1995: Netscape Communications stages a successful initial public offering, making it one of the first companies to capitalize on the growing World Wide Web.

The company, whose premium product was the Navigator web browser (originally called Mosaic Netscape 0.9), saw its stock shoot up to $75 per share on the first day of trading, a near-record at the time for any stock’s opener.

Netscape Communications, founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, took wing and at one time held 88 percent of the browser market. And, in fact, Netscape made it clear that it intended to make its browsers available across all computer platforms, a declaration that got Microsoft’s attention, because it represented a direct threat to Redmond.

After allegedly failing to reach an agreement with Netscape over a division of the browser market, Microsoft went over to the attack. Its own browser, Internet Explorer, came bundled with the Windows 95 operating system, and subsequent upgrades of IE were offered for free.

As it had done with Windows when faced with competition from Apple’s OS, Microsoft essentially built IE to include all the features available on Navigator in order to erase any qualitative edge Netscape may have held.

Its initial sheen gone, Navigator quickly lost ground to IE and eventually slipped into irrelevancy. Netscape itself shriveled up like a snail caught in the sunlight. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, where the name continues to exist as a subsidiary, hosting a Digg-like news portal and continuing to tinker with alternative browsers.

The Netscape software code, however, lives on. It went open source in 1998 and became the basis of the Mozilla and eventually the Firefox browser.

Source: Wikipedia, others

This article first appeared on Wired.com Aug. 9, 2007.