Why does Netscape still exist?
ZDNet | at | by Mike
This article was published on ZDNet, to my astonishment this article is actually good.
When I heard the news that AOL Time Warner (my employer) filed a lawsuit last Tuesday against Microsoft, I was not surprised -- just disappointed. AOL's civil suit accuses Microsoft of using its Windows software, which has long been bundled in its Internet Explorer browser, to crush Netscape, which has a competing browser and is owned by AOL.
Netscape's browser used to be light and zippy, but now it's heavy and sluggish. The current version on my computer, Netscape 6.2e (an enterprise version not markedly different than the consumer one), takes up five times as much memory as Internet Explorer does. Hell, it even takes up more memory than my operating system. Needless to say, it also crashes frequently. Netscape is so bad that I would no longer use it, except that as an AOL employee, I'm forced to. The company recently switched its corporate e-mail to Netscape Mail, which can be used only with the Netscape browser.
(Incidentally, don't even get me started on the wonders of Netscape Mail. Suffice it to say that its primitive features and extremely buggy nature make it seem like a throwback to e-mail systems circa 1995.)