AOL’s announcement that it will no longer be supporting the Netscape Navigator browser come Feb. 1 officially signals the end of an era. Many industry experts have considered the browser dead for several years now. The company which acquired Netscape Communications in 1999 has decided “it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox” in light of the “gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer”. The Mozilla Firefox browser is an open source browser Netscape released in 2000 and in 2003, spun off as an independent unit, the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has been gaining in popularity over the years giving Microsoft’s Internet Explorer some competition. According to data from internet metrics firm Net Applications, as of November 2007, IE accounted for 77.35% of the browser market, Firefox and Netscape had 16.01% and 0.6%, respectively.