AOL-Netscape
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Internet, Software, & Telecommunication |
| Founded | April 4, 1994 (as Mosaic Communications Corporation) |
| Headquarters |
Mountain View, California, U.S. (as an independent company) Dulles, Virginia, U.S. (after becoming a part of AOL) |
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Key people
|
Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and William Foss (founders); James Barksdale (CEO) |
| Products |
Internet suite Web browser Internet service provider Web portal |
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Number of employees
|
2,500 (2002) |
| Parent |
AOL (1999–2017) Oath Inc. (2017–present) |
| Website | isp |
Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation or Netscape) is an American computer services company known for its web browser, Netscape Navigator.
When Netscape was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California.
Netscape's web browser was once dominant but it has lost most of that glare to its competitors Internet Explorer during the so-called first browser war. The usage share of Netscape had fallen from over ninety percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent by the end of 2006.
Netscape is credited with creating JavaScript language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. The company is also known for developing the SSL which is used for securing online communications that was used before its successor TLS took over.
Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when it was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US $10 billion. Shortly before its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product. The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine; all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. The Gecko engine would later be used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.
Under AOL, Netscape's browser development continued until December 2007 when AOL announced that the company would stop supporting the Netscape browser as of early 2008. As of 2011, AOL has continued to use the Netscape brand to market a discount Internet service provider.
Netscape was the first company to attempt to capitalize on the nascent World Wide Web. It was founded under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as investors. The first meeting between Clark and Andreessen was never truly about a software or service like Netscape, but more about a product that was similar to Nintendo. Clark recruited other early team members from SGI and NCSA Mosaic. Jim Barksdale came on board as CEO in January 1995. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen originally created a 20-page concept pitch for an online gaming network to Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 console, but a deal was never reached. Marc Andreessen explains, "If they had shipped a year earlier, we probably would have done that instead of Netscape."
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Wikipedia