Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 1, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
AOL’s new focus on Internet advertising left little room for the investment needed to keep Netscape Navigator at a high level, an official blog entry said on Friday. Netscape had also given rise to the open browser software Firefox, which today is the strongest competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The first version of Netscape
Navigator came onto the market in 1994. In the mid-1990s, the company had a market share of up to 85 percent. Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995 is regarded as the starting point of the New Economy euphoria that culminated in the bursting of the Internet bubble at the beginning of this decade. On the first day, the price of Netscape shares shot up from the issue price of 28 dollars to 75 dollars.
However, Netscape was crushingly defeated by Microsoft in the so-called «first browser war» in the years that followed: In 1995, the world’s largest software group released its Internet Explorer as an addition to the dominant Windows computer operating system. Microsoft took the lead in the browser market in 1999, and a few years later its market share reached a peak of more than 95 percent. Netscape was bought by AOL in 1998, and its market share shrank to one percent.
In the meantime, however, the Netscape team launched the Mozilla project, which gave rise to the Firefox Internet browser, now credited with a market share of between 15 and 35 percent in various estimates. Its source code is open. The last versions of Netscape Navigator were also based on Mozilla software. The linking of Windows and Internet Explorer was one of the reasons for years of antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, during which, for a time, there were also calls for the software giant to be broken up.
