Sentimental Internet users will be preparing to bid a fond farewell to Web pioneer Netscape although some diehard fans will undoubtedly continue to download the once dominant browser.
From March 1, Netscape was no longer supported but owner AOL would allow nostalgic users to download archived versions of the browser.
AOL would also continue to maintain the Netscape website as an Internet portal.
One of the central figures in the Netscape story is Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications.
After his graduation from the University of Illinois in 1993, Mr Andreessen moved to California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies.
There, he met Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. Mr Clark believed the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money.
Soon, Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California, with Mr Andreessen appointed as vice-president. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, so ``Mosaic Communications`` changed its name
to Netscape Communications - thought up by sales representative Greg Sands - and its flagship web browser was the Netscape Navigator.
Netscape announced in its first press release in October 1994 that it would make Navigator freely available to all non-commercial users and Beta versions of 1.0 and 1.1 were indeed freely downloaded in November 1994 and March 1995 with the full version of 1.0 available
in December 1994.
Netscape was quickly a success and dominated the browser market in the mid-1990s. But other companies followed its success, notably Microsoft, which bundled its Explorer software with its operating systems.
This culminated in a highly-publicised legal battle which saw Microsoft accused of anti-competitive behaviour.
Although the settlement saw Netscape gain many concessions from Microsoft, including the ability to exploit IE code, it was unable to gain back its market share.
The demise of Navigator was compounded in 2003 when AOL, which bought Netscape in 1998, made redundant most of the staff working on new versions of the browser.
Many of the staff moved to the Mozilla Foundation, which develops the popular Firefox browser. This browser has a 16% share of the browser market.
IE dominates the browser landscape with an 80% market share. Firefox is the main competitor to IE, particularly in Europe, where it it has a 28% market share, according to recent statistics. It has had more than 500 million downloads worldwide and in countries such as Finland, it is the most popular browser.
According to Shawn Hardin, president and chief executive officer of Flock, Netscape played an important role in making the Internet a relevant mass market phenomenon.
``Netscape had a critical role in taking all of these zeros and ones - this very academic and technical environment - and giving it a graphical user interface where an average person could come online and consume information,'' he said on BBC Online.
``During its halcyon days, it really felt like the Internet and Netscape were the same thing.''
Last week, Netscape users were shown a message alerting them to the end of support for the browser.
``Given AOL's current business focus, support for Netscape browsers will be discontinued as of March 1, 2008,'' the message read.
It then suggested users upgraded to either Flock or Firefox.
Flock describes itself as the ``social web browser'' and allows people to see feeds from community websites, such as Flickr and Facebook, and post to blogs without having to navigate to the page.
Mr Hardin said there were lots of ways that people were engaging in having a conversation and Flock was very focused on making that as effortless and convenient as possible.
However, not all Netscape users are happy about having to change browser.
``I'm sad. Flock still needs improvement and I am not happy with Firefox's interface. I'm [an] orphan!'' one post on the Netscape blog read.
Others posted comments on the blog predicting the return of the browser.
``Netscape is a wonderful browser, and it will be so in the future,'' read one.
