AOL has let its Mozilla staff go. All of them. They've also dismantled the Netscape division, to the point of "pulling the logos off the buildings".

But not to fear... Many Mozilla hackers have banded together to form the mozillafoundation, which strives to continue development of Mozilla.

It looks to me like Netscape (the brand) will be around for quite awhile yet... AOL would be fools to drop something with that name recognition... but I think what will happen is they'll gear it more towards the content-providing side of things, and Netscape (the browser) will disappear. It's already hard to find a link to download the browser from the Netscape site. It just makes sense, given their deal with Microsoft.

But funnily enough, they're not really the bad guys in this scenario. They've given the Mozilla Foundation a $2 million donation to help get them going, and handed them all the trademarks and logos for the project.

With this sort of head-start, the Mozilla Foundation can really go places - places they probably never could have gone while still under the AOL umbrella.

So it'll be an interesting period over the next year for web browsers, and the web in general, since we'll have a 'new' growing browser maker, and an established browser that isn't updating.