Netscape 9 to Undo Netscape 8 Mistakes?

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that Netscape 9 has been announced. The most interesting thing is how they seem to be re-evaluating many of the decisions they made with Netscape 8. Netscape 9 will be developed in-house (Netscape 8 was outsourced) and it will be available for Windows, OSX, and Linux (Netscape 8 was Windows only). Although Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, the company is also considering resuming support for Netscape 7.2, the last suite version with an email client and Web page editor. It remains to be seen whether Netscape will reverse the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko but given that there's no IE for OS X or Linux, here's hoping. After a series of substandard releases, could Netscape be on the verge of making of a version of their browser that enhances the awesomeness of Firefox, rather than distracts from it?"

Is Netscape still taken serious?

[lemmen (48986)]

To me it seems Netscape has lost his reputation as best browser. Mozilla Firefox is the more used browser these days. For Netscape it is very hard to gain market share with a suit. Still brave of Netscape though.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:

[networkBoy (774728)]

First couple days of the month for one of my sites...

Windows 202 72.4 %
Linux 37 13.2 %
Unknown 35 12.5 %
Macintosh 4 1.4 %
GNU 1 0.3 %

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
Firefox No 127 45.5 %
MS Internet Explorer No 91 32.6 %
Unknown ? 34 12.1 %
Konqueror No 10 3.5 %
Opera No 8 2.8 %
Mozilla No 6 2.1 %
Safari No 2 0.7 %
Wget

Looks like it's likely to be firefox on windows for the most common...

Re:

[networkBoy (774728)]

Foo, replying to myself, more stats (the gripe-site in sig), for 2007YTD, I'm betting that most of the hits come from ./ :-)

Operating Systems Hits Percent
Windows 7339 80.2 %
Linux 1059 11.5 %
Macintosh 554 6 %
Unknown 188 2 %

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
Firefox No 6061 66.3 %
MS Internet Explorer No 1945 21.2 %
Mozilla No 356 3.8 %
Safari No 315 3.4 %
Opera No 260 2.8 %
Konqueror No 76 0.8 %
Unknown ? 63 0.6 %
Netscape No 30 0.3 %
Camino No 25 0.2 %
Galeon No 6 0 %
Others 3 0 %

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[AlanS2002 (580378)]

Your stats could easily be influenced by the type of sites you run. For example I'm sure that slashdot.org has a higher proportion of people reading it with Firefox than microsoft.com does.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[zakezuke (229119)]

To me it seems Netscape has lost his reputation as best browser. Mozilla Firefox is the more used browser these days. For Netscape it is very hard to gain market share with a suit. Still brave of Netscape though.

Is it taken seriously?

V8.12 comes with "WeatherBug [axe-s.com]" among other things [netscape.com]. I don't know if it's a full version of Weatherbug or the spyware infected version, but i'm willing to guess it's the spyware infected version.

How seriously would you take software bundled with "WeatherBug".

The last version I ran was probally V6.xx, which was AIM infected.

Re:

[DrXym (126579)]

The last version I ran was probally V6.xx, which was AIM infected.

At the time of Netscape 6.x, the browser was basically a stable branch of Mozilla which went through a shit tonne of extra QA testing and had a few extras like AIM and spellchecker. It wasn't very intrusive and the extra QA was really noticeable back at that time when the Mozilla browser would crash quite frequently.

These days Firefox is pretty stable, so if AOL / Netscape are going to rebrand it, they should perhaps be more subtle and lo

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[dcam (615646)]

To me it seems Netscape has lost his reputation as best browser.

Wow. Welcome to 1999.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[larry bagina (561269)]

He didn't say Firefox was the most used browser, he said it was "more used" than Netscape.

Re:

[Arimus (198136)]

Ah, I misread the parent - not a good idea to read /. before the first mug of coffee is drunk.

Re:

[Professor_UNIX (867045)]

Personally, I'm happy with Firefox 1.5.something. Tried 2.0, it screwed my bookmarks, various other things.

You must be doing something screwy with your bookmarks. I've got hundreds of bookmarks organized into folders and had zero problems going from 1.5 to 2.0. It disabled a couple of oddball extensions I had but fired right up.

There's a Netscape 9? And 8? 7? 6?

[DogDude (805747)]

Wow. I had no idea that there were still "Netscape" browsers being made today. That's cute.

Re:There's a Netscape 9? And 8? 7? 6?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is! Where have you been? You probably didn't notice that there is an Amiga OS/4 either, a 2008 Fortran standard, or a late 2005 release of the TinyCOBOL compiler. I'm sure a revised Gopher client is in the works, along with some juicy updates for our favorite C64 BBS program, Color64. It's great to live in the past!

