I was stunned to read this morning from the Washington Post that as of February 1st, Netscape will cease to exist in the sense that AOL/Time Warner will no longer support the ‘original’ browser with updated security patches.
Yes, the software itself will still be available for download, but at your peril it seems.
I mentioned this to someone today and he mentioned, ’So, should I care?’ Well certainly the world will not crumble under such news, but you have to stop and think that at one time this was the premiere browser. It was thought that Microsoft would be too late getting into the Internet business. At first it seemed that Netscape would win the game, but then with MS integrating everything into it’s software, the once-giant browser quietly faded into obscurity.
I remembered the first browsers I ever used was Mosaic (along with Gopher and Archie), but I completely forgot that it changed it’s name to Netscape. Wow. With all the eye candy out there it was hard to imagine that everything at one time was text-based and no graphics. I even remember having a hard copy of the Internet Yellow Pages long before Yahoo came into existence.
I’m feeling very nostalgic.
