Twelve years ago, Netscape's still-young (though already in its second version) Navigator Web browser took home its first Editors' Choice award from PC Magazine. We said it "pushed the technology envelope in every direction, from embedded multimedia to advanced HTML." It was all so quaint. And now it's all so over.

AOL, Netscape's parent, will officially put a stake in the heart of the Netscape browser operation on March 1. Version 9 (wow, we made it all the way to 9!) will be the last Navigator. I read the news with a combination of resignation and sorrow. Resignation because Netscape's browser had ceased to be the smart, simple, leading browser I used a good eight years ago, and sorrow because I loved that old browser. For me, Netscape Navigator Gold was the gold standard in Web browsing.

What most people forget (and, of course, none of the young adults, teens, and kids coming online today know) is there was a time when Netscape ruled. Web pages were designed to work with Netscape's browser. Netscape owned 90 percent or so of the browsing market. Back in the day, we all laughed at Microsoft's lame attempts to lure Web surfers onto the Internet Superhighway with Internet Explorer.

Okay, that's a lie. None of us laughed. In fact, we thought Microsoft Internet Explorer (as it was officially called back then) was quite good, and though Netscape was "ubiquitous," IE had features Netscape users had never seen before, including exotic things like tables, moving marquees, and AVI video animation. It also had something that was far more important, though I don't think we knew it at the time. Instead, we mentioned it in our March 12, 1996 review almost in passing, "Many will use it just because it's there, it's free, and it dovetails with Windows 95."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2259414,00.asp