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Netscape Navigator
Netscape was truly one of the great success stories of the 90s. Thanks to its innovative features and rapid development and release cycles, Netscape quickly rose to dominance. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was first available in late 1994 and came with full HTML 2 support and partial HTML 3 support. Successive versions added additional HTML features including many custom features know as "extensions". By the summer of 1995, Netscape had secured over 80% of the market share.
In the spring of 1996, Netscape released Navigator 2.0. Armed with many new features such as support for frames, Java, JavaScript, and Plug-ins, Navigator 2.0 had an edge on competing browsers such Microsoft Internet Explorer. One new feature in particular that seemed to define the 90s Web was support for a new image type, the animated GIF.
Netscape Navigator 3 was pretty much the undisputed king of Web browsers in its day with over 90% of the market share. Navigator was actually a full Internet suite that also included a built-in mail reader called Netscape Mail. There were two versions of Netscape Navigator 3: Standard Edition and Gold Edition. The Gold Edition also included a news reader and a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
In 1997, Netscape renamed its Navigator suite Netscape Communicator in order to differentiate it from the Navigator browser that was included in the suite. The newly updated Navigator 4 browser included initial support for CSS Level 1 as well as dynamic font support. The full Communicator suite was comprised of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail and Newsgroups, Netscape Address Book, and Netscape Composer (HTML editor). Partly due to its aging code base, but mostly due to increased competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape began to lose market share in the late 90s. In the spring of 1998, Netscape open sourced most of Communicator's code base. Eventually, later versions of Netscape, based on the new Gecko layout engine, would evolve into what is now the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.
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