Actually, it was around Netscape 4 when Netscape was bought by AOL when it started charging. before, Netscape Navigator was free.
After AOL took over Netscape, Mozilla was split off to continue the free version.
Netscape (Navigator) is still around beyond Firefox in the form of AOL’s “proprietary” browser, for the (few) people who still use AOL and the AOL Desktop.
This was touched on upthread, but I want to add more to it because I think it’s important to understanding it. Compare Internet Explorer, not to other Microsoft products like Word or Excel, but products like Word Viewer, which is also free (though I’m not even sure if it’s still out there. The point was, that whoever won the browser war would subsequently have the deciding hand in developing the language that that browser used and, thus, could control the tools used to develop the web. So, while many products were using the open standard and charging something for their browser, Microsoft came up with the brilliant idea of giving out their product for free to run the others out of business.
Once they got an overwhelming marketshare, when new technology would be developed, they would be able to determine how it was implemented and, thus, be the only ones with the tools that could add those features to websites. That is, they realized that by giving up on the $20 or so from the consumer, they could charge webdevelopers TONS more money for tools, updates, and support. Besides, as has also been mentioned, they started incorporating Internet Explorer into Windows, so, in a roundabout way, when you bought that version of windows, you were paying for IE anyway. But that’s why the anti-trust suit against Microsoft was such a big deal because they were leveraging their control in one market to get a stranglehold on another.
I know exactly what you mean, when I first started telecommuting, we were having remote server issues and I would have these immense 10K line spreadsheets so first thing in the morning I would email myself the spreadsheet at the home email address, in case the work server went down. I could pretty much pick it up on my personal copy of office, and when the server came back up i could email and merge the 2 spreadsheets and keep working without having lot time or data.
RickJay-- does your IE allow you to access Google? 
Ellison may be/is a jackass, but in this respect, he was a visionary: cloud computing may not be THE future, but it most definitely is A future. It just took a while to get here.
thanks for all the comments, folks.
This comment from RickJay, with davekhps’ response, helped me the most to understand it:
If by “a while”, you mean “1970”. We’ve developed well past that point by now.
It’s amazing what’s changed in the last decade or so. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the Newsweek article alluded to by the OP:
Bolding mine. Back then, they still called IE "the Internet Explorer, " and they also felt the need to describe a browser as a “tool that lets you hop around the Net with simple clicks of a computer mouse.”
I don’t want to take anything away from Larry Ellison because he’s clearly a smart business man, but the idea that it was a pain in the ass to administer software on each PC was known by everyone in the industry long before Larry started talking about the network station.
I really doubt it. Microsoft’s revenue generators are Windows and Office, not to mention their assortment of server products, especially Exchange.
Lets say the industry standardized on Netscape. The MS revenue generators would have been largely unaffected.
I guess there’s an argument to be made that if NS won then IE would be ignored, but considering MS’s industry push and large install base, whatever plugins or advances made in NS would quickly find their way into IE.
I doubt anything would have change. Both companies seemed intolerant of web standards and were aggressively developing proprietary extensions.
slaphead’s comment is pretty accurate: Microsoft worked very hard to limit the damage the web could do to their business, by making Internet Explorer just a little better than Netscape (and just incompatible enough) and then, when they had the 80% or so market share, they more or less stopped development on IE, halting adoption of improved standardized (that is, portable) web technology for years. And where they saw an actual use for “real” online applications, they pushed their own standard for plugins, which was more or less impossible to run on anything but Windows.
Yes, this was an attempt by Microsoft to stop any development of a desktop competitor. Microsoft wasn’t really playing for the web interface - they were preventing anybody from making an OS-neutral cover which could run programs above. It wasn’t Netscape they cared about, but rather what it might become. They later kneecapped Java in the same way. Today, of course, MS might just buy out the company or let it play its gimmicks.
Strictly speaking, of course, that wouldn’t have been the end fo their businessness, because you can theoretically put any number of increasingly-annoying “layers” onto your computer. (The Hardware, the OS, the Browser, the Java… ) but it wasn’t really going to help them.
The Browser Wars ended in 2001 when MSIE won. (This coincides with the last update of MSIE prior to Firefox, version 6.0.) But its victory was incomplete because it didn’t allow MS to dictate standards to the rest of the Internet, and it certainly didn’t lock other browsers out of the Web. Embrace and Extend, the strategy where MS embraces a standard and then encumbers it with nonstandard extensions to lock out competition, failed totally.
