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Netscape The Internet

Netscape 6.2 533

Posted by michael from the apparently-unaware-that-browsers-wars-are-over dept.
lylonius writes: "Netscape today released version 6.2 of its browser based on Mozilla. Downloads for a variety of platforms and languages are available. You can also check out the release notes. This release comes off the Mozilla 0.9.4 branch, and is the third major release from Netscape using Mozilla." Kmeleon also has a release today, if you'd like your web with a little more browsing and little less AOL-promotion.
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Netscape 6.2

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  • I lost faith in Netscape after they stoped developing 4x. 6x has always seemed bloated and to slow and since it's based on Mozilla I might as well use mozilla. It seemes to be more up to date then netscape and runs just fine for me.

    • Re:Netscape? no thanks. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by smcv ( 529383 )

      Mozilla *is* made by Netscape. Yes, it's open-source, but most of the major contributors are Netscape employees who're paid to work on it. They then do an occasional code freeze, fix the most obvious bugs in the frozen version, add horrible branding, and call it Netscape 6.

      The Gecko engine (Mozilla's renderer) has the advantage that, unlike NS4, it makes an effort to render non-legacy HTML correctly. Ever tried persuading Netscape 4 to work with perfectly correct Cascading Stylesheets? (Yes, I even tried running the W3C validator on them. They *were* valid.) It supports just enough CSS to try to parse the stylesheet, but not enough to get it right (overlapping images and text were a common problem for me). At the moment my website uses a loading method which *should* be supported, and is supported by everything else which uses CSS (IE, Mozilla/NS6, Opera, ...), specifically to trick NS4 into rendering the no-CSS simple-but-legible version instead of its broken half-CSS.

      And that's quite impressive considering that

      "Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1) became a W3C Recommendation in December 1996."

      -- w3.org [w3.org]
      • Back in 1996, Netscape was running around touting "standards-based platforms" to their customers, but they were in fact very anti-W3C.

        CSS was barely supported because Netscape had developed something proprietary called JavaScript Style Sheets (which CSS is internally transformed to). That's why NS4 ignores all CSS if you turn JavaScript off.

        Netscape also developed a completely different proprietary document object model (document.layers). Which could theoretically could do cool stuff except that it crashed 90% of the time. They blew off the W3C's work on DOM, which was roughly tracked by Microsoft.

        The end result of this standards split is that most of the WWW is stuck on 'common' pre-1996 standards. Ugly HTML 3.2-type markup, very little CSS, and Netscape 3 DOM-type JavaScript.

        The bad thing is there's 10% of the userbase that seems to be holding out for good on Netscape 4.x -- they aren't interested in IE, they aren't interested in Netscape 6. That essentially means that modern HTML authoring will never really come into vogue, and we will be stuck in 1995 until Microsoft actually finally gets the balls to 'fork' the WWW so that their stuff only works on their platform.

        • Re:Netscape? no thanks. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Cardinal ( 311 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @05:57PM (#2500032)
          The bad thing is there's 10% of the userbase that seems to be holding out for good on Netscape 4.x -- they aren't interested in IE, they aren't interested in Netscape 6. That essentially means that modern HTML authoring will never really come into vogue, and we will be stuck in 1995 until Microsoft actually finally gets the balls to 'fork' the WWW so that their stuff only works on their platform.

          Nah. Netscape 4 holdouts will find themselves left behind as more and more web shops stop caring about making their sites look good in NS4, and just worry about IE6/NS6.

          This is a good thing. Netscape 4's time has passed.

          • Re:Netscape? no thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by BitwizeGHC ( 145393 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @06:55PM (#2500326) Homepage


            Nah. Netscape 4 holdouts will find themselves left behind as more and more web shops stop caring about making their sites look good in NS4, and just worry about IE6/NS6.


