Netscape Navigator was the prefered internet browser of the 90's. It was over taken by Microsoft's Internet Explorer at the end of of the century, partly due to the practice of microsoft bundling IE with the Windows operating system (a practice later declared illegal by an American Court in Microsoft's antitrust trial between 1998 - 2001)
Netscape Navigator was bought by AOL in 1999. AOL eventually stopped developing Netscape at the end of 2007, yet continued security updates until March 2008
The source code for Netscape was released under an open source license in 1998 leading eventually to the release of Mozilla 1.0 in 2001