AOL To Retire Netscape Navigator Feb 1, 2008

The first Web browser to garner mainstream acceptance among the Internet’s earliest users (in the general consumer sector, that is), Netscape Navigator has been slated for final decommissioning come February 1, 2008. The news of the program’s imminent departure was released late last week by its current owner, AOL.

As much as we knew Navigator’s time would come to face permanent retirement, it saddens us a bit that the legendary utility, which once was said to saturate roughly 90% of the browser market, is now being put to bed – for good.

Sure, Navigator wasn’t the first official GUI-based browser to be popularized to any significant degree. Its ancestor, assembled by a team headed by Marc Andreessen, a man who would in fact later join Netscape, was Mosaic, an eminently simple, beige-box-compatible design that became the original delight of many a professional and amateur computer user. But Netscape, a piece of progression on the Mosaic structure, furthered the concept of “easy” Internet browsing to encompass a wider world; a contribution many involved with computer science in one way or another continue to honor to this day, if only symbolically.

Many know the basic reason for Navigator’s long struggle and decline. Not too long after Navigator’s inception, a darling company of the tech world dubbed Microsoft made a play for a segment of the then burgeoning browser industry with a project it dubbed Internet Explorer.

A rather smart play, at that. Smart because the new program delivered by Microsoft was introduced to the public by way of a default install with the Windows operating system(s), a convenience Netscape was clearly unable to challenge. Of course, at that time it did not matter all that much to the growing demographic of PC users in the US and elsewhere that Navigator was perhaps a technologically superior invention. IE simply had a leg up with its bundled debut with Windows installations.

And as well all know quite well, Microsoft would never relinquish its advantage with evolutionary updates made to its platform in subsequent years. Thus the decline of Navigator was all but guaranteed.

Today, the browser that is Netscape Navigator, a product now built partly upon the core architecture developed by the Mozilla group, stands rather small among its industry peers. It maintains a 0.6% share of the pie.

Following February’s arrival, that slice will likely be cut almost entirely from view. That is unless a few nostalgic folk decide to maintain its existence for historic purposes, which we think would only be a fitting conclusion. Like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator rightfully deserves a place upon the technological totem pole for sure.