Netscape Communicator

Netscape Communicator
Developer(s) Netscape Communications Corporation
Initial release June 1997
Stable release 4.8 (August 22, 2002) [±]
Development status Discontinued
Platform Cross-platform
Type Internet suite
Website archive.netscape.com

Netscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.

Editions

Netscape Communicator was available in various editions, such as "Professional" and "Complete". The following components were included in Netscape Communicator (different editions had different components and some components were dropped in later editions):

Features

Updates

In 1998, a major update to the program was released as Netscape 4.5. This included many improvements, mostly to the Messenger e-mail client, which now also took on the features of Collabra. However, some of the less popular components, such as Netcaster, were dropped. A feature called "Roaming Profiles" was added in version 4.5 that synchronized a user's bookmarks, address book and preferences with a remote server, so that a user's home and work browsers could have the same bookmarks.[2] By the time version 4.5 was released, Netscape had started the Mozilla open source project and had ceased charging for Communicator.

The term "Navigator" referred to the browser component alone, while "Communicator" referred to the suite as a whole, as established in version 4.0. However, due to user confusion, the names were often used interchangeably. Also, because none of the applications besides Navigator were popular on their own, and because Netscape never produced any other desktop software that approached the popularity of Navigator, people would often refer to both the Communicator suite and the Navigator browser as simply "Netscape". Further complicating the matter was the fact that the command to start Navigator in Unix was "netscape".

In November 2000, Netscape Communicator was superseded by Netscape 6, an almost completely rewritten program based on Mozilla, or what later came to be known as Mozilla Application Suite. However, minor updates to Communicator continued to be issued, culminating in the release of Netscape Communicator 4.8 in August 2002.

The Mozilla Foundation continued to develop the Netscape code base, providing the Mozilla Application Suite as a continuation of Netscape Communicator. The Mozilla Foundation decided in 2006 to discontinue development of the Application Suite. A community-maintained version called SeaMonkey has come to replace the Application Suite.[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "What happened to Netscape Calendar?". SillyDog701.
  2. ↑ "Netscape Roaming Profiles - What is it?". Colorado State University (via Archive.org).
  3. ↑ "Two discontinued browsers". LWN.net. 21 December 2005. Retrieved 19 August 2012.

External links

Preceded by
Netscape Navigator (1-4.08)		 Netscape Communicator (4) Succeeded by
Netscape 5
(developing suspended)