Netscape 3.0 introduced many new features such as new plug-ins, background colors for tables, the archive attribute, and the applet element.

Netscape Navigator 3 was the undisputed web browser giant in its time with over 90% share, but it was later eroded by the free Internet Explorer included with Windows 95.

The new suite was successful, despite increasing competition from Internet Explorer 4.0 and problems with the outdated browser core.

On January 22, 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation announced that all future versions of their software would be free of charge and developed by an Open Source Community (Mozilla).

But there were significant delays to the release of Netscape's next major version and Communicator therefore aged badly over the many years it was still used.

Netscape 5.0 (codenamed "Gromit"[7]) was a continuation of the 4.x code, but only two pre-alpha versions were written, one based on original Communicator code (with layout engine stability and performance enhancements to the 4.0 codebase, codenamed Mariner) and another using the Gecko layout engine.

The aging Communicator code proved difficult to work with and the decision was made in late October to drop the code branch of the Communicator 4.5 core rendering engine and start from scratch using the standards-compliant Gecko rendering engine.

It was based on Mozilla 0.6, which was not ready to be used by the general public yet due to many serious bugs that would cause it to crash often or render web pages slowly.

Later versions of Netscape 6 were much improved (6.2.x was regarded as an especially good release), but the browser still struggled to make an impact on a disappointed community.

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

AOL continued to develop Netscape in-house, but, due to there being no staff committed to it, improvements were minimal.

Its features were said to include newsfeed support and become more integrated with the Propeller Internet portal,[20] alongside more enhanced methods of discussion, submission and voting on web pages.

On December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL would discontinue their web browser on February 1, 2008, due to low market share.

[26] On January 28, 2008, Netscape revised this date to March 1, 2008, and offered support for migration to Flock and Mozilla Firefox.