The shipping version of Netscape 7.0 also refines a few functions of the Preview Release, which was publicly available for three months (see story). (That's the equivalent of 2 trillion songs or more than 8 trillion novels every 30 days.Netscape hopes to regain some of that market share with Version 7.0, which polishes some rough spots present in the previous version. By 2011, global traffic will reach 7.8 million terabytes per month. Rising consumption of Web video, and more file-sharing, will nearly double worldwide Internet traffic every two years, predicts Cisco Systems, in San Jose, Calif. It took a decade after the browser's launch to reach 50 million domain names – and nearly 50 million new sites went online in 2007 alone, according to Netcraft, an Internet service company in Britain. In Netscape's wake, AOL suggests users switch to its free, open-source successor, Firefox, which is now making small gains.Įver since Netscape triggered mainstream web adoption in 1994, the Internet has continued to swell. People flocked to Netscape, and unwittingly solidified its vision of a single, global network. Before its release there had been rumors that companies would launch their own Internets, parallel networks that were similar but independent, like incompatible operating systems. Netscape's story now becomes part of digital lore.
Despite tweaks, Netscape could never keep up and has been running on empty ever since. Explorer blasted from 0 to 60 percent market share in just four years – and hit 95 percent by 2002. In 1995, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, which came bundled with each copy of Windows. Nine months after its launch, Netscape had $20 million in sales and a market value of $2 billion.īut Netscape's dominance among browsers was short-lived. Thus began the dotcom age, and the gold rush that swept through Silicon Valley and Wall Street in the late 1990s. Suddenly, the World Wide Web was within easy reach.
But Netscape turned everyday computers into portals.
Mosaic had made some inroads among researchers. While not the first browser, Netscape is seen by many Web historians as the evangelist that the Internet needed. Nescape trotted out in 1994 – a time when modems squealed and the consumer Internet was little more than an electronic postal service. But AOL, which has looked after the historic browser during its slow skid to a halt, will no longer support it and will stop releasing technical or security updates.
Retro romantics can even download a copy. 1 marks the end of Netscape Navigator, the first commercial browser, 13 years after it sparked the dotcom boom.
0 kommentar(er)
