AOL to End Support for Netscape Browser
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AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software.
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America Online will stop providing direct access to Usenet newsgroups, one of the earliest forums on the Internet for people to discuss a large variety of topics from television shows to software to sex.
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Netscape Communications has released Netscape 7.2, successor to the older version 7.1, which was released in mid-2003. The new release is based on version 1.7 of Mozilla, the most recent version of the Mozilla Internet application suite.
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On Friday, roughly a decade after Netscape's fortunes started to slide, AOL announced it is finally pulling the plug on the Netscape browser. "While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer," Tom Drapeau, AOL's director of development, wrote on the Netscape Blog.
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Netscape Communications yesterday released Netscape 7.2, which is based on Version 1.7 of Mozilla, the most recent version of the Mozilla Internet application suite.
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Back in the mid-&#39;90s, they called it the Browser Wars: Netscape Navigator vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer. But that score was settled long ago, when America Online ironically bought out Netscape while using IE as its default browser.
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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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AOL's new 9.0 Security Edition seems intended to burnish the online service's reputation as the crossing guard of the Internet, but that's a goal that this release can't quite achieve. -Rob Pegoraro
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SAN FRANCISCO - After being written off by industry observers last year, America Online Inc.&#39;s browser unit showed signs of life Tuesday as it released an update to its Netscape Web browser.
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Despite media reports and industry pundits over the years relegating Netscape to Internet history books, AOL has restarted the browser's development. The company plans to bring back a refreshed Netscape browser based on Firefox, which will incorporate an enhanced user interface and several new features. A prototype of the new Netscape will debut on November 30.
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America online is currently beta testing a dramatically modified Internet Explorer based Web browser it calls "AOL Browser." AOL Browser is independent from the AOL client software and can be run as a standalone application. But the decision to use Microsoft's IE core has caught many industry watchers by surprise.
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AOL withdrew its support for Microsoft&#39;s Sender ID e-mail identity standard late Wednesday, likely cementing the creation of two dominant e-mail authentication protocols.
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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's most popular destinations. AOL doesn't break out how much Netscape.com contributes to its revenue but calls the property a valuable one. "Netscape has a loyal community of users and is an important part of the AOL Network," an AOL spokeswoman said. Soon, AOL will restore Netscape.com to a traditional Web portal format, 15 months afterÂ turning it into a social news site, a change that, instead of boosting the site's popularity, hurt it. Still, one can't blame AOL for the attempt to give Netscape.com a new lease on life as a Web 2.0 site. Traffic to the site had been on a years-long slide. This raises the question: Will switching Netscape.com back into a portal turn the tide? With AOL fighting tooth and nail for every online ad dollar, the performance of the once mighty Netscape.com matters. "If you have a brand that has some cachet or currency and carries recognition, it's logical to use it," said James Goss, a financial analyst with Barrington Research. Still, Netscape.com's past glories will not magically draw people back to it. "It's probably not worthwhile to invest heavily on the site unless they have a coherent strategic plan for it," said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. AOL has bet the farm on online advertising as it sheds its old subscription-fee business model. It's a years-long process that continues full-speed ahead withÂ this week's announcement of AOL's plan to move its headquarters to Manhattan and the integration of its ad networks into a single platform. But with its online ad revenue growth a disappointing 16 percent in the second quarter, AOL could sure use the traffic that Netscape.com used to draw even several years ago. An examination of Netscape.com's traffic patterns since AOL acquired Netscape Communications in March 1999 for $4.2 billion tells a story of consistent decline. As critics have pointed out over the years, this is true not only for the Netscape.com portal but also