Doug's Views

Netscape is dead - Long live Mozilla

It was announced yesterday that AOL was ending production of the Netscape Browser with the release of Version 7.1 which was just released at the end of June.

Wow! Normally I would be sad - I am since Netscape has been my primary browser since version 4 - but the reason Netscape is going away is a going to be a good thing for those of us who use the Internet.

Back 1998, when Netscape saw they would stomped out by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, created an open souce group called Mozilla.org. That group got the source code for a new generation of Browser with the Gekko rendering engine and the Netscape Browser suite was made freeware.

This week, with the end of Netscape, as developer of a Browser suite, AOL gave $2 million dollars in money and equipment to set Mozilla.org off on its own.

The Mozilla browser has been built from scratch by a collection of programers at Netscape and volunteer coders from around the world. It took some time to get to version 1 and now they are up to version 1.4 and the Internet community is giving kudos to all the work.

I am writing this post using Mozilla Firebird - a test browser show where it is going in the near future. It is as simple as it can get. It is just a browser that can be extended and expand as the user wants when they want. Instead of a 14 meg download like Netscape 7.1 was, Mozilla Firebird is only about 6 meg. It is almost fully customizable even down to the menu items that show up at the top of the screen.

I recommend Mozilla.

Mozilla.org