Netscape Navigator
The browser with the shooting-star "N" and the throbbing loading icon that, for millions, simply was the early web. Netscape dominated the mid-1990s before losing the browser war to Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer.
Netscape Navigator was first released on December 15, 1994, by Netscape Communications — a company co-founded by Marc Andreessen, who had co-written the pioneering Mosaic browser at NCSA, and Silicon Graphics veteran Jim Clark. Navigator was a fresh codebase rather than Mosaic itself, and it quickly became most people's first window onto the World Wide Web.
At its height in the mid-1990s, Navigator was the dominant browser, holding well over half the market, its meteor-shower logo and 'N' icon ubiquitous. Then Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows — a move central to the US government's antitrust case against Microsoft — and successive IE releases eroded Netscape's lead until, by around 2003, its user base had all but vanished.
In March 1998 Netscape open-sourced most of its code, spawning the Mozilla project — the ancestor of Firefox — and AOL acquired the company in 1999. AOL ended Navigator's development in 2007, with support ceasing in early 2008. Netscape lost the browser war, but through Mozilla it arguably won the long game.
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