ transformed into a spiffy social news site, will revert to being a traditional portal again. In an official blog posting Thursday, a Netscape official explained that feedback from Netscape.com visitors prompted AOL's decision to scrap the site's redesign. In short, people want the site to offer a more traditional Web portal experience, with news items chosen by Netscape.com editors instead of visitors, a prominent search engine box and links to AOL and Netscape services and content channels. At press time, Netscape.com still retained the format it moved to in June of last year to compete with the likes of Web 2.0 social news upstarts like Digg.com. However, those interested in checking out how Netscape.com will look like soon can see its forthcoming format at an alternate address. Proving that everything old is new again, the new format looks a lot like Netscape.com before its social news metamorphosis. After Netscape.com adopts its new/old portal format, AOL will move the social news site to another, as of yet undetermined, Web address, according to the blog posting. The decision is not surprising. Jason Calacanis, the blogging entrepreneur who masterminded Netscape.com's transformation into a social news site,Â left AOL in November, shortly after Jonathan Miller was replaced as AOL's CEO. Miller had overseen AOL's acquisition of Calacanis' Weblogs Inc. in October 2005 and become a Calacanis mentor at AOL. Then in June of this year,Â AOL relaunched its AOL News siteÂ with a raft of social news capabilities, such as the ability for people to vote on, rank, and share links to articles, photos, and video clips, as well as comment on them, duplicating many of Netscape.com's features. Interestingly, AOL News apparently relies on the Netscape.com social news site for its section on stories submitted by readers. It's unclear if or how the transformation of Netscape.com will affect AOL News' user-submitted stories section. AOL didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Â
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Once the dominant Web browser, AOL has discontinued development and active support for the Netscape browser.
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Off to Firefox with you AOL is abandoning all work on the Netscape browser and wants users to migrate to Firefox. Not that there are many left: in the mid-1990s, Netscape commanded well over 80 per cent of the internet browser market. But it has been moribund for many years, with share down to one per cent, at best.â¦
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Attackers could bombard PCs using instant messenger's "away" feature. AOL says a fix is imminent.
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InfoWorld - AOL needs all the Internet traffic it can get, but it is struggling with the fading popularity of Netscape.com, for many years one of the Web&#39;s most popular destinations.