Netscape, how do they make money?

[bdog]

I really don't see them selling any advertising or anything. How do they make any money since their browsers are free?

[Jinx67]

Even though the browser itself is free, There are pay features to Netscape. As to what they are I have no clue?? Also I think one can safely assume that they recieve a percentage off of the plugins that come with the browser that automatically need updating the second Netscape is installed http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif. Real player etc.

[Dominus]

They make money selling their Netscape Webserver.

It kinda blows, so I guess they don't make very much.

[Titan]

There are also many companies using Netscape Mail as their email source, their licensing cost must help carry them. Also, there are people that pay for the browser so they can get support from Netscape if needed.

[pickel]

Everytime I log on, and I only use Netscape,
an advertisement pops up and when I check my
email I get a Netscape flier. My ISP, Bellsouth are integrated together and I really like the way it's setup as compared to IE( http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif ) which does not work right on my computer regardless of upgrades and patches.

[Jinx67]

Internet Explorer, not to be rude but that was the first thing I tore out of Win98's bloated OS.Your actually better off with netscape I also use Opera or Spider.When I want speed.

[SysOpt]

I used to use Netscape all the time - I was diehard Netscape. I hated IE and trashed on it every chance I got. Then along came IE5 and I begrudingly tried it. IMO, it is much faster than Netscape 4.7, more stable, and HTML looks better. Take it from someone who spends 9+ hours a day using a browser - IE5 is good. (I still use Netscape mail though, not Outlook)

As for how Netscape makes money, the above mentioned things, plus look at Netscape.com -ads everywhere. They sell licenses for Netscape and Netscape server, email, etc. If someone has a list of their various revenue streams it would be interesting to post it here.

Scott

[This message has been edited by SysOpt (edited 02-06-2000).]

[RobRich]

I used to be a hardcore IE fan, since IE 3.0, but when IE 5.5 beta hit the scene, I went to Netscape. IE 5.5 is is relatively cool in appearance, but it lacks some basic funtionality that a true web browser should have. With Netscape 4.7, I have easy access to all my popular functions, plus what I feel is a more fluid interface.

For the most part, I still surf with Opera. It's as fast as IE, and has a great UI. I also like the extremely small memory footprint and the excellent performance. Probably its best feature is complete control over its options, such as advanced network settings.

I just downloaded and tried the Netscape 5.0 Alpha release (Milestone 13), and the options look promising. I can't say the same for stability or compatibility. Netscape archives their whole weeks worth of nightly builds, and you might have to download everyone before you find one that will actually work on your system. The good news is that the beta stage is only a few weeks away at their current progression.

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 02-06-2000).]

[elite]

Dont forget the make much much much of of each link in the bookmarks area that comes with the browser on default. I think in the avenue of a million for some of the bookmarks! And thats per update!

[groovy]

Jinx67-
I also use Opera almost exclusively. What is this Spider you speak of? Another browser? Tell me more about it. How large is it and what are the advantages?

[800XL]

Netscapes made money the easy way, they sold out to AOL. :P

If I could get away with it, I would still use Mosaic. I never did care for Netscape, or IE for that matter.

[mattheadfat]

im running ie 5.00.2314.1003? what's with that, but it's running pretty good, what improvements are made in 5.5?

[Thor]

Hi mattheadfat

The biggest change is in the scripting, with Windows Script 5.5 offering some improvements to the JScript and VBScript capabilities of the browser.
These are really only of interest to web page developers at the moment as they will be able to build more complex pages which perform more operations on the page before the user sees it.

Most notably, the search facilities have been beefed up to make it easier for the page to perform global search and replace operations on strings. It's also now possible to get the page to format numbers with decimal places or dates to the format that the user has set on their machine-DD/MM/YYYY, for example.

Other work on the performance of the browser includes a re-working of the frames rendering which will stop the browser from using a new browser control for each frame, instead being handled by mshtml.dll itself. This should lead to slightly better performance.

There are rumours too that Microsoft will also be working closer to the DHTML and CSS standards so that the browser is more
compliant, which would somewhat steal the thunder from Netscape Communicator 5 who's
major selling point so far (though it hasn't even reached beta stage yet) has
been that it will be fully compliant with web standard, something that no browser has done so far.

The most obvious change is at user level, with a new Print Preview feature. Amazingly, this enables you to view the page as it would be printed as opposed to how it looks on screen. Previously there have been problems when printing pages as the format of paper in terms of physical dimensions is very different from the screen.

My 2 cents

Thor http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by Thor (edited 02-06-2000).]