Once it was the biggest browser software out there and was used by over 90% of all people online during the mid 1990’s. AOL’s Netscape navigator has finally come to an end and will no longer be supported by AOL from the 1st of March 2008.

AOL have stated to it’s users that they should either switch to Flock or Firefox which are both built on the foundation technologies that made Netscape dominate. Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Adding important new features such as cookies, frames, and JavaScript (in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial.

Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share during the late 1990’s, the browser was also made available on a number of different operating systems which also helped in it’s success.

However after years of dwindling users the browser as of today now only makes up 0.6% of usage share, probably due to IE being bundled with every Microsoft operating system since Windows 95 and the rise of popularity in the open source browser FireFox.

So what started as the internets most successful browser has became a shadow of it’s former self, the silver lining, however, is that Netscape paved the way for browsers such as Flock and IE’s biggest competitor FireFox and will live on as the core foundation that started a revolution.

Netscape Navigator, December 1994 – March 2008