Netscape, or more precisely, Netscape Navigator, was one of the most significant internet applications in the history of the web. It was launched by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. Having built a highly innovative product and having no real competition back in 1995, the company was evaluated at $3 billion since the first day it went public and would go on to become one of the backbones to the Mozilla project.
Despite its early success, Netscape had no real chance to beat Microsoft who released IE 1.0 soon after Netscape and continued on improve on it until they finally took over Netscape and were able to offer a consistently better product than their counterpart.
Netscape eventually becomes obsolete for the most part but was, however, acquired by AOL in November 1998 for $4.2 billion. After the hire, the company tried again to release upgraded versions of the browser but the battle seemed to have already been won by Microsoft. Netscape finally decided to outsource their code which would later give rise to Firefox. AOL finally shut down Netscape in 2008.
