News 

Om Malik, of GigaOM, reports that he met with Andreessen in the middle of last week, and warned him that his 'switch' would be blogged. Andreessen blamed the switch on trouble he was having with his Lenovo ThinkPad,

ADVERTISEMENT

and on buying a 15in MacBook Pro, said 'I used to be a Mac user till 1994, and now I am a Mac user again'.

Andreessen, together with Eric Bana, coded Mosaic, the first popular graphical browser, before meeting and working with Jim Clark, ex of Silicon Graphics, and changing the name of the browser to Netscape Navigator, and the company that developed it to Netscape Communications.

Netscape was acquired by AOL, which paid $4.2bn for it in 1999. It made Andreessen its Chief Technology Officer, but he left soon after. By that time, the Netscape codebase had already been released under an open source license, and it now forms the core of the Gecko layout engine, which underpins Firefox and Thunderbird.

No release date has yet been set for an appearance of the Mac OS X version of Netscape 8.1.2, so Mac users, including Andreessen, have the choice of either Netscape 7.2 or an alternative browser.