During the start of the internet browser wars, Netscape was a pretty notable web browser but ended up losing out to Internet Explorer. They were pretty huge early on, taking up more than 90% of the web market by the middle of the 1990s. Yet by 2006, they were seeing less than 1% of the market. Netscape’s employee Brenden Eich did create JavaScript and one of the founding engineers Lou Montulli created the first web cookies. Netscape is also responsible for SSL, which secures websites more for online communication. Today, any place that uses an SSL will have the “HTTPS://” opener to its website’s URL.
[Image via Lenscap Photography/Shutterstock.com]AOL eventually acquired Netscape in 1998, however. Yet what’s so interesting is that just a year before AOL bought them, they released the source code for the Netscape browser and created the Mozilla Organization. Using the Gecko rendering engine, they rewrote the source code, and once AOL backed off of its involvement in Mozilla, the team took advantage. By 2003, Mozilla Foundation popped up, and eventually, the Firefox browser was created. In spite of this, AOL still technically owns Firefox, and Verizon Media owns AOL. Therefore, Netscape ultimately failed but was a major player that changed the game forever.