Netscape

Platform/Software
Year initiated: 
1994
Record Status: 
Description: 

Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters was in Mountain View, California.

Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the so-called first browser war. The usage share of Netscape had fallen from over 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent by the end of 2006.

Netscape is credited with developing the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) for securing online communication, which is still widely used,as well as JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages.

Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when it was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US$10 billion. Shortly before its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product. The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine; all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. The Gecko engine would later be used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

Under AOL, Netscape's browser development continued until December 2007, when AOL announced that the company would stop supporting the Netscape browser as of early 2008. AOL has continued to use the Netscape brand in recent years to market a discount Internet service provider.

(Wikipedia)

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Version history (text): 

Netscape was the first company to attempt to capitalize on the nascent World Wide Web. It was originally founded under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as investors. Clark recruited other early team members from SGI and NCSA Mosaic. Jim Barksdale came on board as CEO in January 1995. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen originally created a 20-page concept pitch for an online gaming network to Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 console, but a deal was never reached. Marc Andreessen explains, "If they had shipped a year earlier, we probably would have done that instead of Netscape."

The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9, released on October 13, 1994. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took the 'Netscape' name (coined by employee Greg Sands, although it was also a trademark of Cisco Systems) on November 14, 1994 to avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser. The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code. The internal codename for the company's browser was Mozilla, which stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. A cartoon Godzilla-like lizard mascot was drawn by artist-employee Dave Titus, which went well with the theme of crushing the competition. The Mozilla mascot featured prominently on Netscape's web site in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to this being removed.

(Wikipedia)

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Netscape
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Record posted by: 
Sumeya Hassan