Netscape won't dislodge Internet Explorer from its hegemony over browser space. But its open-source sibling is aiming at even bigger game: Windows.

On Aug. 28, WebSideStory, a firm that keeps statistics on the software that people use online, released some numbers confirming what most Web surfers who think about such things already know: Almost nobody uses the Netscape Navigator Web browser. WebSideStory reported that Netscape, the company many people credit with sparking the Internet revolution, is now forlorn in the world it helped create, claiming only 3.4 percent of the world's Web users.

That's a stunning decline from just a year ago, when Netscape had a 13 percent share -- and especially from the company's heights of the mid-1990s, when virtually everyone used its browser. But now, 96 percent of the people online use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and it's likely that Netscape will lose even more ground in the future, according to WebSideStory.
"The browser war," said one of the firm's executives in its press release, "is in fact a massacre."

Netscape doesn't believe those numbers; a company representative said that other studies have put Netscape's share in the double digits. But the survey nevertheless cast a pall over the new version of Netscape's browser, Navigator 7.0, which was released the next day. In its announcement, the company said that the new Navigator would continue "the growing momentum of Netscape" and that the browser's new features would help win back people who've switched to Microsoft.
[more: salon.com]