Re:

[OldManAndTheC++ (723450)]

What about punchcards? I want to be able to punch out "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" on my IBM 029 and get the result back on a line printer...

revised Gopher client

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Oh, man, that'd be awesome! If they could just add JavaScript to Gopher, it'd be perfect! And image support. And Flash. Yeah, that's all Gopher really needs to succeed. But that would be a pretty l33t Gopher, so we should probably spell it g0ph3r to save confusion. Either that or Bruce (since Archie and Veronica are already taken).

C64 BBS Software

[MagerValp (246718)]

Actually, C*Base is the preferred flavor nowadays, and 3.3 was just released:

C*Base 3.3 [c64.org]

You gotta move with the times, man.

Re:

[Greg Lindahl (37568)]

Um, there's still a big market for Fortran compilers... and F2003 has lots of "modern" features, so it's not really living in the past.

Re:

[poot_rootbeer (188613)]

You probably didn't notice that there is an Amiga OS/4 either

It's half as good as IBM's OS/2, but way better than Tandy's OS/9.

Enhances the awesomeness of Firefox??

[neuro.slug (628600)]

Firstly, that's some quality writing. Secondly, the only thing I see Netscape 9 enhancing is the memory usage. Holy crap, people call Firefox a memory hog. Are they planning on including a discount on a 1GB DIMM with every download?

I gave up on Netscape after 4.72. I recommend the tag 'clusterfuck'.

Who cares?

[joeystitch (1057842)]

I mean, let's be honest here. We have Firefox and Opera, plus Safari if you're a Mac user. Netscape is irrelevant.

Re:

[Tim C (15259)]

I thought choice and competition were supposed to be good things.

Re:Who cares?

[rvw (755107)]

I thought choice and competition were supposed to be good things.

Well they are. But it might be better if they gave their manpower and marketing budget to Mozilla. They can then take Firefox and Thunderbird, rebrand them as Netscape, and move new (or old) users over to the good side.

Too late

[AlanS2002 (580378)]

It would take something truly remarkable for this to have any impact, with Netscape's repeated failed starts over the last few years I can't see many people being willing to give them much of a go.

3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Onan (25162)]

Back in the netscape 4 days, some months after the source release, I remember a coworker having just heard of this new "gecko" rendering engine, and coming excitedly to my desk to show me how amazing it was. He pointed me to where to grab the nearly-naked engine, and then told me to render the same page in it and in my existing netscape window, and marvel at how much faster gecko was.

I opened up some moderately complex page in gecko, and it seemed kind of normal-ish to me. I opened up the same page in a new

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[civilizedINTENSITY (45686)]

I don't think 3.0 had Flashblock, NoScript, nor AdBlock. Tabs are kickass. CSS2? mathML? SVG? Methinks that if Netscape 3 had all the features you want, you don't want much. At least not the things I need.

Re:

[Onan (25162)]

I don't think 3.0 had Flashblock, NoScript, ...

On the first two counts, netscape 3 had exactly the same script- and flash-blocking technology that I use to this day: not installing Flash and disabling javascript. (Or just using a browser that supports neither one in the first place.) Problem solved.

AdBlock.

I will agree that ad-blocking tools are the one and only front on which browsers have advanced somewhat in the past decade. Though I will suggest that gecko/netscape/firefox's solutions for this are rat

Re:

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

I want a sodding web browser.

Well, if it's a sodding web browser you want, I can highly recommend IE7. It definitely ups the sod factor significantly.

I wonder if someone could come up with a Navigator 3 theme for Firefox that would configure the interface to the (vastly superior) Navigator 3 interface. That'd be nice. I'd keep CSS though, if I were you (although I'd make sure minimum font size and override web author colours was turned on).

As far as speed goes, I think most people would be SHOCKED at how mu

Re:

[Maian (887886)]

You got 2 things wrong:

1. Netscape 4 didn't use Gecko. At all. It was built on top of Netscape 3. The first Netscape to use Gecko was Netscape 6 (they skipped version 5 as a marketing ploy).
2. Gecko supports CSS. Netscape 3 doesn't. Want to try viewing /. in Netscape 3? Be my guest. Now the old /. - that's a different story :)

Re:

[Onan (25162)]

1) I didn't assert that netscape 4 used gecko. I asserted that gecko was a slight improvement over netscape 4, which had itself been a vast downgrade from netscape 3.

2) Yes, the previous iteration of slashdot was immensely more accessible, more usable, and better designed. I come here much less frequently now that the site's maintainers have made the poor choice to break compatibility with many browsers. The choice to wed slashdot to CSS is slashdot's problem, not any browser's.

