R.I.P. Netscape
Not quite “new”, just stumbled across it reading about the deadline to be pushed again, a little: It seems that, finally, and after all, Netscape browser sooner or later will be no more. Not that I really care that much, given that (at the very least after the Mozilla project has started) Netscape Navigator / Communicator / whatever hasn’t been of much importance in any post-4.x versions. However maybe I’m getting a bit nostalgic here, I remember dearly well figuring out strange (to me, these days) Unix shell commands to, once in a while (well maybe more than just once in a few minutes, actually) terminate all running Netscape processes that got stuck during my very first trips to the so-called “World Wide Web” back then in one of the computer pools at Chemnitz Institute of Technology. And I remember doing all of my first more serious e-mail communication using the mail / news module that came with Netscape Communicator, unable by then to really get acquainted to the arcane version of ‘pine’ installed on those old Solaris machines… having a tool that once used to be an integral part of daily (computer) life just vanishing surely is feels somewhat strange. And, even these days, then and now I remember what I learnt using Netscape – the shell commands to make use of ‘ps’, ‘grep’ and ‘kill’ used to stop Netscape earlier by now comes in handy more than just once to terminate application servers running wild… or, not lacking any irony, to completely terminate another Firefox locked up maybe because of a broken applet or something like that. Oh well… 🙂