Netscape is dying. After Friday, February 1st, there will not be nay more updates. It's was a long journey, but in all reality Netscape has long been dead. I didn't get my 1st computer until November 2000 (the computer is still going strong. In fact, this post is being written on it), and by then, AOHell has acquired it, and the source code had been released as open source. Almost as an afterthought, Gateway had put the installer for Netscape 4.06 on it which I installed. Compared to IE 5.5/6, it was about on par. Unfortunately, it was also running Windows ME (thank you to The Anti-Christ, and I had some other issue necessitating a wipe and rebuild of my hard drive, and the installer was very will hidden on my restore set. So I lost it, and I used IE for several years.
In the meanwhile, the Mozilla foundation had been founded and the code that started out to be Netscape was now being released as the Mozilla suite (Netscape 6/7 is essentially the Mozilla suite with a buncha of AOHell crap bundled into them). From the Mozilla Suite, it was decided to develop just a browser (rather than a full internet suite), and this became phoenix, then firebird (when I first started using it), and now you all now it as firefox. Another effort to produce a dedicated email client result in Thunderbird. Along the way, the Mozilla suite was discontinued, but it's descendant still lives on in the form of SeaMonkey.
Netscape is dying they say. I say Netscape died when AOHell bought them out. But Netscape still lives. Firefox and Thunderbird are it's great-great grandchildren descended from a long line going all the was back to 1994 and before.
BTW, Netscape and Internet Explorer both can trace there lineage in one form or another to NCSA Mosaic. If you're really feeling adventurous, you can give it a try by downloading it here. Otherwise, you're better off by downloading and using Firefox.
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