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[jez9999 (618189)]

2) Yes, the previous iteration of slashdot was immensely more accessible, more usable, and better designed. I come here much less frequently now that the site's maintainers have made the poor choice to break compatibility with many browsers. The choice to wed slashdot to CSS is slashdot's problem, not any browser's.

You're weird. 99.5% (at a conservative estimate) of people browsing the web can see Slashdot just fine, because they're using IE6, IE7, Firefox (any version), Mozilla (any version), Seamonkey (any version), Safari, Konqueror, Opera, or one of a plethora of other browsers that has no problem with CSS. Just because it doesn't work on your 10+ year old browser doesn't mean it's bad.

Re:

[Onan (25162)]

I most definitely am saying that sites should not rely on CSS. I frankly don't care whether sites include CSS, as long as they continue to do the right thing when my browser ignores it.

"Expanding the way people can present things on the internet" is not universally good; whether it's good or bad depends on the particular situation being discussed. Would you be in favor of site publishers replacing all their html with pdfs? Or with Word documents? Or perhaps just with big images of entire pages as they want

Re:

[limecat4eva (1055464)]

www.pimpmysafari.com [pimpmysafari.com]

New netscape

[Guerilla* Napalm (762317)]

I remember Netscape like it was yesterday. *** assumes the foetal position, in a dark corner. ****

Re:

[tttonyyy (726776)]

Well, lets not forget that it used to be *the* browser to use. I guess that doesn't say much about the state of our browsers at the time, especially since css wasn't around and the web was much simpler.

Brand power

[telso (924323)]

The only reason to keep Netscape alive is brand recognition. Look at how many [google.com] websites are still "best viewed"/"tested" or have bookmark or printing directions for only Netscape and IE, or just haven't been updated to say anything different: NOAA [noaa.gov], part of NASA [nasa.gov], NIH [nih.gov] sites [nih.gov], govts of Utah [utah.gov] and Minnesota [state.mn.us], the IOC [olympic.org], a Consumer Reports site [crbestbuydrugs.org] and college after college after college. If people keep seeing these notices, especially on government sites, there's no way they'll switch to some "other" browser, and keeping Netscape as a brand will be worthwhile. I mean, do I really have to mention AOL?

Re:Brand power

[spellraiser (764337)]

I mean, do I really have to mention AOL?

No, you really don't. You really, really, really don't. We got your point; there's no need to make evil threats like that.

disastrous? distracts?

[Animaether (411575)]

"It remains to be seen whether Netscape will reverse the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko"
Hold on... what exactly whas so disastrous about that? If I'm not mistaken, you got the choice of using either the Gecko or the IE rendering engine. What exactly is so disastrous about that? I thought we were supposed to be all -for- choice?

"a version of their browser that enhances the awesomeness of Firefox, rather than distracts from it?"
I'm not sure if the poster really meant "distracts" there.. it is quite apt, given what a gizmo-ridden POS Netscape is these days.. but I suspect they meant "detract".

Re:

[civilizedINTENSITY (45686)]

Not as a switchable option, but alternative as in replacing. This is why there was, as the article says, a generation of Netscape that wouldn't run on either MacOS or Linux.

In a word...

[Sfing_ter (99478)]

In a word... NO.
Netscape ceased existence with the last vestiges of the 4.79(?) version; as long as AOL controls it, it will be filled with automatically installed spyware/adware and AOL cruft.
Unlike the Mozilla Suite Releases the AOL releases not only added crapware, they could barely get fixes out. Nutscrape is dead, long live Mozilla.

Netscape... AOL still owns that, right?

[Dracos (107777)]

I just can't bring myself to care. AOL has done nearly everything possible to ruin the name, reputation, and legacy of Netscape. If the next version of the browser doesn't continue this grand tradition, then they must be out of ideas.

Yes the Netscape Dev Team is working on Netscape 9

[f()bz (839819)]

I'm not sure why the cryptic title was chosen, of course Netscape 9 will be better than Netscape 8. *smile* The new browser will be integrated with our social news system that has been live on Netscape.com since July 2006, and yes, the browser will run on Linux (as well as Windows and Mac).

I am one of the Anchors on Netscape http://www.netscape.com/about [netscape.com], and not directly part of the dev team, but I am sure members of our dev team will have plenty to comment on this thread once they are awake.

Fabienne Serriere
Netscape Anchor

'disastrous' decision?

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko

Uhm, what disasters were caused by having an _alternate_ rendering engine which most people would not know how or why to use?

What is the point?

