Netscape: A decade of survival

Netscape celebrates a decade on the Web last week amid signs of an unprecedented browser renaissance. But AOL will have to fight to keep its faded brand in the spotlight.

Microsoft's dominant IE browser hasn't enjoyed a significant feature update in years, opening up opportunities for small challengers including Netscape progeny Firefox, Opera Software's Opera and Apple's Safari browser.

Even as a glimmer of competition opens up in the browser market, a weakened Netscape could find itself sidelined after years of abuse at the hands of Microsoft and subsequent neglect after AOL agreed to purchase the company for about $5bn in 1999.

"It certainly was one of the most powerful brands on the Internet at one point," said Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg. "However, that brand has been severely tarnished over the last several years. It's hard to see how they're going to [revitalise the brand] at a time when there's been such a decline in terms of consumers' perception of what Netscape is all about."

Microsoft maintains its stranglehold on the browser market. But the company is beginning to feel momentum for change thanks to mounting dissatisfaction with features and severe security problems with IE. Major computer security groups such as the US Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team recently recommended Web surfers switch from Microsoft's browser, although some of that criticism has since been blunted with last month's release of a major IE security update for users of Windows XP.

In an intriguing twist, the major catalyst for competition has come not from commercial browser efforts but rather collectives of open-source programmers.

Although Netscape gave birth to the most important open-source browser group, Mozilla, AOL has yet to capitalise on Mozilla's recent successes. While Mozilla and its Firefox preview releases win raves, AOL continues to use IE as the default browser for its proprietary online service and as the basis for its planned standalone browser. In recent months AOL has barely promoted Netscape 7, which was based on pre-Firefox versions of Mozilla and most recently updated in August.

Even before its full-version 1.0 release -- now scheduled for the second week of November -- Firefox exceeded its goal of one million downloads in 10 days, surpassed 4.3 million downloads in one month, won plaudits from reviewers, and earned the interest of corporate developers, including Nokia. Scattered metrics suggest the browser might be cutting into Microsoft's still-overwhelming lead.

Even Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who last year dismissed the state of browser navigation as "an embarrassment", recently weighed in with praise for Firefox, which he said along with open-source based Safari could threaten IE.

One of Andreessen's cohorts from the early Netscape days called that wishful thinking, noting that Microsoft has the resources to defend its browser dominance should a serious threat ever develop.