            ITYM "just worry about IE6". The large but dwindling Netscape 4.x user base is what kept Web developers from saying "fuck it" and turning the Web into an IE-exclusive platform these past four years. When you have 90% of the installed base, diminishing returns dictate that to third-party developers, interoperability with your competitors' offerings will be, at best, an afterthought.

            But it gets worse! When Netscape 4 finally fades into irrelevance, the MSN.com lockout will be only the beginning as non-IE users find themselves shunned from more and more sites. Content providers will rely on proprietary components to supply DRM with their content, including HTML, and again, diminishing returns will dictate the OS/client platform: IE on Windows and possibly Mac.

  • Yippee! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Darth RadaR ( 221648 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:11PM (#2499329) Journal
    I hope it can pull up MSN [msn.com].
    :P

    • Re:Yippee! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hexix ( 9514 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:26PM (#2499442) Homepage
      Heh, the funny thing about that whole situation is it renders perfectly in mozilla (I just tried it and it seemed to look perfect, I didn't notice any errors). But I tried it in IE on the mac's at my college and it rendered everything wrong, a lot of backgrounds were missing on things and stuff was in the wrong place.

      So I think it's pretty obvious microsoft was full of it and was just banning browsers for not being microsoft.

      • Re:Yippee! (Score:5, Informative)

        by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:56PM (#2499643) Homepage
        Heh. For a kick, try opening this XHTML page [opera.com] in MSIE. Oh, it's a perfectly valid page: heck, it even encourages you to go validate it.

        Displays perfectly on Opera, of course. How's it look in Mozilla?
        • renders just fine!
          Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.5+) Gecko/20011019
          Whoops... should've edited those win thingies out :)

        • Re:Yippee! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by jonbrewer ( 11894 )
          That's frightening! (XP MSIE 6.0.2600)

          It looks to me though that the Opera people are exploiting a specific IE bug by putting so many tabs between the open-bracket of css elements and the actual attribute.

          This is actually the first page I've seen rendered poorly by XP/IE6, but then again it's only been a few days...

          • Re:Yippee! (Score:3, Insightful)

            by FFFish ( 7567 )

            WTF are you on about? The bit you refer to looks like this:

            h1 {
            color : #333333;
            }

            How is that "so many tabs"? It's *ONE* tab. Hell, it's a common CSS structure.

  • .95 is really fast (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mr.roboto ( 112555 )
    I use it on win32, it's really fast especially when loaded into memory in advance, regardless it's really fast. Almost comparable to IE, and unlike NS4 it's fairly stable in Win 9X.

  • Good for the average joe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NotAnotherReboot ( 262125 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:17PM (#2499380)
    This is good for the user who doesn't know enough about Mozilla to go and download it often. This is for the person who likes to be able to go to Netscape's page, download their latest browser and just go with it. More people will get a newer Mozilla branch which is more stable and faster, which is good.

    For the Slashdot community you're still better off downloading the Mozilla milestones instead of waiting for a Netscape branch every so often.
    • I'm using Netscape 6.2 (Linux) right now, and it looks pretty good. There are some advantages to Netscape vs. Mozilla. The most important one is QA. I'm betting NS 6.2 has less really annoying bugs than you'd expect to find in a nightly build, or even a Mozilla milestone. Also, so far NS 6.2 is the first mozilla-based browser for which Java worked out of the box on my Linux workstation.

  • Very nice... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:18PM (#2499381)
    ...however, Mozilla 0.9.5 and the nightlies afterward are already far ahead. Among other things, you get tabbed browsing, the Links toolbar, and (if you download the proper add-on [mozdev.org]) mouse gesture support.

    Very, very cool.
    • Sounds like a clone of Opera.

      • Re:Very nice... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by WNight ( 23683 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @05:38PM (#2499895) Homepage
        Yep. A free, ad-free, open-source, embeddable version of Opera.

        With Opera you can get it free, or ad-free, not both.

        You also can't get the source, extend the functionality (Spellchecker.xpi) or embed the rendering engine into a project of yours (Galleon, K-Meleon, or anything else).

