Netscape is dead.
So we’ve been debating around the office how much support for older versions of Netscape should be built into our forthcoming project called ImageKind. One of our developers felt pretty strongly that we should develop an experience that degrades nicely back to Netscape version 4. I was concerned that this kind of support would take needless development cycles and started doing some research to see what the latest browser rankings were. While no single information source is anything close to conclusive, I didn’t find a single site that led me to believe that any Netscape versions other than the last two builds are worth taking seriously at all. What surprised me more was how much ground Netscape has given up over the past two years. Some sites had some pretty interesting data which made for good reading but nobody was prepared to say that Netscape has more than 2% marketshare anymore. Two percent! In some ways these stats make me feel old. It really doesn’t feel that long ago that us early (Spry) Mosaic employees were standing around the water cooler talking about all the cool things the Netscape browser could do that Mosaic wouldn’t do nicely. Man, Netscape was cool back then! The smartest and brightest folks wanted to work there. The way we felt about Netscape then is pretty much how people feel about Google today. I’d like to see Google be cool 10 years from now. Wish them luck and Au revoir to you Netscape!
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