Netscape dies officially

The later generations of the Yangtze River push the former ones forward, and the former ones die on the beach. After suffering for years, Netscape, the once King of Browsers, still couldn't escape its fate.

Not long ago, AOL officially announced that it would stop developing the Netscape browser software. Tom Drapeau, the brand manager of the Netscape at AOL, said in his blog: "Based on AOL's current business focus and the fact that Mozilla has successfully developed a successful alternative, we believe it is time to end the development of the Netscape browser. We have smoothly handed over the Netscape baton to Mozilla, and we encourage Netscape users to use Firefox."

Drapeau indicated that AOL will stop security updates on February 1, 2008, and no longer provide any technical support. He urged NS users to switch to the Firefox browser as soon as possible.

Netscape was launched in 1994 and occupied 80% of the browser market in 1995, shining brilliantly as the King of Browsers. However, after Microsoft launched IE and bundled it with the system, Netscape lost its luster. Although the U.S. Department of Justice had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft over this matter, it ended without any result. Subsequently, Netscape's market share was almost entirely eroded by IE. After losing in the first-generation browser battle, Netscape was eventually acquired by AOL and remained depressed ever since. The latest market statistics show that IE occupies 77.4% of the market, Firefox's share is 16%, and NS only has a pitiful 0.60%.

Despite Netscape's ultimate failure, its enormous contributions to the development of the Internet cannot be erased. Back in the day, how many people navigated out to sea through Netscape and got to know the vast world outside.