I followed through the comments for the article above and found
this interesting one. It was written by Blake Ross, one of the
co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, and he describes his experience he
had with Netscape and how AOL killed it. Wikipedia even states that
he was working as an intern at Netscape Communications Corporation
when he was 14. 
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Blake_Ross_on_Popup_Suppression.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
And, the essence of that article would be:
Unfortunately, the release also contained a feature called the
"popup suppression whitelist." This was a list of sites that were
still allowed to open popups, and it was seeded with all of the AOL
properties that used them, such as Netscape.com.
By the way, Netscape.com was the default homepage.
When dozens of people eagerly fired up the New Netscape 7.01, Now
With Popup Blocking!, the very first thing they saw was a popup ad.
WTF?
