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?"

Netscape.....OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

With Firefox and all those other browsers out there, exactly why should we care about a new version of Netscape? Especially since most of the versions I've tried have seemed rather, well, sucky.

Enhances the awesomeness of Firefox??

[neuro.slug]

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]

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

Too late

[AlanS2002]

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.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[AlanS2002]

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:Who cares?

[rvw]

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.

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

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.

Trollish fanboy cheerleading

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why? Why do you think it was a "disastrous decision"? What was the disaster? Why are you hoping this feature isn't included?

Look, I'm a web developer. I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. But this just screams out as blatant fanboyism. Including Trident for particular websites that don't work so well in Gecko wasa fairly sane decision, and really didn't affect anybody negatively. Grow the fuck up if you can't handle that and still feel the need to whine about it after years have passed.

In a word...

[Sfing_ter]

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]

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.

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing you're missing is that "straight HTML" has changed a hell of a lot in the past decade. XHTML, CSS and the DOM model have made documents far more complex and take a lot more effort to render correctly. I can see this and I'm not even a web geek (I've knocked up a bit of hand-written CSS/HTML 4.0 transitional to act a document template for a project that needed documentation, but that's it)

'disastrous' decision?

[Tumbleweed]

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]

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:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[tsq]

I'm not sure if I'm understanding the implication here, but are you saying that web sites shouldn't use CSS? Maybe it's because I wasn't around during the glory days of the internet (the early 90s from what I understand) when you only had hyperlink, header, and paragraph tags and you were happy with it dammit, but how is expanding the way people can present things on the internet (in a standardized way) anything but good?

The problem with the Netscape browser

[DrXym]

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.)

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[DrXym]

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 lowkey about it than they were with 8.0.

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[jez9999]

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:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Jesus_666]

Have you tried lynx? It comes without baggage like CSS, JavaScript or images and its memory footprint is much smaller than that of Fx, Opera or IE.

Re:In a word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, its like with winamp. Bloody aol ruin anything they get their hands on.

Old Memories

[red crab]

Netscape wasn't a bad product at all. IE killed it. I still Netscape more 'usable' than IE. User preferences, connection settings, themes are much easier to navigate through in Netscape as compared to IE. Netscape's failure just shows that to survive in market, just being good isn't enough.

I remember reading an old O' Reilly book on HTML which covered both the browsers. At that time there were certain tags that were rendered differently on the two browsers. The book strongly advised that whenever this be the case, design your pages keeping Netscape in mind since this is the dominant browser nowadays and will continue to be so - a prediction which is nowhere near to reality now.

Tiny Cobol

[16K Ram Pack]

Considering how much COBOL code is still running, this seems quite a relevant project.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[Giometrix]

"of course you are right - there's going to be site specific biases. however, these numbers should be weighted by the fact that MS shoves IE down everyones throat. some/most people will not know there's a choice, some will but won't know how to change and some might feel comfortable trusting MS more than left-field heretics. so one could argue that browser stats are as much an indication of visitor IQ than a true reflection of *choice*."

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shoving down everyone's throat." If you mean the inability to (easily, and completely) uninstall IE, then yes, I agree that MS should allow users to remove it completely. Still, that's hardly shoving anything down anyone's throat, as after you install another browser you can always not use IE.

Every modern OS comes with a web browser. Does Apple force Safari down people's throats? Does Red Hard force Fire Fox down people's throats?

How would the typical Windows user even get Fire Fox easily without a browser included in the system? And finally, people not knowing about alternatives to IE is not really Microsoft's problem (and I'm not implying that you said it was). MS simply provides the bare bone tools (not that some of those tools are by any means very good...) to Windows users, its up to the user to obtain everything else.

Re:Yes the Netscape Dev Team is working on Netscap

[FishWithAHammer]

"Of course Netscape 9 will be better than Netscape 8"? Oh, right, like Netscape 7 was loads better than Netscape 6. I didn't think it could get worse than Netscape 7. Then came Netscape 8. Boy, was I wrong!

You say the newest edition of the abortion is "integrated with [y]our social news system"? What a joke! A browser shouldn't be integrated with one single website anywhere. That's not the bloody point of a web browser. A browser is a method of serving web pages to an end user, not to increase a company's advertising ratings. Do you think anyone would use Netscape if they didn't know better?

I doubt there's one feature in Netscape that both a) doesn't suck, and b) wasn't created by someone else. Nutscrape 8 was a joke, and to be honest I severely doubt that anyone Netscape has in-house can do anything that Firefox hasn't already done without sucking.

You're outmoded. The web passed you by quite some time ago, and trying to make a quick buck off people doesn't work so well anymore. And just for fun, Ms. Serriere, let's take a look at your little news portal (with all your image/ad sources blocked, thank you very much).

"She believes in a gorgeous technologically morphable future." And you're a futurist too! Well, hell, let me just genuflect right here!

God, I hate PR flacks.

Re:Netscape.....OK...

[jone1941]

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.

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Onan]

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 them to look?