With American Online moving to a new ad-supported Web revenue model and most of Netscape’s features being included in Firefox, it comes as no surprise that AOL is going to discontinue development and support of the Netscape browser as of February 1st 2008. At this point it is really more of a formality than anything else, but it is surprising that AOL is encouraging users to adopt Firefox while handing the future development over to Mozilla.

While some users will undoubtedly be very unhappy with this decision, a skinning utility called “Netstripe” will allow Firefox to be reskinned to make it look and feel more like Netscape.

Netscape had a rocky road, but some of us on the Fudzilla staff got our first Web surfing experiences using the Netscape browser. AOL really didn’t do much with the Netscape browser after acquiring it and then followed a complex transaction that saw Sun Microsystems acquire the server side of Netscape. While some internal teams at AOL tried to revive the Netscape Navigator, it really never materialized into anything much.

We bid you farewell, Netscape, and we hope that all of the concepts that you contributed to browsing the Internet will live in on Firefox.

Read more here.