The rivalry was compounded even further when Microsoft's browser team apparently dropped its massive IE logo off at Netscape's campus the night of Internet Explorer 4's launch.
Netscape continued to develop both Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Communicator 4.0, but the looming threat of Internet Explorer, with version 3 bundled into Windows 95 service release 2, still lingered heavily in the background. Netscape's browser icon through the years.
The move, however, failed to gain much traction with the suit-and-tie set.
Communicator added in a Usenet client, web editor, e-mail app and even an address book in short, it quite handily defined the very early days of sales- and management-driven bloatware. In an attempt to differentiate from its IE rival and grow its user base, Netscape took a stab at the enterprise crowd and launched the Netscape Communicator 4.0 bundle in late 1996. Netscape and Internet Explorer traded releases in lockstep throughout 19, but by the time Internet Explorer version 3.0 was released, Microsoft had fully caught up and was able to match Netscape feature-for-feature. The company launched Netscape Navigator into the market without even a glimmer of real competition and the browser went on to become the de facto portal to the web in early 1995. At last, Microsoft had arrived with its first effort at a Netscape killer. It was around this time that Microsoft was preparing to release Windows 95 and a separate add-on pack: Windows 95 Plus! Pack, which included Internet Explorer 1.0 and TCP/IP, the protocol needed to use the web. By close of day, the company's valuation skyrocketed to nearly $3 billion. On August 9th of that year, the then roughly 1-year-old Netscape went public with its initial stock offering at $28 per share. Of course, Microsoft was working feverishly in the background to play catch-up with a browser of its own creation, licensing Mosaic's tech to build the first iteration of Internet Explorer. By the end of December, the company underwent a significant transformation, adopting the name Netscape Communications and launching Netscape Navigator 1.0. The team then churned out the first point release in October of that year: Mosaic Netscape release 0.9. With Clark's help, the two created Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994, pulling in many former SGI and NCSA employees.
Andreessen had spent some of his time at university working on the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Mosaic browser and understood full well the potential it offered. Netscape was born the child of University of Illinois graduate Marc Andreessen and Silicon Graphics' Jim Clark. The "browser wars," as they came to be known, would ultimately lead to creation of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's antitrust suit and the formation of the Mozilla Project and Firefox. Consider the battle that would ensue between this web pioneer and Microsoft. Netscape's founders successfully plucked a brilliant idea from academia and pushed it onto the world's stage at a time when competition didn't exist, websites were not much more than plain-text blurbs and inline images were still revolutionary. Netscape's story reads like a proper fairy tale: takeovers, fierce and hostile competition, split-ups, a giant payout and even a dragon! While Netscape may now only be a sweet, sweet memory to those who used it to first discover the web, the browser's monstrous impact has cemented it as one of the first and most important startups to shape the internet.