Back in the fall of 1994, my web browser was NCSA Mosaic, but it was quickly replaced by Netscape Navigator. A great deal of my early, enthusiastic surfing of the World Wide Web was done using these classics. It wasn’t until years later that other browser software had any relevance in my eyes. Back in 1999, AOL purchased Netscape for about four billion dollars, an act of financial hubris that has since become the object of a kind of wistful, nostalgic scorn and pity.

Yesterday, Netscape’s official blog announced that the browser is dead. They’ve stopped development and will suspend product support entirely after February 1st, 2008. All that’s left of the once-mightly brand is the Digg-like portal page. Another titan ploughed under by progress…