About a week ago, Netscape ceased to be supported. This is an event I could not allow to pass without comment as it has been a very significant piece of software (and company) in my time online. Rather than add to the reams and pages of history of the company, I'm just going to list some of my abiding memories of Netscape:

• The excitement of the arrival of the first betas after using NCSA Mosaic and Lynx.
• Being able to fit it on a floppy with Trumpet Winsock for those occasions when you had to use a PC computer lab rather than an X-Terminal (thanks to Nick for this one).
• How elegant being able to center text made a page look.
• How quickly blink became really annoying.
• Having to use a friend's account on a Sun to be able to use it because it wasn't available for Dynix.
• Being granted access to a cluster of HP UNIX boxen by the university's Sys Admin just so that I could use Netscape.
• Extensions to the body tag allowing background colours and images and the arrival of tables.
• Reading jwz's accounts of the early days at Netscape and thinking how cool it must have been to work there.
• The increasingly bloated nature of Communicator as more and more features got added (mail reader; news reader; IRC client; dog walker; kitchen sink ...) but it was still hipper than switching to IE.
• The code being opened and the long long wait for a release as the code got tidied and then totally rewritten.
• The pointless portal (did anyone really want to get their news from Netscape rather than from a news service?).
• Discovering that a friend at church used to work for them - how cool?

I'm just stunned:

• Last month, the Bursledon Parish site served just short of 5.5GB!
• Over 330 people have downloaded my sermon on Titus 2 so far.
• In February, over 2,000 unique visits led to nearly 14,000 hits on the site.
• Six days into March and it's looking likely to far exceed February's statistics!