The Death of an Old Friend

I've been poking around the internets since Gopher was the best web browser around. Of course, nobody remembers Gopher now, because it really wasn't a particularly great protocol. No, the web came into its own with the creation of NCSA Mosaic, which spun off quickly into the first mass-market web browser, Netscape.

While the web seems firmly established in our world today, it didn't really begin until Netscape burst forth onto the scene 13 years ago. Netscape offered support for visual images online, and began to give us our first glimpses into what the web could be. Anyone who surfed the internet in its infancy used Netscape to gaze into the world wide web. It is perhaps too much to say that the internet would not exist without Netscape, but its evolution would undoubtedly have been different. It was the catalyst for the tech boom. And it helped build this medium.

Which is why this bit of news makes me feel just a bit sad:

An historic name in software will effectively pass into history in February as AOL discontinues development and active support for the Netscape browser, according to an official blog.

AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software, according to a Friday entry on The Netscape Blog by Tom Drapeau, lead developer for Netscape.com. The Netscape.com Web site will remain as a general-purpose portal.

AOL, of course, is not wrong to do so. The Netscape browser has less than a one percent market share, and AOL is already struggling to survive, and avoid becoming another internet memory that fades through the years.

But though Netscape is gone, it will not be forgotten. Those of you using Firefox, like me, are using a direct descendant of Netscape. But even if you're using Internet Explorer, you're still benefiting from the world Netscape first helped show. The internet would not be what it is without Netscape, and that's reason enough to raise a glass to the departing browser. Thanks for the memories.

(Via Balloon Juice)