The internal codename for the company's browser was Mozilla, which stood for 'Mosaic killer', as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took the 'Netscape' name (coined by employee Greg Sands, although it was also a trademark of Cisco Systems) on Novemto avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser. It became the main browser for Internet users in such a short time due to its superiority over other competition, like Mosaic. Within four months of its release, it had already taken three-quarters of the browser market. The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9, released on October 13, 1994. As of 2011, AOL has continued to use the Netscape brand to market a discount Internet service provider.

Under AOL, Netscape's browser development continued until December 2007 when AOL announced that the company would stop supporting the Netscape browser as of early 2008. The Gecko engine would later be used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. Shortly before its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product. Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when it was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US $10 billion. Netscape is credited with creating JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages, as well as developing the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) for securing online communication that was used before its successor TLS took over. The usage share of Netscape had fallen from over ninety percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent by the end of 2006. Netscape 9.0.0.6 Download Now Released: Size: 5.Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the so-called first browser war.

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