        Opera is great, but there are many things for which it's not the best.
    • Mouse Gestures work in Netscape 6.2 also.
      Last I checked, the Links Toolbar was default off because it added 10% to the page load time!

      The tabbed browsing on the other hand is way cool, especially for those of you that still "surf".
      EOF
    • Milestones and nightlies also have far more bugs. So it's a simple choice, a stable branded browser, or an non-commercial buggier but more recent browser.

  • K-Meleon (Score:2, Informative)

    by JasonMaggini ( 190142 )
    I've been using KMeleon for a while, and become a fan... It pretty quick (not THE fastest) and the footprint is small. It's worth checking out.
    There are a few quirks, sure, but for the most part It's replaced IE as my primary browser. I still have to use IE for the occasional page, but we'll see what 0.6 fixes...

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:20PM (#2499398)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:netscape cares about the details... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NutscrapeSucks ( 446616 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:55PM (#2499633)
      Actually, I would say that your management was right on. As mozilla.org says [mozilla.org]: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!. We provide no end user support.

      This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only. No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.

      So, if you are worried about a MS-dominated WWW, encourage people to try Netscape 6.2. Don't even mention Mozilla -- it detracts from the message. Unfortunately, lots of (normal) people took a look at the horrific 6.0PR releases and the terrible 6.0 final and need some encouragement to take another look at the releases that actually work.
      • This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only . No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.

        I think you're lagged by 3 months or so. Mozilla is in fact now perfectly capable of being your primary browser, it delivers in all departments and seldom crashes. (The only time I don't use Mozilla now is on small memory/slow machines, and there I use Opera, except when Opera can't render the page, then I go to Mozilla, damm the speed :-) You're also wrong about non-nerds. My wife uses Mozilla and is perfectly happy. People use what you give them, so long as it does the job.

  • Don't go double clicking on no web pages now... (Score:4, Funny)

    by blazin ( 119416 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:22PM (#2499410) Homepage Journal
    From the Release notes:

    Known Problems
    General
    Mac OS: There is a known incompatibility between Netscape and WebFree, a Control Panel commonly used to block HTML-based ads. When using Netscape , disable WebFree.

    Keyboard and Mouse Double right-clicking on a page can disable the keyboard.

    Trying to visit a Microsoft owned web page may result in your computer's HCF (Halt and catch fire) instruction being called.

    Ok, so I added the last one.

  • Netscape advantages over Mozilla? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:24PM (#2499422) Homepage Journal
    Everyone keeps pointing out that you're better off downloading the latest Mozilla instead. And while I tend to agree (I'm using the latest nightly build right now), my understanding is that the Netscape release adds in commercial features that aren't in Mozilla.

    Does anyone care to comment on what features Netscape 6.2 offers that aren't in Mozilla?
    • The only (IMO) usefule feature is the inclusion of a spell checker (which can be used by Mozilla btw)

    • Well, lets see:

      AOL As your default homepage

      Tons of shitty AOL bookmarks

      AOL crap cluttering up your toolbar

      AOLIM installed weather you want it to or not

      AOL shortcut on the desktop

      AOL as your default search engine instead of Google

      These are about the only commercial "features" you get with netscape over mozilla.

      • These are about the only commercial "features" you get with netscape over mozilla.

        Looking over your list of features, it doesn't look like it should be very difficult to implement those features into Mozilla.

        (Score: -2, Clue Challenged)
    • All 'scrapping' aside:

      Sidebar tools for AIM and more
      Built-in JRE support (no DLL copying/.so linking)
      Easy IMAP support for Netscape Email
      Spell Checker (by default)
      'End-user' features like shopping/my netscape buttons)
      Flash included (I believe, possibly RealPlayer too)

      It's a nice tidy package for people to use... Mozilla can require some 'fussing about' to get it all to play nicely..

