AOL-Netscape

Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US$10 billion."America Online Inc. Completes Acquisition of Netscape Communications Corp."
. Business Wire. March 17, 1999. Retrieved July 1, 2012."What's $10 Billion to AOL?"
. Morningstar. April 5, 1999. Retrieved July 1, 2012. In February 1998, approximately one year prior to its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product. The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine, and all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. When AOL scaled back its involvement with Mozilla Organization in the early 2000s, the Organization proceeded to establish the Mozilla Foundation in July 2003 to ensure its continued independence with financial and other assistance from AOL. The Gecko engine is used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

Netscape's browser development continued until December 2007, when AOL announced that the company would stop supporting it by early 2008. As of 2011, AOL continued to use the Netscape brand to market a discount Internet service provider.

History

Early years

Netscape was the first company to attempt to capitalize on the emerging World Wide Web. It was founded under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994, the brainchild of Jim Clark who had recruited Marc Andreessen as co-founder and Kleiner Perkins as investors. The first meeting between Clark and Andreessen was never truly about a software or service like Netscape, but more about a product that was similar to Nintendo. Clark recruited other early team members from SGI and NCSA Mosaic. Jim Barksdale came on board as CEO in January 1995. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen originally created a 20-page concept pitch for an online gaming network to Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 console, but a deal was never reached. Marc Andreessen explains, "If they had shipped a year earlier, we probably would have done that instead of Netscape.""OPSWARE INC. / On the record: Marc Andreessen"
SFGate. December 7, 2003. Retrieved July 24, 2012.

The company's first product was the web browser, called ''Mosaic Netscape 0.9,'' released on October 13, 1994. Within four months of its release, it had already taken three-quarters of the browser market. It became the main browser for Internet users in such a short time due to its superiority over other competition, like Mosaic. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took the "Netscape" name (coined by employee Greg Sands, although it was also a trademark of Cisco Systems) on November 14, 1994, to avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser. The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code. The internal codename for the company's browser was ''Mozilla'', which stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. A cartoon Godzilla-like lizard mascot was drawn by artist-employee Dave Titus, which went well with the theme of crushing the competition. The Mozilla mascot featured prominently on Netscape's website in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to this being removed.

Initial public offering (IPO)

On August 9, 1995, Netscape made an extremely successful IPO, only sixteen months after the company was formed. The stock was set to be offered at US$14 per share, but a last-minute decision doubled the initial offering to US$28 per share. The stock's value soared to US$75 during the first day of trading, nearly a record for first-day gain. The stock closed at US$58.25, which gave Netscape a market value of US$2.9 billion. While it was somewhat unusual for a company to go public prior to becoming profitable, Netscape's revenues had, in fact, doubled every quarter in 1995. The success of this IPO subsequently inspired the use of the term "Netscape moment" to describe a high-visibility IPO that signals the dawn of a new industry. During this period, Netscape also pursued a publicity strategy (crafted by Rosanne Siino, then head of public relations) packaging Andreessen as the company's "rock star." The events of this period ultimately landed Andreessen, barefoot, on the cover of ''Time'' magazine. The IPO also helped kickstart widespread investment in internet companies that created the