Netscape Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was popular during the 1990s. Once the flagship product of Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant browser in terms of usage share, its user base had almost completely evaporated by 2002 partly due to the inclusion of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system,but also due to lack of significant innovation after the late 1990s. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of IE were vastly inferior in almost every way to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator; IE 3.0 (1996) began to catch up to its competition; IE 4.0 (1997) was the first version that looked to have Netscape beaten, and IE 5.0 (1998) with many bug fixes and stability improvements saw Navigator's marketshare plummet below IE for the first time.
Netscape Navigator 3.0 came in two versions, Standard Edition and Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with mail and news readers and a web page WYSIWYG composition tool integrated into it. The extra functionality only made the software program larger, slower, and more prone to crashes, and the decision to integrate all these features together was widely criticized.
