Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications, later to be renamed Netscape Communications on 4 April 1994. Andreessen developed the web browser, to become famous as Netscape Navigator, while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. The project was to be called Mozilla, which evolved from the name Mosaic Killer. The code of Netscape Navigator partially overlapped with the code of the graphic Mosiac web browser, and was released as Mosaic Netscape 0.9 in October 1994.

The Navigator was the first user-friendly browser to hit success. Support for HTML frames was a real innovation that allowed masses of people to access the internet. Its impact is unquestionable. Until 1996, Netscape was the most popular web browser in 16-bit Microsoft and Apple Mac operation systems.

The popularity of Navigator began to decline rapidly when the Windows suite including Microsoft Internet Explorer was released. The browser war broke out, as a consequence of which Navigator was no longer ranked among the most frequently used browsers by the end of 2002.

The source code of the browser became open with the fourth version, and the Mozilla project was launched. The sixth version was already based on Mozilla source code, and was released as part of the Netscape Communicator suite. Later on, Netscape Navigator was renamed, Navigator was omitted from the name, and then on it was called Netscape browser. The seventh version based on Mozilla 1.4 was the last one that also ran on Mac operation system.

On 28 December 2007, the owner AOL announced that it would cancel development of the browser on 1 February 2008. Users were recommended to change for Firefox.