Netscape

From Computing Knowledgebase

Wikipedia:Netscape was the umbrella name for a series of web browsers originally produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, now a subsidiary of AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser war, it lost virtually all of its market share to Internet Explorer.

Netscape's code was eventually donated to the Mozilla Foundation, and resulted in the Mozilla Suite. This soon began to suffer from feature creep, and a project was initiated to produce a lightweight, cut-down version of Mozilla Suite. This eventually resulted in Mozilla Firefox, and then Mozilla Thunderbird.

Netscape enjoyed a short rebirth, at first adapting the code for Mozilla Suite, used as late as Netscape 7.2, but Netscape then switched to the Mozilla Firefox codebase, and created Netscape 8. Netscape 8 had an unusual feature; it could switch between Mozilla Firefox's rendering engine, and Internet Explorer's rendering engine.