[jopet (538074)]

What is the point of making a new, separate browser instead of joining forces with the Firefox development and just distributing a re-branded Firefox with a new theme and a couple of pre-installed extensions?
What differences will there be that are not just another theme or preinstalled extension? Is there any coordination going on with the Firefox developer community (since FF this is supposed to be an open community, obviously not).
Will Firefox extensions and themes work with NS9? Why won't it run on Solaris?

What will NS9 that Firefox, maybe with one or two extensions installed, cannot do?

Why should I bother to try yet another browser that maybe has a few little improvements and at the same time lacks other things I get in other browsers?

Re:What is the point?

[christopherfinke (608750)]

What will NS9 that Firefox, maybe with one or two extensions installed, cannot do?

For starters, improvements to the core of the browser. If we only wanted Netscape to be Firefox with a few extensions, we would have already released it as Firefox with a few extensions. I'm not at liberty to discuss here what else there will be, but I do blog a progress update/feature teaser every Tuesday at the Netscape blog [netscape.com].

One thing I can guarantee: Netscape 9 will not force you to supply a zipcode when you install it. That's one Netscape 8 mistake it will definitely undo.

Christopher Finke
Dev lead for Netscape 9

The problem with the Netscape browser

[DrXym (126579)]

Is that it's not THE Netscape browser. These days Netscape is just a brand and the browser is the Mozilla browser after a bunch AOL marketroids have slapped tonnes of performance / screen sapping buttons, effects and other shit all over it rendering it completely useless.

At one stage the Netscape browser was actually worth using because it was Mozilla + extra QA + some minor and useful extras like IM panel and spellchecker. These days I simply don't see the point.

If AOL really want to revamp it, I suggest they consider throwing a million at Mozilla.org to produce a version of Firefox with different bookmarks & search set to AOL links and maybe some cool Time Warner themes that people might actually want (e.g. Superman Returns, Lord of the Rings, 300, Harry Potter, Sopranos etc. etc.)

Wha?

[KoldKompress (1034414)]

Sorry, Net Who?

The Underdog

[Jekler (626699)]

I think many people get excited about Netscape news because many of us want them to win a battle they lost a decade ago.

I was lulled into Internet Explorer from the start, because that's what my ISP's software shipped with, and at the time, the browser and the ISP software were synonymous to me. I didn't have any technical knowledge, my girlfriend had to explain to me how to open an .mp3 file. If my computer didn't natively handle a format, end of story.

Anyway, I digress. A lot of us have fond memories of Netscape, including myself. I remember when I switched to using "Netscape.net" email, and the Netscape web browser. It was an exciting time for me, because I felt like I had a choice in the software I used to view the web. Even though my choices are greater still (Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Kameleon, etc., my perception was different. The nostalgic feeling of discovering there was another option felt so much more important at the time. Now, I can switch between browsers and Operating Systems easily, but back then, Netscape represented a diversity that scarcely existed.

In 1995, Widows and "internet" were synonyms to me. It was only in discovering Netscape that the idea of modularity even occurred to me. That I could view the internet in a different way but still have the same computer.

Netscape has made no small number of mistakes over the years, but all that is forgivable because of the moment of clarity they afforded me. Will the next version of Netscape be a technical rival to IE or Firefox? Maybe not, but I'll try it anyway. Benefit of the doubt and all that.

Re:

[fistynuts (457323)]

In 1995, Widows and "internet" were synonyms to me

I'm surprised your girlfriend put up with that.

NS7.2 is not an entirely bad choice

[gelfling (6534)]

NS7.2 is extremely servicable is very stable and works well. NS8 - the dumb choice they made to end the mail client just stupid.

But - FF/Thunderbird REALLY DO have their own problems.

a) Lots of bloat & overhead for both. FF/Thunderbird work ok but are sluggish. The fast launch STILL doesn't work right, combining it with the Google accelerator is even worse.

b) STILL has compatibility problems with many websites. Ergo the IE Tab extension which is an absolute necessity.

So - Seamonkey is a good middle ground. It works more or less ok, has a lower overhead than FF/Thunderbird, works like NS7.2 but allows for extensions. Now there are still lots of warts with Seamonkey but it's good enough for now.

NS8 should be bypassed as it really doesn't bring anything to the table. It's bloated and slow, doesn't have a mail client. Maybe NS9 will do........what? Exactly? Be a lot like FF? A lot like Seamonkey? I don't know.

not that bad

[noldrin (635339)]

Netscape 8 was actually a pretty interesting browser. It came preloaded on my laptop, it seemed pretty nice in several ways. I only used it to download seamonkey, but it did it really well.

Re:

[jone1941 (516270)]

Because choice is a good thing! If people (yeah I don't know who either) feel better running netscape at least they're not running IE. It's still a gecko engine so everything is going to render like firefox, that can't be a bad thing.