Tomorrow, Netscape is officially dead: AOL is ending support for the venerable browser. But its offspring, Firefox, is thriving. Both Netscape and Firefox had several brushes with death. In 1998, "Microsoft was driving their monster truck after us and they were about to pin us to the wall," former Netscape software engineer Brendan Eich recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that could happen, however, Netscape execs James Barksdale, Eric Hahn, Mike Homer and cofounder Marc Andreessen decided to open the browser's source code to the community. Behold, Mozilla. But the organization wasn't independent of Netscape owner AOL yet. And here's a shocker, AOL executives nearly killed Mozilla through neglect. So who saved the baby?

Like a developmentally disabled child getting praised for his classroom manners, Microsoft has won praise from the judge overseeing its behavior after an antitrust case. Though Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has extended her period of oversight until November 2009, citing an "extreme and unforeseen delay in the availability of complete, accurate and usable technical documentation," she described Microsoft as "extremely cooperative." (Microsoft was supposed to produce the documentation to make it easier for rivals to work with its software.) Does anyone realize how cutting this is? Microsoft isn't misbehaving, according to the court; it's just stupid.

Creative Capital got ahold of the December 2007 ComScore numbers for the top social networks in the U.S. — and they are, on the whole, not good. Engagement — average minutes spent on the site per visitor — is down for MySpace and Microsoft's Live Spaces, but up for almost all the other sites. Unique visitor growth is ominously low for MySpace and, in the last three months, LinkedIn. Hit the jump to see the numbers for yourself.

Enterprise IT is boring ... except when it gets lowdown and dirty. LIke it's starting to between Microsoft and VMware. Last week, Microsoft announced a "vision and strategy to accelerate virtualization adoption." We could relay the details, but they're full of jargon like "System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM)" and "RPD protocol for VDI environments." So go here for that. The best way to understand tech jargon like this is to see how companies pump up their sales guys for battle, since everyone knows sales guys are thick as rocks and must be told things in small, English-language words. Here are excerpts from a leaked VMware memo:

Another Demo is coming up this January 28-30. Smart startup founders will save their best pitches not for the bored audience — trust us, they'll all be ignoring you and sending BlackBerry emails. Instead, buttonhole the guys with money to spend, starting with reps from Google, Microsoft and Cisco. Here's who they're sending.

MSN and Microsoft's other Internet ventures are a sizeable business: $863 million in the most recent quarter. CBNC's Jim Goldman calls the quarter a "stunner." Perhaps, if he meant stunningly bad. Microsoft's growth rate is flat, Henry Blodget notes. Not counting Microsoft's aQuantive acquisition, it's been growing only 24 percent a year. And it's still losing money: about $200 million in the most recent quarter. No wonder Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo: For all of its woes, the Web giant still has its act more together than Microsoft.

Remember CinemaNow, the Marina Del Rey-based movie-downloads service backed by Lionsgate, Microsoft, and Cisco, among others? Its video-streaming service has been left in the shadows by Apple, Netflix and Amazon.com, but CinemaNow's found a way to survive: porn.

Microsoft reported sales growth of 30 percent year over year, listing $6.5 billion in profit on $16.4 billion in sales in the second quarter. The $16 billion in revenue exceeds Microsoft's previous record by $2 billion, the company eagerly notes — though one would expect a growing company to regularly post so-called "records." Redmond's financial wizards prognosticate revenue to be between $14.3 billion and $14.6 billion with $5.6 billion to $5.7 billion in operating income during the third quarter. The full release is after the jump. (Photo by AP/Koji Sasahara)

Frank Shaw runs Microsoft PR at Waggener Edstrom. And he's got some fighting words in reaction to Apple CEO Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote. "The event and news today made me wonder if the Apple PR model of hold and surprise was wearing thin," Shaw wrote on his blog. Oh no he didn't? Oh yes he did.

The Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 works "perfectly well" on a Mac as is, Ina Fried notes on Beyond Binary. But Microsoft marketers have learned their lesson. They no longer expect Mac users to pick up a package marked "Certified for Windows Vista," with a jumble of specs on the front. Here's how Microsoft renamed and repackaged the same mouse for Mac users.

Microsoft executive Megan Wallent, née Michael Wallent, has been keeping track of the number of times she's been called "Sir." It doesn't bother Wallent particularly. Even Tilda Swinton, the androgynous star of Orlando, gets addressed with the male honorific, she notes in the following video clip.

At most companies, the post of chief information officer is a humdrum administrative job, making sure that the servers running the CEO's BlackBerry don't go down. At Microsoft, add to that this burden: Serving as a part-time shill for the company's products. If anyone could change that, it may be Tony Scott, freshly hired as the software company's fourth CIO in as many years. Scott, Tony, replaces Scott, Stuart, who left in scandal.

Google.org, Google's for-profit charity, announced all kinds of new initiatives today. The short version: health, climate change, good government. The basic idea, as MarketWatch notes in a video report about the project, is to approach "giving" like a venture capitalist. Thing is, Google's only "investing" about 3 percent as much as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. No matter, says Google's Larry Brilliant in this clip.

We stopped by the Blogger Lounge within the Microsoft booth on the Macworld Expo floor. Inside, it was rather comfortable, considerably more so than the press areas at CES — except the internet didn't work. While we were there though, we found M&M's graced with the Microsoft Office, Word and Excel logos, comfy leather couches. And a computer that everyone in the lounge was very interested in — but not the one you'd suspect.

Today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will announce a MacBook with a little somethin' somethin' wireless. We think. We guess. We have no idea. It'll change the world or something. Meanwhile, Microsoft has already announced its own game-changer: the ad-supported grocery cart.

European Union regulators plan to drag Microsoft back into court over monopolistic practices. Specifically, they argue Microsoft should not require developers to code Web software in languages only Microsoft's Internet Explorer can read. The regulators will also argue for open office-document standards, a practice which could threaten, in theory, Microsoft's Office franchise.

No one expects the fannish inquisition. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can breathe easy; he has nothing to fear from 60 Minutes after all. From the looks of the teaser CBS News is running for his upcoming interview, the hardest question Zuckerberg got asked was if he got in trouble at Harvard for launching Facemash, a predecessor of Facebook built from photos he hacked out of school servers. The venerable news organization even got his net worth wrong — he owns 27 percent of Facebook, making him worth $4 billion on paper, not $3 billion. So much for factchecking. Here are the questions we wish CBS's Lesley Stahl had asked — but doubt she bothered:

Are Microsoft's second-tier executives all second-rate? Apparently. Microsoft has just tapped Stephen Elop, the COO of Juniper Networks, to run its Business division, which includes the highly profitable Office suite. Elop, the former CEO of Macromedia, is a good fit. But his hire sends an unwelcome message to up-and-comers within Redmond: Keep toiling away, but don't aspire to run one of Microsoft's great franchises. Bill Gates can find someone better than you elsewhere. Which should be as good a signal as any for them to start leaving.

While Microsoft has yet to come up with a search engine that wows consumers, it has successfully wooed Wall Street with its push into online advertising. Alas for Microsoft, it's losing a key dealmaker. Bruce Jaffe, a top corporate-development executive who helped engineer Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive and its $240 million investment in Facebook, is leaving the company. He's been interviewing around the Valley, but last we heard, he's decided to form his own startup. Anyone have more details on what he's up to?