Firefox-Based Netscape 8 Beta Goes Live

pigmelon writes "According to BetaNews, 'America Online's Netscape team has opened its doors to the public, releasing the first beta of the revived Netscape Web browser. (screenshot) Based upon Firefox, Netscape version 8 focuses on security and user privacy, and supports rendering with both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser engines.' Before downloading the beta, remember that it uses Firefox 1.0, which contains some vulnerabilities."

Mirror

[Broke Mirror]

If needed.

http://www.betanews.com.nyud.net:8090/article/Nets cape_Browser_80_Beta_Goes_Live/1109870204 [nyud.net]
http://fileforum.betanews.com.nyud.net:8090/detail /Netscape_Browser/1101836316/1 [nyud.net]

Extensions

[BobPaul]

Unfortunately you can't install extensions cause they all say they don't support Netscape.

Re:Does it fix the shyte rendering of slasdot?

[drinkypoo]

Slashdot misrendering actually happens MORE under Firefox 1.0.1 than on 1.0 - at least on my home PC. Kind of disturbing. It doesn't seem to happen at all at work (heh heh) using Mozilla 1.7.5. For what it's worth, slashdot seems to render properly, but the browser's interface is amazingly, astoundingly ugly.

windows only?

[Anonymousse Custard]

Sadly it seems to be a windows only release.

Re:Mirror

[OverlordQ]

Yes! Let's mirror the download page and not the file itself ;)

Download [netscape.com]

it's on netscrape bandwidth so it should fare just fine.

Re:Does it fix the shyte rendering of slasdot?

[jacksonj04]

Quick fix for this:

Ctrl +
Ctrl -

Forces Firefox to re-render the page for you.

Re:Does it fix the shyte rendering of slasdot?

[cephyn]

I just use SlashFix [hardgrok.org]

Re:Does it fix the shyte rendering of slasdot?

[Anonymous Custard]

Use Slashfix [hardgrok.org], and never worry about slashdot rendering errors again.

Re:My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

[Osty]

I doubt much of anyone is using a 600x800 resolution. Tablet PCs tend to be higher resolution and I doubt you could even get a driver for the ISA VGA card that ran the old 15" radius pivot monitors.

I dunno, my nVidia card can rotate the screen, and my LCD monitor can rotate (meant for access to inputs on the back of monitor). I don't think I'd actually use my monitor that way, but I could if I wanted to.

Re:Merged Menu Bar

[DrXym]

Probably not. In case you're interested, this effect is probably achieved by either a) overriding the paint routines for the non-client areas of the frame window or more likely b) producing a title-less frame window and handling mouse down events in the top area of the frame to simulate dragging the window around.

I was going to suggest you load view-source:chrome://browser/content/browser.xul to see how the chrome does that top part, but their view-source: code seems to be broken. Ooops! Still, you could probably browse the .jar files if you were interested.

Re:why?

[kerrle]

Right click on a page. Select "View like Internet Explorer" from the menu. I agree, it should also be under view.

Re:why?

[Octagon Most]

"Supposedly the netscape version has built in the IE rendering engine for compatibility, while still maintaining the security of Firefox. We shall see. This may mean a browser that is vulnerable to every exploit."

According to Walt Mossberg's review [wsj.com] in the WSJ:

"If a site is considered trustworthy, Netscape automatically renders it using the Internet Explorer method, for maximum compatibility. Internet Explorer's method for rendering Web pages opens security vulnerabilities that Firefox's doesn't. Netscape figures that, at trusted sites, it's OK to take that risk."

Impressions

[skt]

I can only imagine that Netscape wants to use Netscape 8 to help market its ISP. After using this browser briefly today, I can not really understand who their target audience is. Is it power users? It seems to be intended for power users, it offers a level of control I have never seen before in a browser, multiple rendering engines, user-trust levels and containers, very detailed, site-specific settings. Also, check out the toolbar configuration GUI if you get a chance.. yikes. However, I don't think power users will touch this because they are already aware of firefox and Mozilla. Even though firefox does not have the level of control that this Netscape 8 beta has, who really wants to configure and manage all of that when firefox works perfectly well (minus IE-specific sites) without it?

As far as regular users go, I can not think of any reason why they would prefer this browser over something like IE or firefox. I have thought that for a while, IE has been so popular because of its simplicity. Even though it doesn't support features like tabbed browsing and typeaheadfind and RSS.. your average user doesn't want that stuff anyway, thus IE meets their needs so why change to anything more complex?

So, unless I am missing something, we have a browser here that power users will not use and average users will not use. Perhaps Netscape can get some people to use it if they bundle it with their ISP. It is only beta though, maybe it will get better..

Re:Does it fix the shyte rendering of slasdot?

[paul248]

screenshot [purdue.edu]

Rendering Solution

[Quikyn]

One solution, beside plugins (that do the same thing for you automatically, if I'm not mistaken) is to increase or decrease the font size in Firefox, then return it to normal. (CTRL+= or CTRL+- then CTRL+0)

Whatever part of the rendering causes the bug is not recalled when fields are resized for text size changes.

I hope this helps, it's what I use when Slashdot becomes completely uninterpretable.