Netscape Navigator was released twenty years ago

Netscape Navigator is twenty years old. The web browser of the company Netscape Communications Corporation was the dominant browser for a long time, but after the ‘browser war’ eventually had to recognize its superiority in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The code of Netscape Navigator versions is based on Mosaic, which is considered the ‘mother of all browsers’. The developers, who released the first versions as Mosaic Navigator, built a browser that was relatively user-friendly at the time. In addition, Netscape Navigator was free to use for non-commercial purposes and was available on several operating systems.

Netscape built the Gecko engine for processing HTML documents. In addition, the company developed numerous technologies that have become commonplace in the browser world, such as the implementation of cookies, javascript and frames.

Developers like Marc Andreessen’s assessment that browsers would be one of the most important components of future operating systems turned out to be correct: Netscape Navigator, later succeeded by Netscape Communicator, with the added bonus of an HTML editor, and an email and Usenet client, grew. quickly became the most used web browser.

Netscape’s rapid growth did not go unnoticed by Microsoft. The company released Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows. Thus, the browser war was born. With the release of IE 5.0, Microsoft managed to break the dominant position of Netscape. Microsoft was fined years later for allegedly engaging in illegal business practices and abuse of its dominant position during the browser war.

In the late 1990s, Netscape lost the browser war. The company decided to make the code open source, after which years later the Mozilla project developed Firefox, among other things, based on the code and the Gecko engine. In 1999, internet giant AOL bought Netscape, after which several versions of the browser were released. However, the power of IE had become too great and eventually AOL support was discontinued on March 1, 2008.