Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support on 1st February, 2008, after a 13-year run.

Its current caretakers, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape's usage dwindled with Microsoft Corp.'s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.

"While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer," Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.

People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead. A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.

The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows. Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.

Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape's stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2 billion market value even though it had only $20 million in sales. But Netscape's success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft. Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10 billion deal completed in early 1999.

Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing. Source: associated press.

On a personal note, I was an avid user of Netscape for years, then moved on to Firefox, which I continue to use to this day - I only use MS Internet Explorer when forced to at work. An end of an era for sure, although it's been in the cards for a while now. Buh-bye Nutscrape.

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to say about “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” some 2,000 years prior.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.”

Source: commenter on MichelleMalkin.com.

I officially completed my 600 hour internship on Tuesday, with just three days to spare until finals start. Nice timing finishing when I did - I really did not want to be working through finals week. Technically I completed the 600 hours last Friday, but I came back on Tuesday for a 'certificate of appreciation' to be presented (which is basically an official acknowledgment / confirmation that the person named did indeed successfully complete the 600 hour internship program), and then the director took me out to lunch. Yay me!

The internship provided a lot of worthwhile practical experience in auditing which should serve me well in the future, and as a bonus, my performance was at a high enough level that the director wrote a glowing personal reference along with the certificate of appreciation - something they do not usually do apparently (I believe it's usually limited to the certificate only). So.. onwards and upwards. Now I need to find another internship for the new year.

Yes it's that time of year again - final exams start this Friday and continue through to the following Friday. Gaaah. With just a week to go until the final, one of my professors assigned a minimum eight page essay worth 30% of the overall final grade. It's political science. I don't mind writing essays at all, and usually I would find something like this a big bonus as it's worth so much of my overall grade, however I tend to spend a lot of time writing draft after draft for an essay, basically polishing until I get something that will almost certainly earn an A, but in this case I wont really have the time to do so because I have other classes I need to study for. To make matters worse, this particular professor has a reputation of being a very tough grader when it comes to essays, so a 'good attempt' will not be sufficient. Despite how it may sound, he's actually a really good guy, and the class was awesome, but still.. blah. Wish me luck - I'll most likely be needing it!

Happy birthday Amber! Just talked to you on the phone which was awesome. Haha woah good luck losing that creepy infatuated emo dude, seriously - set him up with someone you don't like, such a good idea imho. Hope the Xmas party is fun, wish I was there with you. Send photos of your hair! Love you. xoxo

Woke up this morning, looked out the window, and it was snowing! There was a few inches of snow accumulated on the ground already by that stage, and more was falling - pretty early for snow really, and there's more predicted later in the week. I like it when it snows here - New York loses that look of perpetual grime that it seems to have, and starts looking kind of clean for a change, at least while the snow is still fresh and the air is crisp and well below freezing.

Final exams coming up in a couple of weeks (eek!), and I'm also coming to the end of my 600 hour auditing internship and it looks like I'll finish it just a couple of days before my first exam, which is well timed - didn't really want to be working through the finals. Been a hectic semester and we're certainly looking forward to a couple of days with no work or study between Christmas and the new year! Amber's birthday coming up in a few days - missing her heaps as always, but it's worst at this time of year.