for the company's other products, in particular its browser. "AOL has never known what to do with Netscape. They squandered that asset," Sterling said. "Eventually, the bottom dropped out." In November 1999, Netscape.com had 20.8 million unique visitors in the U.S., reaching close to a third of the country's Internet users, according to comScore. By December 2003, Netscape.com's unique visitors had dropped to 18.8 million, and its reach had plummeted to 12.4 percent of the U.S.'s Internet users, according to comScore. Things kept deteriorating, and by January 2005, Netscape.com had little over 17.5 million unique visitors and a reach of 11 percent. In the next nine months, Netscape.com suffered a massive drop in unique visitors. In October 2005, the portal had 12.9 million unique visitors, and its reach among all Internet users in the U.S. -- 169 million at that point -- had fallen to 8 percent. This page-view graph, based on data compiled by Alexa Internet, shows the erosion in Netscape.com's traffic between early 2002 and today. "It's an interesting illustration of the waning of a very strong Internet brand," Sterling said. As tragic as 2005's traffic numbers look compared with what Netscape.com had been, they would probably elicit tears of joy from AOL officials today. In August 2007, Netscape.com drew 6.1 million unique visitors, down from 10 million in August 2006, according to comScore. The AOL spokeswoman said part of the traffic erosion of the past year is due to the fact that starting in the third quarter of 2006, Netscape Mail was migrated to AIM Mail so Netscape.com lost those visits. Also, in October 2006, the site lost the traffic from the Netscape Connect dial-up access service, which was broken out into its own property. She couldn't quantify how many unique visits the loss of those two components cost Netscape.com, but it's probably fair to say that AOL had much higher expectations for the site's traffic after its social news transformation. Netscape.com drew 61 percent fewer visits in August of this year than in August of last year, a period when visits to social news rival Digg.com increased 142 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd. In other words, the problem hasn't been the social news format, which lets readers submit and share links to stories as well as vote on, comment on, and rank those articles. Netscape.com simply didn't gain the expected traction with people who frequent these sites. AOL acknowledged this when it announced the plan to turn Netscape.com into a portal again. AOL isn't giving up on the social news site now housed at Netscape.com. Last week, AOL announced that the social news site will be rebaptized Propeller and moved to Propeller.com. However, Propeller could face an uphill branding battle, considering the history of its Web address. According to cached pages found at the Internet Archive, Propeller.com belonged to PropHead Development, which specialized in digital set-top boxes. PropHead was acquired by AOL Time Warner -- now known as Time Warner Inc., parent company of AOL -- in 2000. Archive.org's last cached snapshot for the Propeller.com address dates from January 2002. At press time, Propeller.com is empty of content. As a portal, Netscape.com will feature news articles handpicked by its editors instead of visitors, along with a search engine and links to AOL and Netscape services and content. Netscape.com's forthcoming format is at an alternate address. Basically, it looks a lot like it did before its social news transformation. One change: AOL plans to establish links between Netscape.com and Propeller.com. It remains to be seen if the latest plan to revitalize the once mighty Netscape.com will propel it to new heights or see it sputter into oblivion. What's clear is that AOL once had a portal jewel in its hands. "AOL really wasted an opportunity when they bought Netscape. They didn't do enough to leverage the site's traffic and brand. They basically sat on it. It was a strategic blunder," Sterling said.
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Itâsa safe bet that smiles are showing up on Netscape devoteesâ faces as Internet Browser War II broke out this week. They were a forgotten bunch, these loyalists, nursing their aging, once-dominant Netscape
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Ever since I discovered I could check AOL e-mail accounts using a regular Internet browser, I've found little use for the company's all-in-one software package.
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The original browser from the earliest days of the web will cease to be in February, AOL says. After playing second fiddle to Microsoft and being eclipsed by its offspring Firefox, the Netscape browser will be killed off by parent company AOL, which purchased the brand in 1999.
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Netscape is synonymous in my mind with missed opportunity. After AOL bought the company it totally neglected it and IE ate all its remaining market share. Since that time the Netscape brand has been &#8220;reinvented&#8221; several times, as a low-cost ISP, a Digg clone and now a personalized start page.  Indeed, a new My.Netscape is joining [...]