AOL releases Netscape update
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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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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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NEW YORK -- AOL is getting a software makeover, its first since deciding to make more of its services available for free in the chase for online advertising dollars.
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New developer program invites closer integration with search AOL functions.
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AOL has launched its 9.0 Security Edition, which includes McAfee&#39;s VirusScan Online application, offering protection against infection from peer-to-peer file sharing, Web site downloads, CD-ROMs and disks, or multimedia files.
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Update addresses potential denial-of-service vulnerabilities as well as a flaw in QuickTime.
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NOVEMBER 30, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - America Online Inc. today released a preview version of a new Netscape Web browser that&#39;s based on the open-source Firefox Web browser, but also supports Microsoft Corp.
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AOL will be adding a host of new features designed to combat spam, virii and spyware to version 9.0 of its browser. The package, known as &#39;AOL 9.0 Security Edition&#39; is a free download which was available from Thursday.
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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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com December 23, 2004, 11:15 AM PT. Opera Software released a test version of a major update to its Web browser software Thursday, intensifying its efforts, along with open-source
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Once the dominant Web browser, AOL has discontinued development and active support for the Netscape browser.
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AOL LLC&#39;s venerable Netscape.com site, given an extreme Web 2.0 makeover 15 months ago and transformed into a spiffy social news site, will revert to being a traditional portal again.
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Just two days before it was to end support for Netscape Navigator, AOL gave the browser a last-minute reprieve, saying it would extend support until March 1.
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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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AOL is once again revamping its Netscape.com Web portal, dropping a year-old "social news" component in which visitors submitted and voted on news stories and blog entries to determine how they're ranked on the site.
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America Online Inc. is releasing a new version of its software today that focuses on increasing online safety and security, which the company hopes will help it hold on to more subscribers.
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Blog: Updates address some critical vulnerabilities in the popular browser.