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I was saddened by AOL's announcement late last week that it has terminated development of the Netscape Navigator Web browser and will stop supporting it as of February 1st, 2008. Like many who first climbed the on-ramp to the information highway back in the '90s, Netscape was one of the first Web applications I ever used.

In the current context, it's hard to dispute AOL's business decision. Netscape, which once commanded some 85 percent of the browser market share, had declined to less than one percent (.06 percent in the latest survey I saw), which hardly justified keeping even the skeleton development staff that was left on payroll.

Where I fault AOL, which purchased Netscape in 1999 just as the dot.com bubble was reaching the bursting point, is that they never really marketed the browser enthusiastically after they had it, not even making it the default AOL Internet Service browser. Consequently, Netscape was left to slowly wither on the vine, so to speak, although I'll give AOL credit for continuing to support the open source Mozilla Organization that was formed to develop Netscape 5 and later the Gecko rendering engine that has been the guts of all Netscape versions from 6 on (non-Gecko Netscape 5 never saw public release) through 9 until Mozilla found its own legs. The Mozilla Organization was originally established back in 1998 by still-independent Netscape to coordinate the development of a successor to the venerable and once overwhelmingly dominant Netscape browser, then at version 4.x. At first, Mozilla was staffed mostly by Netscape employees, although in theory it operated at arms-length from Netscape, and its nominal mission statement was that the group was developing the Mozilla browser as a trial bed for Netscape 5 and for testing purposes only, and not for use by end users. In 2003, an independent Mozilla foundation was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite, and AOL continued to be a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation. In 2005, the Mozilla Foundation launched a wholly owned subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation to continue the development and delivery of the Firefox Web Browser and the Thunderbird email client software.

And of course, the Gecko engine lives on in Mozilla's own Firefox browser, which now enjoys about a 16 percent market share, as well as the SeaMonkey suite browser that succeeded Mozilla 1.7, the Mac-only Camino browser, and a raft of specially browsers like Flock and Sunrise. Gecko is the second most prolific browser engine in use, the others being number-one Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), WebCore (used by Apple's Safari) and Presto (used by Opera) Indeed, Netscape 6 through 9 have been more or less skinned versions of the Mozilla 1.x browser or in the case of Navigator 9 - Firefox, with some distinctive interface features and enhancements added on.