I took a break from studying for my last two summer school finals to take a look at the state of Netscape. Truthfully, there was very little to investigate.

The Netscape browser has been dead for several months now.

Netscape.com is a green AOL.com clone. (However, you can view a stripped-down version of the old portal at isp.netscape.com. The Compuserve website, another brand that has been largely abandoned by AOL, also uses a stripped down version of the old Netscape portal.)

The Netscape social news portal has transformed into Propeller (which kind of surprised me; if you have a very visible and familiar brand, why abandon it and adopt a new brand and build it from the bottom up?). Interestingly, Netscape Newsquake is still up and running.

My.Netscape will be dead by month’s end.

The Netscape blog is still around, but as of late it has served mainly as a line of communication for the Netscape management to let its users know what product they are killing next.

The Netscape ISP is alive and well, but for how long? AOL will be splitting in half by next year, with its media services being separated from its access services. Who knows what will happen to the ISP by that time? Not that I care, no one who was at least slightly familiar with Netscape really considered the ISP to be part of Netscape anyway.

If one has been using Netscape for as long as I have, you’ll notice that some parts of the Netscape website are still around. The Netscape Community site is still online and apparently people still use it. The “Today’s Poll” section looks like it hasn’t been updated in years. The poll asks which search engine its users use most often. One of the options is “Ask Jeeves,” however, “Jeeves” was phased out almost three years ago. Links that formerly pointed to the Netscape browser section now forward, interestingly enough, to the Flock website.

For a real blast in the past, you can see vestiges of the old Netscape Netcenter days by visiting Netscape My Webpage. I still have two websites online with My Webpage, and because I no longer remember my old passwords there is virtually no way for me to take them down.

Netscape’s old press release section is also online. Reading some of these names from the open-sourcing press releases of the late 1990s was quite interesting.

There are a few other pages online, but these were the most interesting to me.

So the only real part of Netscape that still exists and is still being maintained is the Netscape ISP, which really isn’t part of Netscape anyway. Propeller is spun off and Netscape Newsquake is part of Propeller (though it still uses the Netscape name). The software division is dead. The portal is as good as dead. So Netscape itself has been dead since February. Where was the company’s obituary?

Perhaps after AOL splits next year and the Netscape ISP goes on its way, perhaps AOL can finally allow Netscape to die a merciful death. Or perhaps AOL could sell the brand to someone who could make better use of it?