It’s the end of a web era. Poor aul Netscape Navigator has been dying a slow death for a number of years and has now been dealt the final death blow as AOL will no longer support the browser as of tomorrow, March 1st.
I feel like we should hold a wake or something. Netscape was the first big browser used by over 90% of web users in the mid-90′s; until Internet Exploder came along; it’s market share is now around 0.6%.
Although the browser will soon disappear within a short while in body it will still remain in spirit in the guise of Firefox [FF 3 coming out very soon] and Firefox clones such as Flock [1.1b out now]. AOL are of course recommending people switch to either of these two browsers.
IE8 is due out soon enough, beta testing begun a while back, and it is expected to support some advanced CSS stuff such as CSS tables which, with my limited knowledge of CSS browser support, should mean css tables can be more widely used. Which is nice.
CSS tables, fyi, should provide designers with an easier and more robust way of producing multicolumn css layouts.
Now if only people would make the switch from IE5/6/7 asap without holding on to old browsers for donkeys years we’d be in a much better situation.
Anyway … Netscape Navigator … all the best me aul mucker!
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