Firefox is a whole new conflict that has more to do with how MS reacts to Open Source and software that can’t be bought because it isn’t owned by a company or, indeed, any single entity.
About new markets: Do any of the common handheld Internet-capable computers run Windows? That is already the new market, and MS hasn’t made any significant showing. (In fact, Symbian is the most dominant contender in that arena.)
Uh, no.
Before MSIE, Netscape was always a paid program (at least, for most users – it may have been for colleges), maybe about $30 as a stand alone. ISPs often would bundle it as part of the service, paying Netscape out of your subscription.
MSIE forced Netscape to become free to all.
OTOH, Mozilla WAS Netscape – the internal name for the program.
If I recall, another point of the browser war was to control the server-side software (this was before Apache became the standard). Whoever could dominate the browser war could then introduce proprietary changes to their web-server and dominate the server market as well.
These are both absolutely true, and they lay the groundwork for understanding where Firefox comes from:
In 1998, Netscape knew it was losing the Browser Wars. It also knew that if MS was allowed to win totally, the market for Netscape servers would dry up totally and the entire Netscape corporation would no longer be sustainable. So it did the Hail Mary of all Hail Marys and released the source code of the Netscape browser package under an Open Source licence. The internal name for Netscape had always been Mozilla (“It’s spelled ‘Netscape’ but pronounced Mozilla”, according to the development team.) so that’s what the Open Source project and product was called.
That is so important partially because it proved to the business world that Open Source could be a valid business model, just like it was in the 1960s and 1970s, and that it could be used to avoid total vendor lock-in. History has validated both of these positions.
But Mozilla had problems: The source code wasn’t the best, leading to a large, balky, and unstable browser that languished in an unfinished state for far too long. I used Mozilla under both Windows and Linux in the late 1990s and I didn’t really like it or its memory-hungry ways.
That lead, in the early 2000s, to Firefox being spun off from the Mozilla project as a very simple, very lightweight standalone browser. And it was good. And it was popular. And lo if MS didn’t feel a fire under its ass for the first time in years. 
These days, Firefox has a marketshare substantial enough the majority of web designers can’t develop to MSIE alone. (Yes, maybe you can. You aren’t a majority. You’re one person.) Moreover, the popularity of Firefox has forced MS to upgrade MSIE for the first time since 2001. MSIE 7 isn’t Firefox and it’s a long way from being Firefox (no ad-blocking, no Javascript blocking, none of the other Add-Ins) but it is more standards-compliant, meaning it’ll work in websites designed by people who don’t especially care about MS or MSIE. That means lock-in will never happen, at least for the foreseeable future.
And there was much rejoicing.
MS has Windows Mobile that attempts to compete with Symbian. They also have various versions of Embedded Windows XP which shows up in a surprising number of places (gaming [gambling] consoles, ATMs, car computers, etc.). I don’t really know what their market share is, although it seems to be growing.
Of course, there is the XBox which was a market they entered and found success in (for certain definitions of success).
I was focusing entirely on handheld devices, not ATMs or video gambling, and that likely skews the percentages.
The XBox mainly succeeded in showing the world that even when MS controlls the hardware and the software, determined people are still going to get through the security and do what they want with the system. It kind of takes the luster out of their whole Palladium initiative.
ATM and gambling were examples. If you don’t want to include them in your point, then don’t. But Windows Mobile and Embedded XP are Microsoft’s OS for “handheld Internet-capable computers run Windows”. Market share for Windows Mobile is around 12% compared to Symbian’s 47%. Microsoft’s market share is not all that great considering iPhone’s is around 10% and has only been out a few years.
Microsoft did get into the PDA and SmartPhone market early. They competed very well against Palm, who had the entire market to themselves. Frankly, I think Microsoft’s success had more to do with Palm’s meltdown than anything else.
>OTOH, Mozilla WAS Netscape – the internal name for the program.
Right, it stands for Mosaic Killer. Mosaic was the first real browser that displayed images inline. It was the first browser I used and it was free. Andreeson left UofI to start Netscape to make a non-free browser and to add proprietary extensions to html. MS competed with them and forced them to release NS for free when they realized no one wanted to pay for a browser.
Whats ignored is that Mosaic was free and the world could have standardized on it, but instead the world went with a commercial route. Ironically, it took MS to give us a free browser again. NS is just a business, nothing more. All it did was reluctantly give up its code when it realized it wasnt marketable, thus the Mozilla project, which was a bloaty mess almost strictly for unix users, and the much later Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox product which is alive today.