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WHAT THE HECK IS NETSCAPE DOING? Its latest business moves have been in a desperate attempt to regain market share from that 800-pound gorilla. And, although some desperate moves actually turn out to be good ones, I'm convinced that Netscape's latest will bring only more trouble to the lately struggling company.
Dig back into that memory chest of yours. Back in January, Microsoft made a deal with the DOJ to remove Internet Explorer from Windows. On the same day, as if to seize the moment of instability, Netscape made a surprise announcement. They told everyone that their excellent Communicator and Navigator browser products (commonly referred to as simply "Netscape") would now be free to everyone.
I'm fine with this move. Most people (including me) were smart (or dishonest) enough to notice that there was no mechanism within Navigator or Communicator to stop people from using it after 90 days. Since most people were downloading the software for free, the annoucement basically made the cheaters honest people. Also, Netscape made very little money with these browsers (at least in terms of the money they make from their web servers). And it would be safe to say that giving away the browsers will slow down the market share slide Netscape has been taking since the IE 3.0 days.
Unfortunately, that annoucement was only one of the annoucements Netscape made that day. The other announcement was about giving away the source code to Netscape's next-generation of browser, Communicator 5.
And now, after three months of waiting, the source code has finally been set free at mozilla.org. Netscape's plan is to use interested developers as a kind of workforce for Netscape. Then, they will incorporate the best ideas used in the customized versions of Netscape in the actual real retail version of Netscape.
This is not good for anyone. Beginners looking for source code to play with will be disappointed that the code "is not in beta, not in pre-beta, alpha form . . . it is not executable in any way (direct from the mozilla.org page). For tested developers, the code will presumeably be very buggy and hard to compile.
For users, this may mean even more browsers to worry about. Most people already use IE and Netscape already. Just imagine what would happen if there were 500 different interpretaions of HTML in every customized version of Netscape there will be? It seems bound to happen, with Netscape not releasing its code in even partially polished form.
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