“It’s something you'd expect from a start-up, not the largest software company in the world.” But just five years later, Netscape’s share was 4%, having been drained faster than a beer keg at a Delta Tau Chi party, and what little was left of Navigator included an open-source skunkworks project called Phoenix. Some of Netscape’s engineers started developing a subset of the suite to produce a nimble browser, and that eventually became Firefox (after conflicts over its. The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code.It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its use had almost disappeared. Chris Holten, Netscape’s spokeswoman at the time, likened the logo stunt to a fraternity prank. Most of Netscape Navigator (or rather, Communicator) was released as open source in 1998 this was then extensively rewritten and eventually emerged as the Mozilla application suite. Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. – a signal that the browser war was fully ignited.Įarlier that evening in San Francisco as Microsoft celebrated IE 4.0’s release, Netscape’s Navigator was enjoying a 72% share of the browser market. 30, 1997, a group of Microsoft employees strategically placed a large metal likeness of the Internet Explorer logo on the front lawn at Netscape Communications in Mountain View, Calif. Mozilla: Mozilla Application Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Historique Des Sorties de Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Le Livre de Source Wikipedia on.