    • Re:Netscape advantages over Mozilla? (Score:5, Informative)

      by astrosmash ( 3561 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:55PM (#2499637) Journal
      Does anyone care to comment on what features Netscape 6.2 offers that aren't in Mozilla?

      Netscape has a spell checker

      Netscape installs java by default However...

      Mozilla does image blocking (I'm addicted to this)

      Mozilla allows a security policy for cookies (like IE6)

      Mozilla has browser tabs

      Mozilla has the "Link" toolbar (which Slashdot now supports as of yesterday, I believe)
      That latest mozilla builds also tend to use/leak more memory than the Netscape releases. I don't know why that is, but if you like to have your browser run all day, or you need a spell checker, Netscape's probably a better choice. If you like to play with the latest browser toys, or you can't live without ad blocking, use Mozilla.

    • Aside from the cited commercial features, NS 6.x is always, always more stable than any milestone including the one it's based off because it's hammered that much more.


      So if you value stability over cutting edge, use NS. It won't be cutting edge but that's not too big a deal for most folks.

  • alas, not 0.9.5 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChristTrekker ( 91442 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:25PM (#2499436)

    Too bad Netscape didn't wait a few more weeks. Mozilla 0.9.5 introduced support for <link>, which rocks. I'd hoped that people would start getting introduced to this sooner rather than later. OTOH, Mozilla's support of <link> still has a few quirks (that's why it's not enabled by default right now) so maybe it's OK to wait until 6.3/0.9.6 or whatever.

    If you're using 0.9.5 and haven't enabled <link> yet, do it. It's under your View menu, called "Site Navigation Bar" or something. It's pretty slick when you get to a site that uses <link> tags consistently.

    • WTF is a <link> tag?

      • Re:alas, not 0.9.5 (Score:2, Informative)

        by jedwards ( 135260 )
        Just look it up in the standard [w3.org]

      • Re:alas, not 0.9.5 (Score:5, Informative)

        by smcv ( 529383 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:56PM (#2499644) Homepage

        Use Mozilla 0.95 and you will see the wonders of the <link> tag ;-)

        Basically, they're a way for a web page author to specify related pages in a browser-independent, design-independent, extensible way, outside the main HTML of a page - think of them as "quick links" whose targets are defined by the page you're on. A long multi-page document might define Next, Previous and Contents to go to the obvious places, for instance. A website with content from many authors might define the Authors link so it goes to a list of this document's authors. A site with a specific copyright policy might link to it with the Copyright link. All of these are independent of the actual text in the HTML (they go in the <head> section) so if your browser doesn't support them, or you configure it not to, you'll never see them.

        The W3C defined the meanings of quite a few links, and the Mozilla developers have added a couple more which they felt should be there for symmetry (W3C defined First, but not Last; Mozilla looks for Last too, for symmetry, and the Mozilla team have given the W3C a very short list of extras like Last which they think should go in the next HTML spec). You can use anything you like, though (Mozilla implements this by putting any unknown ones in a submenu).

        Mozilla shows the <link>s as an extra toolbar, but there are other ways you could display them.

        The defined ones are things like Previous, Next, First, Up, Top, Help, Authors, Search and Copyright - the sort of things many web pages and documents want. (At the moment Slashdot uses Top and Search).

        • Re:alas, not 0.9.5 (Score:3, Interesting)

          by singularity ( 2031 )
          About five minutesbefore reading your post I noticed that Slashdot was using LINK tags. Theyare actually using more than just the ones you list.

          Depending on where you are, I have seen Home, Previous, Next, Author, and Search.

          iCab has included LINK support since their beginning. At first I had them turned off, now I use them more and more.

          I even added them to http://www.ka.net/eudora/faqs/index.html [Eudora/Mac FAQs]

          So as not to be modded off-topic, I have never liked the combined mail and news clients in the later Netscape installs. The only version of Netscape I have on my computer is the last true "Navigator" install that Netecape offered on the Mac, 4.0.8

          On occasion I run a Mozilla build to see how it is. Most browsing, however, is done in iCab and, occasionally, Opera.

