Today's internet users may know Chrome, Safari, or Edge, as browsers. But in his day, there was one name that was very famous and had no opponent, namely Netscape.
The story of Netscape begins in April 1994, when Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic is the name of the software that allows users to access different kinds of content on the web.
Andreessen previously worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. While Clark previously worked at Silicon Graphics, which then brought a number of colleagues to work at Mosaic, so did Andreessen.
In October 1994, the team released Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and in December they changed the company name to Netscape Communications, coinciding with the release of Netscape Navigator 1.0.
The founders of Netscape were well aware that the web browser would be a revolutionary tool. They also make this browser free for individuals, academics, and research use, as quoted by us from Techspot, Sunday (20/2/2022).
"By making Netscape free for personal use, the company is following the tradition of software for the Internet being offered free of charge," Netscape wrote in a 1994 statement.
Meanwhile, commercial users must purchase the license, which is USD 99 per user, including warranty and support. But that price didn't last long, because after that the price was often discounted to USD 40 per license.
At the time, Navigator was the only publicly available browser. So they can be said to have no competitors at all.
On August 9, 1995, Netscape began selling its shares to the public, at an opening price of USD 28 per share. On the first day of trading, the stock skyrocketed to USD 75 per share, which means its market capitalization is USD 3 billion.
The soaring value of Netscape's shares can be seen as a sign of the large number of investors who are interested in parking their money in internet companies, which then creates the so-called 'dot-com bubble'.
But not long after Netscape made its initial public offering (IPO), Microsoft -- which had actually been secretly working on its browser -- released Windows 95, complete with Internet Explorer 1.0.
Despite finally having competitors, Microsoft still lags behind Netscape. It was only after IE 3.0 was released in August 1996 that Microsoft could catch up with Netscape's browser technology.
After that, Microsoft -- with various tactics -- pursued its browser market share, including through IE which was automatically installed as the default browser on every Windows-based PC.
Netscape continued to develop its Navigator and Communicator browsers, and in 1998 they released the Communicator source code, which later sparked the creation of the Mozilla project, and became the Firefox browser.
However, after releasing the source code, Netscape's browser development slowed down, and on the other hand, Microsoft continued to push for development. They are recorded to spend more than USD 100 million annually, with a team of more than 1000 people.
In late 1999, Microsoft 'won' the browser market share, which became the beginning of the death phase for Netscape.
Netscape's already gasping condition got an additional breath from AOL (formerly America Online), which acquired Netscape for USD 4.2 billion in November 1998.
However, development is still slow and the browser's performance is getting worse because the web display is getting heavier and the internet connection is also getting faster.
August 2022 Netscape 7 was released, and in the same year AOL closed its Netscape division and laid off almost all of its employees. In 2005 AOL sold Netscape to Mercurial Communications, a Canadian company, which then released Netscape Browser 8 in May 2005.
AOL then re-purchased Netscape and released Netscape Navigator 9 in October 2007, retained it for several months, released Netscape Navigator version 9.0.0.6, and finally closed the browser.