Many of us knew it was coming, but had hoped it wouldn’t. A quote from Glazblog and Zeldman reads: “People, it’s over. Netscape is dead. Nothing to see here.”
MozillaZine was one of the first (and so far, the only) site to comment of the death of this web pioneer. To quote:
“It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings).”
There is an upshot: Mozilla.org is now the Mozilla Foundation. Development will continue as it has as we move into development for Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.5. Brendan Eich (the creator of JavaScript) has noted in a public press release that “The Mozilla Foundation will continue mozilla.org’s work of coordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase. With an independent non-profit as the legal home for Mozilla, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla’s long-term survival.”
He goes on later to say the following:
“Now that the Mozilla Foundation has been launched, we believe the time is ripe to move aggressively toward new distribution channels, new end-user markets, and better incorporation of developer-driven innovations from the whole Mozilla community.”
As far as all of the blogs I’ve read since finding this out at Zeldman’s site and confirming it at Henrik Gemal’s site, I’m the first one to post about it. Go me. Let us all have a moment of silence for this once great fallen soldier, Netscape Communications.
