This year, we'll see AOL prod that old corpse, Netscape, and make it do one last dance. Well, two, actually, if rumors are to be believed.
What you see before you, it seems is the new Netscape Navigator... AOL's idea of a 'web compass', for those who didn't remember that Navigator was actually a web browser before they got their ugly mitts into it. JWZ goes over it with a few of the ex-netscapers in gory detail...
But, get this. To boot, just for all us oldies, there's another twist of the knife: Netscape, a la Microsoft IE. As if it wasn't bad enough that our beloved pet has gone from being a web browser into some kind of alien desktop widget, AOL has seen fit to turn the actual browser into Microsoft Internet Explorer.
And so, at last, it ends. Microsoft wins, in the way most opposite to the way it had intended to: Instead of Microsoft buying Netscape, as it wanted to do on that fateful morning, Netscape became just another IE skin.
