Beyond the browser wars, web's future beckons

Netscape's star, once so bright, sunk to a new low last week with the resignation of Jamie Zawinski as head of its struggling browser development effort. But ironically, just when the future of Netscape's browser seems most tenuous, the browser wars have all but lost their significance.

In the wake of last year's wave of layoffs, Netscape's giving away the source code of its flagship Navigator browser for free and launching the Mozilla project to coordinate future development was tantamount to an admission that it was losing the browser wars to Microsoft msft . At the time, Zawinski says, the plan was a "beacon of hope" to those developers within Netscape who had fought the browser war in the trenches. The company hoped the plan would revitalize the browser by allowing developers outside Netscape to contribute to the its development.

But a year has passed, and Netscape has failed to release a new version of its browser.

In the meantime, Microsoft has managed to integrate Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows despite the government's best efforts to prevent it, and Netscape has been acquired by America Online aol , raising additional concerns about the future of Netscapes browser. In an essay he posted to his web site last Wednesday announcing his resignation, Zawinski wrote that "the Mozilla project has become too depressing, and too painful, for me to continue working on."

Despite its current problems, America Online won't allow the Netscape browser to die, because they don't want to operate in a world where IE is the only available option, according to Ted Schadler, a research director for technology analyst firm Forrester Research. "AOL is not going to let that thing die on the vine," he says.

"They will do anything they can to have a second browser."

Even Microsoft doesn't want to see Netscape's browser die completely, according to Jim Balderston, a director at Zona Research, because it would add to the antitrust scrutiny the company is already under.

But whether or not Netscape's browser survives its current difficulties, the next phase of web development has already begun to push the browser out of the limelight. As Internet use increases, more and more users will access the web through other devices such as Personal Digital Assistants, cell phones and televisions. Content developers have already begun to prepare for this new era. Yahoo yhoo , for example, announced yesterday that it will begin to deliver its content and services to these devices with the help of technology from a small, privately held startup called Online Anywhere.

In the past, the company that controlled the browser could control access to the web.

But as the number of devices accessing the web increases, the browser loses its control over the path between users and content. As a result, the stakes in the browser wars have been eliminated.