The web browser pioneer, Netscape Navigator was sentenced to die. AOL announced that the official support for Netscape Navigator will be stopped starting from March 1st. I remember myself when I first used the Internet. Netscape was the favorite browser back then. Although, the bad marketing and the strong competitor Internet Explorer have lowered its market share.

Nowadays, Netscape has only 0.61% of the market. When its decline was obvious, the company opened its source code, making it available for developers. So, the Mozilla project appeared and today’s popular Firefox. In spite of being acquired by AOL in 1998, Netscape remained in obscurity. It had troubles with security patches and bug fixes, so the web surfers forgot it.

If you still planing to use Netscape Navigator, you should perhaps switch to Firefox and add an extension for Netscape. For now I will just say “RIP Netscape Navigator…”

via Gearater

Mozilla’s VP of Engineerring, Mike Schroepfer, announced that with all these developments on mobile phones nowadays it’s time for Mozilla to go mobile with “no compromise” to security or other issues. Firefox is the world’s most popular open-source browser and with a market of 20 mobile devices to outnumber 1 computer I think they will do good.

First Mozilla needs to finish developing Firefox 3 before they release the mobile version that will be able to run Firefox extensions and allow people to build rich applications via XUL. Two new people have been accounted in the team: Christian Sejersen, head of browsers at Openwave (NSDQ: OPWV) and Brad Lassey which moved from France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) R&D.

To make sure it’s clear here’s what Mike Schroepfer said:

* Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.

* We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.