Netscape Communicator

Netscape Communicator

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Netscape Communicator

Netscape Communicator is an Internet suite that was produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.

Editions
See also
External links
References

Editions

Netscape Communicator was available in various editions, such as "Professional" and "Complete". The following components were included in Netscape Communicator (different editions had different components and some components were dropped in later editions):

Features

Netscape Navigator ? web browser
Netscape Messenger ? e-mail client and (in version 4.5 and above) news client
Netscape Collabra ? news client (merged into Messenger in version 4.5)
Netscape Address Book ? address book
Netscape Composer ? HTML editor
Netscape Netcaster ? push technology client (dropped in version 4.5)
Netscape Conference ? multi-user communication client (dropped in version 4.5)
Netscape Calendar ? enterprise calendar client (dropped in version 4.72 because Netscape's license to use the underlying technology expired^[1])

In 1998, a major update to the program was released as Netscape 4.5. This included many improvements, mostly to the Messenger e-mail client, which now also took on the features of Collabra. However, some of the less popular components, such as Netcaster, were dropped. A feature called 'Roaming Profiles' was added in version 4.5 that synchronized a user's bookmarks, address book and preferences with a remote server, so that for example a user's home and work browsers would have the same bookmarks^[2]. By the time version 4.5 was released, Netscape had started the Mozilla open source project and had ceased charging for Communicator.

Technically, "Navigator" was supposed to refer to the browser component alone, and "Communicator" was supposed to refer the suite as a whole, as established in version 4.0. But due to user confusion, the names were often used interchangeably. Also, because none of the applications besides Navigator were popular on their own, and because Netscape never produced any other desktop software that approached the popularity of Navigator, people would often refer to both the Communicator suite and the Navigator browser as simply "Netscape". Further complicating the matter was the fact that the command to start Navigator in Unix was "netscape"

In November 2000, Netscape Communicator was superseded by Netscape 6, an almost completely rewritten program based on Mozilla, or what later came to be known as Mozilla Application Suite. However, minor updates to Communicator continued to be issued, culminating in the release of Netscape Communicator 4.8 in August 2002.