Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy 133
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape. From the article: 'Mozilla's Usenet public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla's public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use. Most of the approximately 63 different newsgroups that began with the old moniker have now been officially abandoned.' Related: Earlier this week Netscape Communications released version 8.1 of its Netscape Browser."
Re:Netscape (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Times have changed. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't really believe that Microsoft invented the web browser, do you? When Netscape was born, Bill Gates didn't even think the internet was particularly important. And Netscape was just building on the university-developed NCSA Mosaic browser.
Back in the mid-90s, Netscape was THE dominant browser. But it got stagnant as the corporation tried to figure out how to make money off of it. Meanwhile, Microsoft built a browser that was comparable in quality (neither one was great), and used it's monopolistic position - combined with some rather unethical tactics - to grab users away from Netscape.
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Informative)
Nope... Netscape was meant to be a Mosaic-killer (Mosaic + godzilla = Mozilla)
Re:Netscape (Score:4, Informative)
Or you can get a similar effect in Firefox on windows using the IE Tab extension. Can be very handy.
Re:Times have changed. (Score:3, Informative)
Correct if you mean 'Mozilla the foundation'. The Mozilla suite is dead and will see no further development by the Mozilla foundation. It's now an independent community project called Seamonkey. If I read the news groups correctly the team is substanitally the same one responsible for the old suite. See: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ [mozilla.org] The best bet is one of the nightly build releases under the 'contrib' branch of the trunk tree. Gecko/20060116 SeaMonkey/1.0b is working well for me.
Re:Times have changed. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And WTF are you smoking? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Breathing (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that's true, but let's not forget that Netscape's REAL business was Enterprise server software. The rise of Apache had a lot more to do with Netscape's poor finances than the rise of IE did.
In conclusion:
+ Netscape browser gets beat down by IE
+ Netscape web server loses against Apache and IIS
+ Netscape groupware gets squeezed off the map by MS Exchange and IBM Notes
+ Netscape application server (Kiva) gets overwhelmed by Java stuff like BEA and WebSphere
Endgame: Netscape ends up a as a lame portal company.
Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... (Score:4, Informative)
Try an LXR search [mozilla.org]. Generally speaking, kungFuDeathGrip is used (as Pneuma ROCKS guessed) to ensure that reference counts are kept above 0 during a code path. A good example is in libpr0n [mozilla.org], where the comment kind of explains what they're doing.
In XPCOM (and COM), objects have reference counts. When the reference count reaches 0, the object is destroyed. The reference count is incremented any time a block of code takes a reference to the object, and is decremented whenever a block of code releases that reference.
Occasionally there are places where the reference count is potentially 1, and a certain function call may reduce it to 0 (thereby destroying the object) before the object is really ready to be destroyed. In that case, the Mozilla codebase grabs a kungFuDeathGrip on the object (increasing the ref count by 1) until it's really safe to release the object.
Generally speaking this occurs when an object (event source) makes a callback on another object with a refcount of 1 (event handler), and the event handler removes itself from the event source - reducing its refcount to 0. However, if the event handler isn't complete yet (still has some cleanup), then they need to grab a kungFuDeathGrip to ensure that the object isn't destroyed before it's ready to be destroyed.
Re:boring rehash (Score:3, Informative)
Grab.
Re:Breathing (Score:1, Informative)
Having worked at Netscape during the 'browser wars', you are wrong and the other posted was correct.
Netscape actually did testing for open statndards. It was the company mantra. was the one exception to that rule, and if scuttlebutt is to be believed, it was put in while a proposal for standardization, and it wasn't included (thank god, how annoying), they just never removed the functionality.
Everything was standard, a NNTP news server, a POP3/IMAP4 Mail server, HTTP/HTTP Web server, LDAP directory server.
What tags are you talking about, exactly?
The Enterprise server (HTTP/HTTPS) was even tested against IE to make sure things worked well.
The only history distortion I see if yours. Your claims simply arent true. Prove me wrong, I'd love to me enlightened on the issue. I worked with all of these products, and joined Netscape to fight Microsoft (well, and the fact it was cool as hell to work there).
Netescapee.