photo credit: Cristian Levin

SAN FRANCISCO — Every time he fired up his Netscape Web browser since mid-February, John Uribe was greeted with a message urging him to switch to one of Netscape’s two successors, Firefox or Flock.

The missives came from AOL, Netscape’s parent company, and warned him that Netscape, which introduced millions of people to the Internet, was about to become a digital orphan. On March 1, he was told, AOL would stop providing support for Netscape, leaving a band of users loyal to the pioneering Web browser to fend for themselves if they ran into technical problems.

Mr. Uribe, a 56-year-old real estate agent in Waldorf, Md., ignored every message.

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