Alas, poor Netscape... we knew ye' well.

Talk about death by a thousand cuts, Netscape's Communicator is a living (dying) example.

The once highly revered browser that brought the Internet in to our homes and businesses is so fast sliding into web obscurity, it numbs the mind when the mind chances to dwell upon such things. I mean, really(!) Netscape Navigator only three years ago was the Internet browser. It put a friendly interface on the web. The icons on top were simple and straightforward... and to be candid about this point... I preferred the old graphical concept to what exists today. And, 'holy cow!' when the 'Gold' edition of Navigator hit the streets with its 'Composer' feature, wow! a free web page authoring tool that was guaranteed to work and everything it produced was in harmony with Navigator.

Of course, trying to construct web pages with Composer that reflected a smattering of typography and graphic design was much akin to making fine beaded jewelry out of bricks. Headline type was uncontrollable and at the whim of the browser and the browser's limited font library. Page formatting was relegated to heroic measures involving tables and invisible shims, cellpadding and cellspacing. Who, in the early days, hasn't constructed a web page and 'bulled' the type around by inserting zillions of " "? And who, honestly, didn't once in their web authoring career try out the 'blink' feature of Navigator?

It was also Netscape who gave the Internet frames. Frames have their purpose but can be, and are, overused. On the various computer shopping sites, the visitor would soon become lost without the navigational aid of a reference frame. Yet... there are those long-time web masters who loathe frames and will give it their all to avoid using frames. Personally, I prefer creating the illusion of a frame by using cascading style sheets (CSS) and HTML 4. But I'm not against frames. This entire web site is nested in a frame. Just click the View Source link to see for your self. Shame on me, but frames hide the code.

So, what is it that's killing Netscape? It's my opinion that Netscape administered its own poison. I say this because it's also my feeling that Netscape, the company, couldn't sell water to rich men dying of thirst. Brilliant programmers they were, but lousy salesmen and marketers. Netscape's developers were true believers, believing that their product would aid in changing the world. Well, they were right about that call, but they really had no idea as to what to do with their 'wonder product'. I can clearly remember the day when Netscape announced on its home page that they were no longer going to concern themselves with the 'little guys' and focus all of their attention on the 'heavy hitter' computer clients. It was then when a torpedo slammed into Navigator's ship. The 'big guys' were being wooed by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Novell and Netscape was so deluded as to believe that they could walk right in to the networking and e-commerce arena and compete.

Personally, I have nothing against Netscape. Hell, I was one of the very few people who actually paid for a copy of Communicator. I felt obliged to. I still use Communicator to test my web designs and therein lies the main reason for Netscape's demise. By virtue of the fact that we web designers have to continually 'test' our work with the two top ranked browsers to make sure the pages work correctly (or at least acceptably) is evidence enough of what is wrong with Netscape. Ideally, there should be no reason to have to test web pages in other than one browser. When it was only 'tables' and 'frames', Netscape could compete with the best of them. Certainly at that time (two years ago) Netscape's product was superior to Microsoft's Internet Explorer... and lord knows that Netscape's email agent was far superior to the one in IE3.

No... where Netscape faulted, in my opinion, was in its very slow start to grasp onto the idea of CSS and Dynamic HTML and its being out of step with standards espoused by the World Wide Web Consortium.