[5] Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US$10 billion.

[6][7] In February 1998, approximately one year prior to its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product.

Netscape's browser development continued until December 2007, when AOL announced that the company would stop supporting it by early 2008.

Instead, think about an encyclopedia—one with unlimited, graphically rich pages, connections to E-mail and files, and access to Internet newsgroups and online shopping.

[18][19] It was founded under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins as investors.

[25] A cartoon Godzilla-like lizard mascot was drawn by artist-employee Dave Titus,[26] which went well with the theme of crushing the competition.

On August 9, 1995, Netscape made an extremely successful IPO, only sixteen months after the company was formed.

While it was somewhat unusual for a company to go public prior to becoming profitable, Netscape's revenues had, in fact, doubled every quarter in 1995.

Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.

Former Netscape executives Mike Homer and Peter Currie have described this period as "hectic and crazy" and that the company was undone by factors both internal and external.

[38] On November 24, 1998, America Online (AOL) announced it would acquire Netscape Communications in a tax-free stock swap valued at US$4.2 billion.

[6][7] This merger was ridiculed by many who believed that the two corporate cultures could not possibly mesh; one of its most prominent critics was longtime Netscape developer Jamie Zawinski.

[48] Additionally, Netscape also maintained the Propeller web portal, which was a popular social-news site, similar to Digg, which was given a new look in June 2006.

[49] On December 28, 2007, AOL announced that it would drop support for the Netscape web browser and would no longer develop new releases on February 1, 2008.

[11] The date was later extended to March 1[12] to allow a major security update and to add a tool to assist users in migrating to other browsers.

The browser was easily the most advanced available[citation needed] and so was an instant success, becoming a market leader while still in beta.

Version 3.0 of Netscape (the first beta was codenamed "Atlas") was the first to face any serious competition in the form of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0.

Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.

[52] Despite this, Apple entered into an agreement with Microsoft to make IE the default browser on new Mac OS installations, a further blow to Netscape's prestige.

[56] On January 22, 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation announced that all future versions of its software would be available free of charge and developed by an open source community, Mozilla.

These had more features than the old Netscape version, including better support of HTML 4, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript; eventually, the more advanced Internet Explorer 5.0 became the market leader.

AOL had decided to deactivate Mozilla's popup-blocker functionality in Netscape 7.0, which created an outrage in the community.

Examples are handling of right-to-left or bi-directional text, user interface widgets, bugs and web standards violations in Trident, etc.

Netscape Browser 8.1.3 was released on April 2, 2007, and included general bug fixes identified in versions 8.0–8.1.2[64][65] Netscape Navigator 9's features were said to include newsfeed support and become more integrated with the Propeller Internet portal,[66] alongside more enhanced methods of discussion, submission and voting on web pages.

[71] AOL officially announced[11][12] that support for Netscape Navigator would end on March 1, 2008, and recommended that its users download either the Flock or Firefox browsers, both of which were based on the same technology.

[72] The decision met mixed reactions from communities, with many arguing that the termination of product support is significantly belated.

[73] Asa Dotzler, one of Firefox's original bug testers, greeted the news with "good riddance" in his blog post, but praised the various members of the Netscape team over the years for enabling the creation of Mozilla in 1998.

[74] Others protested and petitioned AOL to continue providing vital security fixes to unknowing or loyal users of its software, as well as protection of a well-known brand.

[82] However, businesses quickly recognized the use of push technology to deliver ads to users, which annoyed them, so Netcaster was short-lived.

Its client software continued to be made available for Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT), Macintosh, Linux, OS/2, BeOS, and many versions of Unix including DEC, Sun Solaris, BSDI, IRIX, IBM AIX, and HP-UX.