          I want a browser to browse, and not shop and checkmy email.

          The system requirements for 6.2 are also listed at a 266 mHz 604e (something I do not think ever existed 0 they must mean a G3). That is leaving out a lot of older machines that are still out there.

    • Re:alas, not 0.9.5 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sab39 ( 10510 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:46PM (#2499577) Homepage
      The two things that 0.9.5 provided (link tag support and tabbed browsing) were probably the major reason why Netscape didn't want to use 0.9.5. They wanted stabilization and bugfixes, not new features. I for one am glad they used 0.9.4 for this very reason - the problem with 6.0 was its poor stability, and if 6.2 has a reputation for being rock-solid, that'd be great for the future perception of Netscape in general.

      As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 [mozilla.org] and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code. There are also some negative interactions with the tabbed browsing feature which will need to be resolved before it can be turned on by default.

      In the meantime, be glad that Netscape chose the earlier release rather than shipping something buggy, like the current state of the link (sorry "site navigation") toolbar and tabbed browsing.

      Stuart.

      PS Thanks to /. for adding link tags! It's great to visit sites and actually see the toolbar in use :)

      • As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 [mozilla.org] and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code.

        Hmmm. You're working on this, and you noted a speed hit. And I want something from you that might address that speed hit. Perhaps we can help each other. Here is my suggestion: steal an idea from the Web TV guys. They had link support back in 1996 or 1997 -- what they did was look for any link tag with a "next" value for the relationship attribute, and then they pre-fetched that page during idle cycles. So the end-user visits a page, reads through it, clicks the next link, and it appears instantaneously. Damn that was a cool feature. I'd love to see it in Mozilla, and it would definitely cause a perceptual increase in speed.

    • might be great if you're using some decrepit HTML2.0 site that makes use of it but since the vast, vast majority of sites have never even hear of it I doubt it will be a great loss to many. And seeing as the patch to incorporate was large and had performance issues, there was no way Netscape could have justified the risk or delay by including it.

  • the dead rise on Halloween (Score:3, Troll)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:26PM (#2499446)
    Ghosts of dead software companies haunt us again for a few hours on All Hallow's Eve, before returning to their graves.

  • Useful feature... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sconest ( 188729 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:28PM (#2499454) Homepage
    already in Mozilla for a while.
    Add user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true); to your prefs.js (while Netscape is not running) file and presto... no more popups.

  • Interesting point of departure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by corky6921 ( 240602 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:29PM (#2499459) Homepage
    It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

    I would say that this speaks volumes about what sort of client platform most of their customers are using, and how the UNIX client landscape has changed recently. A few years ago, anti-Microsoft or pro-UNIX people (some one, some the other, some both) were seen running anything from HP-UX to OS/2. Netscape, accordingly, released versions of Netscape for nearly every OS. Now, these groups have condensed into the people running MacOS X and Linux. The people running something else as a client have slowly faded away, until these clients were considered a niche market. This is shown even by Slashdot, which has switched from "news for nerds" to an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site.

    This bodes well for Linux and MacOS, both of which have their markets. I am seeing more people use both of them not because they have an axe to grind with Microsoft, but purely for curiosity and learning's sake.

    But what of the other client platforms? Obviously, Mozilla is still being released for them, but if official, "supported" browser/office software is no longer available, will anything but Linux/MacOS/Windows as a client go away? Or has it already?

    Just an interesting trend, IMHO.

  • Cache not optimal? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mikael ( 484 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:37PM (#2499517)
    Is the cache in Mozilla not optimal? If you compare Moz against Opera in regard to flipping pages back and then forward, there is a huge speed advantage for Opera. Is it because Mozilla caches entire pages, and re-renders them when you hit back? I think Mozilla is as fast as any other browser in regards to rendering complex pages, but the case of flippnig back and forward is rather slow. Anynone know why?

