MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (February 15, 2000) -- Netscape Communications, a leading Internet company and a subsidiary of America Online (NYSE: AOL), today announced the achievement of several major milestones for its Netscape Netcenter service and Navigator and Communicator browsers. The Company also announced that a beta of Netscape's new, more powerful and convenient Internet browser suite - powered by Netscape Gecko -- will be available to the public within the next 60 days.

Netscape's milestones include:

• The Netscape Netcenter service has surpassed 25 million registered users worldwide, more than double the number of users from a year ago. The increased traffic came one month after Netcenter unveiled a redesigned homepage to help professionals better manage their business and personal lives, offering greater ease-of-use with new tools, enhanced daily news and business programming. According to the December, 1999 Media Metrix report, Netcenter is the fourth most visited Web site at-work, ahead of Geocities, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista and GO.com.
• 105 million copies of its groundbreaking Navigator and Communicator Internet browsers were downloaded from Netcenter between January 1998 and December 1999.
• The Netscape Open Directory Project (ODP), the open-source search service maintained by the Web community at large, now includes more than 1.5 million web sites, which are organized into more than 200,000 categories by more than 22,000 volunteer editors. The directory was recently honored as part of the 1999 "Best of the Net" list by About.com's Guide to Web Search, featuring the top 10 search resources of the year.

Jim Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Netscape Netcenter, said: "Netscape is on the move. These new metrics demonstrate the continued excitement over Netscape since it joined the AOL family and foreshadow the even greater success we expect in the future. With the beta of our new browser available within 60 days and other exciting developments in the pipeline, we are energized to build on this momentum."

Among the other key achievements for Netscape since it joined with AOL:

• Netscape built and delivered the marquee applications for AOL 5.0, the latest version of the AOL flagship service's client software, including Shop@AOL, AOL Search, and You've Got Pictures, as well as My Calendar, the online scheduling program that has already been set up by nearly 6 million members;
• Netscape has also developed, through its open-source mozilla.org project, the Gecko browser engine that will serve as the faster, smaller, and more flexible heart of the next generation Netscape browser, as well as driving a wide range of Internet devices;
• The number of users of My Netscape, the suite of rich personalization features available to Netcenter registrants, has increased 400%; Netscape Search tripled in page views in just six months; and Netscape Internet Keywords continues to increase in popularity with a doubling of searches performed from the browser URL window;
• The Sun-Netscape Alliance has successfully launched its iPlanet brand of e-commerce applications, and has forged dozens of new relationships with major companies such as Lockheed Martin, Cisco, IBM, Vodafone, dr.koop.com, First Union and Vanguard. More than 7000 companies use Alliance products to run their Internet businesses.