Bye-bye, Netscape
Netscape, we hardly knew ye. This Friday AOL, which, like Fortune Magazine, is part of the Time Warner (TWX) empire, will become a zombie browser. AOL announced late last year that it will no longer support Netscape, meaning that it won’t update features or provide security upgrades. That means the few people who continue to use the browser should stop. Already, AOL is recommending that Netscape users switch to Firefox.
It’s a peculiar quality of the technology industry that such important companies and products can simply vanish in so short a time. Netscape went public just a dozen years ago and sold to AOL in 1999 for $10 billion. Its battle with Microsoft (MSFT) spawned an epic antitrust fight with the Justice Department, a topic covered in an interesting Financial Times column today.
Most interestingly, though, is the story of how Netscape itself gave birth to Firefox, today’s browser of choice for non-Apple (AAPL) users who prefer not to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I use Firefox and cover Silicon Valley, but I didn’t quite know the whole story of how Firefox came to be. It was told quite well today in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
R. Hirsch
How well does the Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey work for you ? It is from the same root source, after all.
I’m a Netscape beta-tester from way back when. It’s too bad they let what was once the browser standard lapse into obsolescence. I still use it as much as I can just for the convenience of the click/hold menu, which it seems Firefox dropped and Safari never had. There are a few other features I prefer to have onboard. Cest la vie.
Now I’ll weigh in … the reason I wrote non-Apple is that it’s likely that most users of Apple’s Safari browsers will be Macintosh users, though of course Mac users can and do use Firefox and, in fact, Windows users can use download Safari.
Jay: I edited this blog post, and we did in fact look this up. Here’s what happened: when the deal was offered in November 1998 for stock, the value was $4.2 billion. By the time the deal was consummated, AOL stock had risen so much, that the valuation was closer to $10 billion. So that’s the figure we used.
AOL purchased Netscape for $4.2B
not $10B. I guess even basic fact checking by using Google is a luxury these days.
Why the “non-Apple” part? I’m a very happy Firefox user on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris.
Funny , Netscape was great untill they hooked up with AOL. It’s AOL’s invasiveness that ultimatley turned the world off of them. RIP netscape and hopefully AOL as well.
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Wall Street watchers think of capital markets and financial players out west as being on the "other" coast. That's not how it's viewed in the Pacific time zone. From the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road to the bond kingpins of Orange County to the corporate finance department at a certain software company in Redmond, Wash., there's plenty going on "out there." Adam Lashinsky should know. A native of Chicago, he has covered West Coast finance for a decade, with an emphasis on money matters in Silicon Valley. If it involves money and it's happening west of the Mississippi, look for it in Go West. 
I’m a former Netscape and AOL employee and I can say from experience and close knowledge that the Netscape AOL acquired in ‘98 had already lost its mojo. True, AOL had a knack for buying then suffocating innovative companies. But in the case of Netscape, innovation retired with a cadre of newly minted millionaires after the IPO.