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.