End of Support for Netscape web browsers.

Truly the end of an era, or at least the official end of an era.

Netscape was known to many as the thought leader in web browsing, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools.

I still vaguely recall using, for a very brief time, Netscape 0.9. This would possibly have been in 1996. It seems ironic now that Internet Explorer became the “Firefox” of the late 1990’s when web developers grew increasingly frustrated with Netscape 4’s… limitations.

It occurs to me also that I have been using Firefox for about four years now, and as with Netscape, I was using the pre-release 0.x series before Firefox went into official 1.0 release.

I’m also using Safari (for Windows) a lot more now as well. I’m “trailing” the beta release 3.x series and while there have been a few hiccups, I’m mostly enjoying the experience.

I especially like the way Safari (along with other Apple apps, iTunes, for instance) makes me momentarily feel like I’m using a Mac. Ah Macs, now there are real computers for you!