Netscape
More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark
- Type
- Software company (acquired 1999)
- Successor
- Mozilla
The browser that made the web a mass market, and whose 1995 IPO started the dotcom era.
Marc Andreessen had co-written Mosaic at university and built a commercial successor with Jim Clark. Navigator quickly became dominant. In just a few years the company gave the world SSL, cookies, JavaScript and frames — protocols and features still in use.
The August 1995 IPO, of a company with barely any revenue, turned the share price into news and set the tone for the next five years. Microsoft responded by bundling Internet Explorer into Windows at no cost — the basis of the US antitrust case — and Netscape lost the market. AOL bought the remains in 1999; the code became Mozilla.