Netscape
Management:
- Marc
Andreessen - Teen Idol
- Jim
Barksdale - Heating and Cooling
- Troy
Chevalier - That's Mr. Chevalier to you.
- Jim
Clark - Uncle Jim's Money Store
- Alex
Edelstein - Voice Crying Out In The Wilderness
- Tony
Fernandes - Costume Design
- John
Giannandrea - Brave Fool
- Laura
Grenyo - Bahalana
- Joy
Lenz - Salvage
- Jean-Charles
Mourey - "Charles, not Claude, Vandammit!"
- Harrison
Page - Former Topless Dancer
- Tom "Pacman" Paquin
- Interpretive Dance Instructor
- Rick
Schell - Vice President of Stuff
- Michael
Toy - White Board Operator
- The
Mozilla 3.0 Team, 1996.
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Netscape built
the first commercial web browser, providing a major driver of the
development of the web and related online innovation that characterized
the late 1990's.
In May, 1994, Jim Clark, founder of the computer company Silicon
Graphics Inc., Marc Andreessen, and others from the Mosaic development
team formed a company to develop a commercial web browser. The
University of Illinois almost immediately sued. The company announced
settlement of the suit at the Comdex conference in the fall of
1994, and, as part of the settlement, agreed to change its name
from "Mosaic Communications" to "Netscape".
Netscape had the resources to improve their technology much faster
than the NCSA,
and the use of Netscape spread rapidly. In October 1994, Netscape
released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b,
over the Internet. On December 15, the final version was released,
Mozilla 1.0, the first commercial web browser.
By the end of 1994, the amount of Web traffic on the Internet
passed the amount of Telnet traffic for the first time, and became
the second largest source of traffic on the NSFNET after
FTP. In April 1995, the number of web packets passed the
number of FTP packets communicated over the NSFNET.
Netscape quickly provided many powerful new browser features,
and conveniently integrated three Internet technologies in one
application -- web, email, and newsgroups. Netscape also made a
point of ensuring that their browser was designed to run on all
three of the major computer types -- Windows, Macintosh, and Unix.
Netscape was made available for free over
the web to individuals and non-profit organizations from the beginning, which
was key to its rapid adoption. At first, Netscape asked people to pay after
using the browser for a trial period. However, as pressure from Microsoft's
free Internet Explorer browser mounted,
they quickly realized that their profits were going to come from development
of web server software, traffic to their home page, and related revenues, and
stopped asking users to pay for the browser.
In 1995, Netscape had the
then third largest ever Initial Product Offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock
exchange.
In January, 1998, the Netscape Navigator standard edition was made
free (archive) and source
code published on the new Mozilla web
site for any developer to examine and improve,
adding their
software to
the free
open source software environment, where code is freely
published so that potentially millions of people can use it and offer improvements.
The Mozilla foundation has gone on to develop the leading Firefox web browser
and Thunderbird email application.
In November, 1998, under great pressure from
Microsoft and their development of Internet Explorer, Netscape was
sold to America Online.
A few attempts were made to keep the commercial code base going, but soon fizzled
out.