Netscape Revives Navigator Brand for Netscape Navigator 9Saturday May 5th, 2007The official Netscape Blog has announced that the next Netscape browser release will be called Netscape Navigator 9, reviving the name used for Netscape's earliest browser releases at the height of its popularity. Though many users have always referred to both the company and its flagship product as Netscape, the browser was officially called Netscape Navigator for its first three releases. For version 4.0, Netscape increased the prominence of the non-browser features and rebranded the whole suite as Netscape Communicator, though browser component continued to be called Navigator. The Communicator name was dropped for the first Mozilla-based release, Netscape 6, but the browser component remained known as Navigator, a situation that was unchanged with the launch of 2002's Netscape 7. By the time version 8 arrived, AOL had co-opted the Netscape name for use in a variety of unrelated services, including the Netscape website (originally a showcase for Netscape's products, which evolved into a content-driven portal) and a dial-up Netscape Internet Service. This led to the decision to brand the new software Netscape Browser, presumably because the extensive repurposing of the Netscape name (a process former Netscape engineer Jamie "jwz" Zawinski referred to as "Brand Necrophilia") had caused it to no longer be synonymous with Web browsing. While less abused than the Netscape brand, the Navigator name has also been recycled by AOL. In 2004, AOL previewed Netscape Desktop Navigator, a Flash-based application for Windows that allowed users to perform searches and access various AOL-owned Web properties, launching their default Web browser (which may have been Netscape but was more likely to be Microsoft Internet Explorer) as appropriate. More recently, Netscape have used the term Navigator to refer to a class of users on the relaunched Netscape website, which is now a social news portal. The weblog posting acknowledges the potential for confusion. The ninth version of Netscape was announced earlier this year. Since then, previews and announcements relating to the release have been made available almost every week on the Netscape Blog. Most of these can be seen by browsing the Netscape Blog posts tagged "browser". Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk, WHEN will all this Happen? Foxfire, Opera, Even this Netstripe theme, it's just not the same and you can't find things when you want or NEED them. Navigator should be around for competition with IE7 there is no release date for Netscape 9, alatli. maybe in the second half of 2007 or next year. we'll just have to wait for further news about when NS9 will be ready. I believe Netscape Navigator 9 will be based on Firefox 3 Beta 1 of Netscape Navigator 9 is now available at the Netscape Browser downloads page: http://browser.netscape.com/downloads/ "I believe Netscape Navigator 9 will be based on Firefox 3" I take that back. Netscape Navigator 9 is really based on Firefox 2 and still works under Win98/ME systems. At least NS9 has ditched the IE engine from NS8. |