Netscape Navigator, once the dominant Web browser back in the 1990s, will no longer be supported as of February 1, 2008. In a posting to Netscape’s blog, Tom Drapeau writes:

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be.”

AOL originally acquired Netscape for $4.2 billion in November 1998, a landmark event in the first Web boom. For an interesting glimpse back in time, check out CNET’s original coverage of the deal.

In any event, what remains of Netscape now is a fairly generic portal that is co-branded with AOL. For a while, Netscape had re-modeled itself after social news site Digg, but that effort has since been re-branded as Propeller.

Nonetheless, Netscape will always have its place in history, especially for those of us that first found our way onto the Web in the 1990s. As I recall, my first Web browser was Netscape Navigator 2.0 which ran on an IBM personal computer that had a 133mhz processor with brand spankin’ new Windows ’95 as the operating system.

Navigator made it all the way up to version 9, which launched in June of this year.

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