Yesterday, I stumbled across The Netscape Archive containing some of the classic versions of the good old Netscape Navigator – how cool of them to keep those versions lying around! You guys remember the 4.79 version with the recurring “Document: Done” status message at the bottom of the browser? Oh, but those were the days. Here’s a couple of screenshots to relive the beginning of it all:

Our Meeho!™ Blog shown in Netscape Navigator 4.79.

google.com looks kind of odd in NN 4.79.

So what happened to Netscape Navigator? Well, put shortly, it lost the competition to the – back then – rising star Internet Explorer. Funny thing is, version 4.79 is from 2001, which is also the release year of Internet Explorer 6, the most broken and randomly acting browser to have ever annoyed millions and millions of web developers world-wide. While Netscape Navigator phased out pretty quickly, Internet Explorer 6 is still out there… It makes you wonder, huh?