That’s right, AOL will stop actively development on the Netscape Navigator browser on February 1, 2008.  This truly marks the end of an era.  Netscape released one of the first mass market internet browsers before losing ground to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the late nineties.

However, some good came out of the whole deal.  When Netscape released the source code to the open source community it gave birth the Mozilla browser and the Mozilla Suite (browser, email, & chat client).  Of course, everyone knows about Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

It is sad to see Netscape go.  I remember using the Netscape Communicator suite religiously to do all of my internet surfing and email reading.  Of course, we can all forget about that horrible experience that is Netscape 6.0 (I’m sure they would even like to forget about it).  But Netscape was always (up until 6.0) the better browser.  Microsoft just integrated Internet Explorer into Windows giving everyone a web browser on their desktop and thus no need to search out a better alternative.

Rest in Peace Netscape, you will be missed.