Goodbye NETSCAPE

Tom Drapeau, director of Netscape, AOL, who famously stopped development on Netscape in December last year, and who set Feb 1, 2008 as the deadline for ending all support to the browser was the same person who on Wednesday pushed forth the deadline to March 1st this year.
The reason he cited is that Netscape and partners need more time to complete work on the tools necessary for users to migrate to Mozilla's Firefox or Flock's Flock browsers.

In a post to the Netscape blog, Drapeau explained that Mozilla, Flock, and AOL are working towards providing tools to ease migration to the recommended Flock and Firefox alternatives.

He also said that for Netscape 9 users, an upgrade would be issued through the browser's integrated update feature to help streamline the process of choosing between alternatives (Firefox and Flock).

But even for Drapeau, Flock is a new recommendation, because in December 2007, he had recommended only Firefox as possible successor to Netscape. Flock is a free browser with social networking features, and is built on Firefox code base.

Drapeau hasn't elaborated on the kind of tools the companies are working on. But in all likelihood, they would be some sort of Netscape-to-Firefox migration assistant.

Currently, users need to manually copy the Netscape "profiles.ini" file and its folder to Firefox's directory in order to migrate from Netscape to Firefox. Whereas, Flock's latest version 1.06 includes Netscape migration features.

With AOL support of Netscape now extended to one more month, it still isn't clear why the company has decided to end support in the first place.

Last year, Drapeau had mentioned the reasons for ending support as "AOL's current business focus", and the inability to revive Netscape's dying market share vis-a-vis other browsers.
source:techreef