First Peek at Netscape Navigator 9 186
lisah writes "Netscape released a beta version of Navigator 9 (Linux.com shares corporate overlordship with Slashdot) today that includes several new components while giving some old ones the boot. This release will no longer ship with mail or composer but does have URL correction, a pre-populated RSS feed menu, and a neat clipboard in the browser's sidebar that will hold links to websites you want to visit again but not necessarily bookmark."
goddamit! (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:goddamit! (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox with a Netscape toolbar (Score:3, Insightful)
Souped-up? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad to hear it's been slimmed down, but really, is integration with the Netscape.com portal a big feature?
Re:Netscape eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Netscape eh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Also how could something which is available for linux depend on IE?
Re:My linkpad (Score:1, Insightful)
No wait. Make that I wouldn't want vi to come back from the grave.
Re:Firefox with a Netscape toolbar (Score:3, Insightful)
I can only see this of use in situations where the PHB is fixated on the Netscape name for some reason. They'll refuse Firefox, but Netscape is fine since they've used that forever.
Re:goddamit! (Score:4, Insightful)
From About: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5pre) Gecko/20070604 Firefox/2.0.0.4 Navigator/9.0b1
Re:Netscape is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape 4.x is what killed Netscape. Maybe the early 4.0 versions were acceptable, I really can't remember, but by around 4.5 it was a bloated, slow, buggy browser. Netscape 4.x is what made Internet Explorer popular. IE 5 was a breath of fresh air compared with Netscape 4. (Personally, I think that IE 4 was also many times better than NS 4, but that's a different argument. It's really unarguable that IE 5 was superior, though.)
Now some people might cry out that IE is a security nightmare and that no one should choose it over Netscape for that reason, but NS 4 was also a security nightmare. It was, simply, a worse browser than IE 5. It was in the NS 4 days that I switched to IE, and it was because IE was simply a better browser.
Netscape died in the 4.x days, when the browser became a large, slow, and bloated piece of crap. Compared with Netscape 4, IE was a fast, light, agile browser with many more features and provided a much better experience. As someone writing webapps around the Netscape 4.5/IE 5 days, I can say that IE provided a much nicer platform to write webapps for.
That changed around the release of Mozilla 1.0; but around the time of Netscape 4.5, IE was simply the better browser while Netscape was simply no longer improving their browser.
Still a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Would I ever use Netscape over Firefox or Camino? Probably not. Does it seem like some queer throwback to days gone by? Yes. Does it, on some level, seem kind of pathetic in the same way when A Flock of Seagulls shows up at some local bar/theater for a concert? Yes.
But I quickly realize that, as a web developer I can only stand behind them and cheer them on as a great alternative to IE. There's nothing wrong with another standards-compliant, Gecko-based browser on the market.
I just realized the irony that there is a Gecko broswer called Flock [flock.com].
Comments without Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's all give it a good shot first before making some quick judgments. Sure it may just be a branded Firefox, but it also may have some great uses. Maybe this is a browser that may be the recommended browser for your aunts and uncles when they get a new system? Who knows.. Let's at least give it a shot before shooting it and leaving it for dead.
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Re:Brand power (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Netscape is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brand power (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? I'm glad you asked [alternativ...liance.com]. For all the varying levels of standards compliance, they're at least converging, so that targeting standards, then tweaking for quirks, has a better chance of succeeding across browsers than targeting the browsers to begin with. On the other hand, security vulnerabilities (other than misuse of intentional functionality, like the IDN spoofing attacks a while back) tend to be specific to an engine+platform combination.
If we've got two major IE versions, Gecko, Opera and Safari, and if each engine has a big enough userbase that "designers" can't afford to ignore it, then maybe we'll actually see more web development instead of IE/Gecko development.
Re:How well does it work with Napster? (Score:3, Insightful)
product type would be webserver, mail server, collaboration, etc.
The whole process was confusing. Aside from losing Netscape with the AOL deal, I miss the Netscape Developer Center content. In the old days, Netscape and Microsoft provided great documentation on using new web technologies. AOL killed a good share of the old Netscape content over time and Microsoft merged their content with MSDN and slowly targeted it to web application developers exclusively.
I remember downloading Netscape 2.0 beta to look at porn sites. When I first got on the web, it seemed like porn sites used new technologies like tables and animated gifs first. Well I was in high school at the time. The IE enhanced porn sites weren't as good. Who cared about a scrolling marquee on a porn site? Still, I had to switch to IE because Netscape 3 crashed all the time on me. I got back onboard with Netscape 4 but it was never the same.
Re:Brand power (Score:3, Insightful)
You know how often I have to recode for Opera? Twice so far, in the last three years.
When you mostly code to standards, and don't use browser detects but functionality detects to get stuff working with IE, it's very rare that you need any change at all for Opera or KHTML. More fragmentation is good, but not because of the web pages and web applications. It's good because it gives competition a boost and we might actually see innovation in the browser field (SVG, CANVAS, OpenGL
(At least, not from the ones who already grasp the bottom line. Maybe from the ones who now only code for IE.)