    Mikael
    • I LOVE that you can fully disable the cache in mozilla (I really hope this debug feature does not go away in 1.0+!)

      That way I can rely on my very fast Squid cache instead!

      Not a great solution if you don't run a LAN at home, but..well..I do, so why not distribute things properly? Squid is great for caching stuff, and can even be used for rudimentary ACL's if you wish to filter your kids/girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/dog/cat/wha tever
    • If you compare Moz against Opera in regard to flipping pages back and then forward, there is a huge speed advantage for Opera.

      Mozilla deliberately broke (MHO) history in 0.9.5. See bug 101832 [mozilla.org]. Might be what you're seeing.

  • Fine Here (Score:2, Informative)

    by Dark-Helmet ( 64583 )
    I personally stopped using Netscape after a series of bad expierences with the 4.x versions. However, it seem as if Netscape 6.2 on Win32 really isn't so bad. Its very slick looking, renders all webpages I frequent flawlessly and very fast. So far, though I've only been using it for a few minutes, it has proven to be very stable. I will not yet uninstall IE6 from my system, but I'm going to give Netscape another chance.

    I miss my Netscape 3.0 Gold Edition Days =)
    • If you like that, you should get the moz nightlies. Tabbed browsing is a very nice addition! And I like the way it is implemented...unlike in opera it does not get in your way and allows you to combine new windows with tabbed windows in a very efficient manner. I love being able to work the way I want and not the way some UI-Design wannabe wants me to work. Kudos to the UI team and tabbed browsing guys on the mozilla team for getting this VERY RIGHT.

      The site navbar is way cool too, if a bit dated (most sites that use those links the way they were intended put the links in the document itself these days...but it is nice to have it always floating right there!) The navbar even pops up on slashdot now.

  • Omniweb (Score:2, Informative)

    by wrt ( 530301 )
    For OSX I've had a great experience with Omniweb. Its fast (load time and render time), super-configurable (its config looks just like the System Prefs panel), and has a sleek UI. The slide-out bookmarks is great! The carbonized IE is TERRIBLE, and netscape x.x seams equally crash-prone. I'm gonna stick with one of the "other" guys.

  • Rather than whine about Mozilla... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:47PM (#2499585)
    I recommend those of you (and it's quite a few) who whine about Mozilla's performance check out K-Meleon. I think most of you will agree the real problem with Mozilla is not Gecko, it's the damned XUL-based Interface of Infinite Slowness +2. K-Meleon is one of the nicer attempts out there to take Gecko and wrap it in a native interface, in this case for Windows (yes, I use Win2k at work, so sue me).


    If you tried K-Meleon 0.1 or 0.2 and thought "gee this would be great if it actually supported cookies and had some configurable options and felt like more than a toy" then check out 0.6. Actually, it's been quite usable for a couple of releases now, and 0.6 seems as good as ever. Yes, I still use IE sometimes, but unlike my repeated attempts to wean myself to Mozilla that inevitably end in me getting sick of the poor UI response times and rendering freezes in Mozilla, I can actually get used to the snappy K-Meleon look and feel.


    No, it's not perfect or bugless, and it still isn't quite as pretty or slick looking as IE, but it is nice to see how fast and responsive a Gecko based browser can be when the entire UI isn't getting rendered from XUL, and it's nice to have a real native browser alternative on Windows.

    • I browse with the latest milestone of Moz. Have been for about six months now. Not quite as stable as IE on the same system, but it gives me a little more control over my browsing environment.

      I download the new build of K-Meleon whenever it comes out, get really excited, and then go back to using Moz after a few days of crashes and inconsistent behavior. Frankly, I'm getting a little burnt on the cycle. Still, I bet K-Meleon will reach 1.0 before Mozilla does.

