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AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

money.cnn.com

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Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#51

Post by dageshi »

zeroname wrote: post #40
asadotzler wrote: post #11

Good contemporary read: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/fear.html jwz was right, the source code was out there and even though AOL eventually gave up on browser tech, the code lived on to become Firefox, re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward, and providing an independent browser that's beholden to users first.

> ...re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward I fondly remember when the selling point of Firebird/Firefox was that it isn't a bloated, sluggish piece of crap unlike all other major browsers (including Netscape) at the time. Back then, it was still possible to develop a web browser without hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. Fast forward to how the web platform has "progressed"…

I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load, like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison.

That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's no browser with that level of annoyance I don't think.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#52

Post by kakarot »

Scuds wrote: post #15

AOL, an industry behemoth with 14 million subscribers, will acquire Netscape's Navigator and Communicator software, its e-commerce software, and its Netcenter Internet "portal" site, one of the 10 most-visited sites on the Internet. The portal was supposed to be the real cash cow, here. Buying eyeballs in the early era of internet ads. Q: What's a portal? A: Yes, exactly.

It is, and it's called Facebook.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#53

Post by jpalomaki »

skrebbel wrote: post #50
fallous wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time AOL was planning to shut down the Silicon Valley site and preferred to have everything in Virginia. Additionally they were already in talks with Time Warner (which internally we knew about). There was a lot of redundancy in ops between AOL and Netscape, and AOL's talks with Time Warner made it apparent that their belief was that content and subscriber base was their future, not software... which is where…

But then why did they buy Netscape?

Probably for the user base. IIRC Netscape switched from focusing on software to providing portal on the web. The browser became a tool for getting people to their start page.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#54

Post by megablast »

dageshi wrote: post #51
zeroname wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward I fondly remember when the selling point of Firebird/Firefox was that it isn't a bloated, sluggish piece of crap unlike all other major browsers (including Netscape) at the time. Back then, it was still possible to develop a web browser without hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. Fast forward to how the web platform has "progressed"…

I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load, like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison. That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's no browser with that level of annoyance I don'…

Well sure, IE loaded all that crap when windows loaded.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#55

Post by Sharlin »

megablast wrote: post #54
dageshi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load, like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison. That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's no browser with that level of annoyance I don'…

Well sure, IE loaded all that crap when windows loaded.

Yeah. It was already running the whole time, heck, it was the very shell of the OS. Opening an IE window was literally no different from opening a new (filesystem) Explorer window. Hence the decade-long antitrust battles.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#56

Post by hef19898 »

vxNsr wrote: post #20
Reedx wrote: post #10

There's a good Netscape documentary filmed during their last year leading up to the acquisition. When they were working to get the Mozilla source code released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

at 53:30 one of the engineers says " We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's gonna go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that. " Sounds pretty prescient considering current events.

I somehow have the suspicion that the guy is proud of his insight and disappointed to be right at the same time.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#57

Post by dageshi »

megablast wrote: post #54
dageshi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load, like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison. That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's no browser with that level of annoyance I don'…

Well sure, IE loaded all that crap when windows loaded.

Not really, there was a point where it loaded pretty snappily. I think they bundled a bunch of stuff like email client e.t.c. and it was busy loading that stuff along with the browser. That's my recollection anyway.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#58

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

rossdavidh wrote: post #29

It should be said, despite the massive stupidity of how AOL handled what they bought, that their primary motivation might have been to use it as a bargaining chip with Microsoft: "play nice, or we'll make Netscape the default browser for AOL". At the time, that would have made IE a minority browser again, IIRC.

AOL already had its own built-in browser (the imaginatively titled "AOL Browser"), although it used the IE rendering engine under the hood IIRC.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#59

Post by nly »

aasasd wrote: post #48

Alright, the article itself is not so interesting (for me) as the fact that CNN apparently keeps the entire design for an article from '98.

The BBC does the same. Here is their coverage of the same story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/221295.stm . The navigation links on the side even still work.

Presumably pages were either statically generated AOT, or edited directly back then.

Re: AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)

#60

Post by icedchai »

dageshi wrote: post #51
zeroname wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...re-igniting competition for web browsers, moving the web platform forward I fondly remember when the selling point of Firebird/Firefox was that it isn't a bloated, sluggish piece of crap unlike all other major browsers (including Netscape) at the time. Back then, it was still possible to develop a web browser without hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. Fast forward to how the web platform has "progressed"…

I don't recall precisely when but I do recall Netscape taking FOREVER to load, like you'd click on it and it'd take 10 seconds or more (that's what it felt like) to load. It'd sit on a splash screen telling you all the crap it was loading. IE at the time just loaded like a flash in comparison. That was ultimately why I recall switching to IE at the time, nowadays there's no browser with that level of annoyance I don'…

Yeah, I recall that, too. I think it's when they transitioned from "Navigator" (web browser only) to "Communicator" which bundled a lot of other crap in: mail, news, and I forget what else. Netscape 3.x and earlier was pretty light weight. I remember running Netscape 0.9something on my original linux desktop with 8 megs of RAM!
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