Netscape 6.x

Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.

Many other versions of Netscape can be found on the Sillydog Archive and the Netscape FTP. Some earlier versions can be located on the Mcom.com Archive.

Wanted: Genuine floppy/CD dumps - these often differed slightly from the free download versions.

Screenshots

Release notes

Netscape 6 was the first release of the Netscape browser based on the open source Mozilla browser and its new Gecko rendering engine. The version number "5" was skipped, as attempts to update the Netscape 4.x codebase were discarded.

The initial 6.0 release was considered extremely slow, klunky, and buggy. Even compared to the Mozilla browser on which it was based, and even more so against Internet Explorer and Opera. It did, however support better web standards, and was much more advanced compared to Netscape 4.