    • Re:Rather than whine about Mozilla... (Score:5, Informative)

      by GregWebb ( 26123 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @06:06PM (#2500078)
      I have to say, I really don't understand people's comments about speed. FWIW this experience is with, Windows 2000 on a P-II 128 MB, Win98 on P-II 350 and 400 (both 128 MB) and oddly behaving Duron 700 (256 MB). Nothing exactly cutting edge, in other words.

      I started playing with Mozilla 0.9.5 last week, first Mozilla build in some time. It's not quite as fast as Netscape 4.7 but way, way faster than IE5. Blows it straight out of the water. IE will sometimes take 10+ seconds to render a window, Mozilla, as long as it's been loaded into memory before like IE, is less than a second. It's faster in operation, too.

      It's not perfect - the back button has died a couple of times, while really, stupidly heavy session (20+ windows, new ones opening all the time) slowed it down a little and I've discovered today it's not too fond of mod points - but hey, neither's IE under W98. They smear all over the place, misplace themselves, eventually run out altogether and too many windows of that crashes the machine.

      Anyway. Mozilla and XUL may have been slow once (dunno, didn't use it then), but it isn't any more. Lovely and fast, really.
    • Heh. I almost downloaded this thinking it was a KDE version of Mozilla. :)

  • 256 colors (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mrroach ( 164090 )
    My only access to a windows system is over Citrix at 256 colors, and at that color depth kmeleon/gecko looks terrible compared to IE. all the colors look washed out, and images are blurry.

    Anyone know why this is? I haven't tried mozilla under windows, does it suffer from the same problem?

    (mostly unrelated, gtk+ for windows doesn't work in 256 colors either, so no gtk/citrix/windows apps without paying Citrix for a 16bit color license.)

  • K-Meleon (Score:3)

    by bwt ( 68845 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @04:55PM (#2499635)
    K-Meleon has come a long way. It seems pretty usable. Anybody else out there trying it?

    It seems to use a lot less memory than mozilla.
    • I'm still looking for an installer that doesn't end in .exe .

      "The goal is to leave windows behind... where it started out..."
    • Posting from it now. Seems to be nice - I wish there was an option to make it jump more lines with the scroll wheel, but other than that I am liking it.
  • proprietary development.....they can't wait until a 1.0 so they take it when its good enough and call it x.y no wonder windows sucked for so long...and now that it doesn't suck as much, MS makes a bad activation/icinsing /Want to own the internet move....oye. I hope Netscape can make ther kind look good again, but since it is owned by AOL...well that speaks for it self on software development
  • Quick question/comment. On my win2k server any install of the 6 series of netscape causes the following things to happen (every single time)

    1. part way through the install I will get some random error, usually "disk problem" or "virtual memory problem" (this with 512 mb of memory and 1 gig of pageing available and running almost nothing else during install!!) Disk check reveals no problems

    2. Just before I reboot Zonealarm will beep about some winders program wanting to contact a microsoft site (which I allow, haven't hauled out the packet sniffer to see exactly what is being sent when server phones home)

    3. Reboot and running netscape does NOTHING. I get a pretty icon and then it goes away. Not log file/event entry.

    So anyone else have this expereince? Just curious before I goto check again and haul out the packet sniffer.....Is it me or does my Win2k server just not like netscape? Is Billy boy up to his old tricks again? Jesus, I just wanted to look at the new netscape for gosh sakes.

    Oh well
  • There are plenty of great browsers out there, Mozilla, Konquerer, IE, Opera, and sever others. Why would anyone stop using their browser of choice and use Netscape? I mean, it's not really that good anyway.

  • Where have all the unix platforms gone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hubertf ( 124995 ) on Tuesday October 30, 2001 @05:33PM (#2499855) Homepage Journal
    Personally, I need binaries for:

    * Solaris 8/x86 (!)
    * Solaris 8/sparc
    * NetBSD/i386

    Please!

    - Hubert

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