RIP Netscape Navigator (1994 - 2008)

tuaw.com ^ | December 28, 2007 | Christina Warren

[HAL9000]

Excerpt -

Soon, Netscape Navigator - the first highly successful graphical web browser (yeah, yeah, I know Mosaic came before Netscape, but I don't remember seeing Mosaic floppy-disks bundled with my PC World and Macworld magazines in 1995, at least not under the name "Mosaic") - will be nothing more than a footnote in Internet history. Let's take a moment of silence for the big N. OK, that was long enough.

AOL, the parent company of this blog and Netscape, has announced that they will cease support for the current version of Netscape as of February 1, 2008. Netscape, which at its peak in the mid-1990s held 80% of the web browser marketshare, and was a player in Browser Wars 1.0.

~ snip ~

[Jeff Chandler]

I have never used Seamonkey; it looks like an all-in-one program like Outlook. Likewise, The Sunbird calendar is one I haven’t tried. I have tried the Thunderbird email program, and have found it wanting. The Firefox browser is a competent program- my main browser, in fact.

[andy58-in-nh]

Your recollection gave me some great memory flashes. I was also on the Internet back in the pre-GUI days, and it was a strange world of names and acronyms like WAIS, Gopher, Telnet, Bulletin Board Systems, and this funny little network of university libraries and government research sites called the World Wide Web. And all of this crazy stuff was obtainable through a phone link, a 1200/2400 baud modem, an IBM 8088 processor with 256Kb of memory and a 25Mb hard drive, and an (approximately) 2,000 lb. CRT monitor with a green monochrome screen and if you were rich, a Hercules graphics card.

And when the graphics revolution came along (a/k/a VGA-mania) along with those blazing 9600-baud modems, there arose a demand for dial-up portals, and Prodigy was among the first. And yes, it was a very ugly interface:

[MediaMole]

Mosaic? Real web users use Lynx.

[JerseyHighlander]

Seeing that screen I just remembered my Prodigy log-in and password, from over a decade ago.

The best part is somewhere in the labyrinth of Prodigy’s server farms, there were still original prodigy personal webpages on the ‘net in 2004. Even years after subscribers had stopped paying their contracts.

[Netizen]

I’m looking at Firefox now, but don’t see ‘composer’ listed in it. I have used netscape for years because of ‘composer’. Do you know if Firefox has a similar option?

[Jeff Chandler]

I don’t think Firefox has Composer, but there are free and inexpensive HTML editors around.

[JerseyHighlander]

There are a few decent Firefox replacements for Composer. I too had Netscape installed for several years past daily use just to use Composer.

Web Developer:
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Simpler extension many Freepers use everyday on FreeRepublic:
Xinha
http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/

A bit more complex:
Codetch
http://www.codetch.com/

[Netizen]

Thanks, both of you for your responses.

I wasn’t sure if mozilla would still be a choice, isn’t that part of netscape?

Found links on NuV or something like that which was touted as being composer’s replacement, but seems its demise was earlier than netscapes.

I checked out the links you gave and then found kompoZer and it looks and feels most like composer to me.

http://www.kompozer.net/features.php

I just haven’t decided at this point whether I’ll keep netscape on my system or if so, for how long and I wanted a replacement in case I decide to dump netscape in its entirety.

It just seems a waste of space to keep all of netscape just for composer. Its going t oseem weird not having netscape around anymore.