AOL Drops Support for Netscape (for real this time)
February 24, 2008
Last week, after extending Netscape’s lease on life for a month longer than originally expected, AOL finally pulled the plug on support for the Netscape web browser. When users upgrade to the latest version (9.0.0.6) they will be prompted to switch to Firefox or Flock. Netscape was first released over 13 years and can really be credited as the program that brought web surfing to regular people. Netscape started to drift into the back waters in the late 1990s after they were acquired by AOL and many people (including me) switched to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I eventually drifted to use Safari and Firefox, but I’ll always have special memories of Netscape’s grainy ship wheel startup screen. Avast, R.I.P. fair, hypertext markup language rendering software. Ye served me well.
