Netscape said a year ago that cracking open its source code-egg and spilling its precious browser brains into the hands of developers worldwide was the company's best chance for keeping up with Microsoft in the browser race.
A year later, Microsoft is rolling out a spruced-up version 5.0 of Internet Explorer. There's still no ship date for Netscape Communicator 5.0, and Netscape as we knew it has withered into the arms of America Online.
Has Netscape's open-source, Mozilla-driven approach paid off? Or does IE's latest release leave Netscape ceding the browser race to Microsoft?
To Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, which monitors the state of electronic media including the Internet, Microsoft's lead may be insurmountable.
"I think clearly the Netscape browser is in eclipse," Chester said. "It's more now of a glorified portal to bring traffic into the AOL network.... It was a great browser. I prefer it but I think, at the end of the day, it was a place that glommed a lot of eyeballs so AOL could sell advertising and collect data. It was not bought for its technological prowess."
Jamie Love of the Consumer Project on Technology said Netscape's "big strength has been the client software. [Now] they're just disappearing as a company."
Such predictions of doom are way off the mark, say Netscape insiders and other observers.
Jim Hamerly, vice president of Netscape's client products division, say the doomsayers are dead wrong and completely ignorant of America Online's stated intentions.
"Mozilla, Gecko, and all the technologies that it represents are core technologies that are vital, not only to us, but to AOL as well," Hamerly said "AOL has openly supported Mozilla and our open source initiative."
In the days after America Online announced plans to buy Netscape, AOL proclaimed its support for the development of the browser and the Mozilla project. But it did so only after Mozilla project leader Jamie Zawinski posted a letter to the Mozilla community.
AOL chairman Steve Case called Netscape's software engineers an experienced development team with the ability to innovate rapidly. "We are committed to maintaining continuity at Netscape," Case said at the time.
There's no question that AOL is a wildcard, said Forrester Research analyst Paul Hagen. "[But] I'm starting to see a little bit of joint development and cross-fertilization [between AOL and its Netscape subsidiary]."
Whatever AOL ends up doing with the software, the company has changed course on what it plans to achieve in Netscape's next release. That achievement will depend heavily on a component that's also largely responsible for the software's delay.
