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Netscape The Internet

Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security 226

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hands-to-home-buddy dept.
wikinerd writes "Netscape is building Netscape 8 which will include several anti-phishing enhancements and will emphasize security. Netscape obtains blacklists of scam and spam sites which will be denied access to ActiveX and cookies. RSS capabilities will also be included in Netscape 8, which will be released on 17 February."
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Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security More

Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security

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  • ActiveX (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rdc_uk ( 792215 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:48AM (#11539886)
    Try just not putting it in at all...
    • I thought the browser already was missing it. I remember an ActiveX plug-in a while ago, but I haven't seen a recent one. If it has ActiveX, you'd think it would work with Windows Update, which it doesn't, which is the only reason for keeping IE around, IMHO.

    • Re:ActiveX (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tx ( 96709 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:59AM (#11540020) Journal
      I would actually like to be able to allow certain sites to run ActiveX controls. The sad fact is quite a few sites require ActiveX to function properly, and that will probably be the case for a long time. I dislike having to use IE for those sites instead of Firefox, so selective enabling of ActiveX would be OK with me.

      • Re:ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)

        by FuzzyBad-Mofo ( 184327 )

        ActiveX will never go away if we encourage sites to keep using it. At any rate, only about 0.5% of sites actually *require* ActiveX to be used (in my experience). And those can usually be easily spurned for a competitor..

      • Re:ActiveX (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sremick ( 91371 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:31AM (#11540342)
        The other sad fact is that by compensating for the sites that use ActiveX, you stop giving them any incentive to stop using it.

        They win, we (including you) lose.

        The whole idea is to pressure sites to clean up their code, make it standard, and stop using ActiveX. You do that by increasing the marketshare of browsers that DON'T accept bad/nonstandard code and DON'T use ActiveX.

        If you allow sites to be crap, they'll happily do so. It's the whole "give them an inch..." thing.

        Someone once referred to this as a big game of chicken. Netscape loses by blinking and putting in ActiveX. This removes a lot of the pressure sites have to wake up and stop making their pages IE-only.

        It's very unfortunate for all of us.

        • The whole idea is to pressure sites to clean up their code, make it standard, and stop using ActiveX.

          How do you make a Direct3D game [cartoonnetwork.com] load from a web site without loading through an ActiveX control? What about client-side apps that access the file system, such as an ActiveX virus scanner?

          • Re:ActiveX to load a Direct3D game (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            > How do you make a Direct3D game [cartoonnetwork.com] load from a web site without loading through an ActiveX control? What about client-side apps that access the file system, such as an ActiveX virus scanner?

            D3D Games from websites: "Why the fuck would you want to?"
            Virus scans from websites: "Why not just have them download and run the fucking executable?"

            ActiveX: A virus of a solution still looking for a problem.

            • Business models (Score:2, Insightful)

              by tepples ( 727027 )

              D3D Games from websites: "Why the fuck would you want to?"

              To advertise to children. The Kids Next Door game is based on a TV series, which is supported by TV advertising.

              Virus scans from websites: "Why not just have them download and run the fucking executable?"

              A downloadable version of the online virus scanner would compete with the retail version.

          • Re:ActiveX to load a Direct3D game (Score:5, Insightful)

            by sremick ( 91371 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @12:42PM (#11541237)
            How do you make a Direct3D game load from a web site without loading through an ActiveX control?

            You don't. You use something that's actually cross-platform and isn't Windows-specific. Not all internet users run Windows (I sure don't). It's the internet, not the Wintelnet.

            What about client-side apps that access the file system, such as an ActiveX virus scanner?

            They shouldn't. That's not the place for such things. Convenient? Sure. Worth the price? Hell no. There are far better ways to scan for viruses than to give websites full access to every file on your computer.

            An analogy would be saying that unless you leave your doors unlocked at all times, how is the cable guy going to fix your TV? Or the telephone guy fix the static on your lines? Or the furnace guy fix the boiler? Sure, we get robbed ever week... but we've GOT to leave our house unlocked for these other things.

            And some of us run operating systems that don't get viruses anyhow.

        • Open Zee Eyes (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 )
          Someone once referred to this as a big game of chicken. Netscape loses by blinking and putting in ActiveX. This removes a lot of the pressure sites have to wake up and stop making their pages IE-only.

          Since no one uses Netscape anyway (come on, this is not a troll, it's a reality), I don't think this has effect at all on anything. I continue to be surprised that AOL has anyone at all working on a browser that they refuse to use or promote. Is it charity? Contractual? Who knows, but Netscape is a non-player,

          • Re:Open Zee Eyes (Score:3, Insightful)

            by DesScorp ( 410532 )
            "Since no one uses Netscape anyway ..."

            Not even remotely true.

            "I continue to be surprised that AOL has anyone at all working on a browser that they refuse to use or promote."

            I can't argue that AOL's strategy with Netscape has been maddeningly inconsistant; it would indeed be nice if they would use the Gecko engine as the standard in their own product.

            "Who knows, but Netscape is a non-player, and so a non-issue in any way."

            Netscape is now the standard browser throughout my workplace, and is the browser

        • Re:ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)

          by raddan ( 519638 )
          Yeah, but there's another area where having ActiveX would be helpful: legacy corporate apps. We have a huge number of them. Actually, I only call them 'legacy' because I'm hoping that someday they'll be replaced with something better, but right now, we're stuck.

          Our parent company has spent many millions on the development of in-house apps that depend on ActiveX. They're only just realizing their conundrum now. Because the malware problem was getting so bad, we spent a significant amount of time trainin
      • I don't think there are "quite a few" sites that require 3rd party ActiveX to function properly. Things like Gmail use xmlrpc, which in IE is invoked through ActiveX, but that's an internal ActiveX component.

  • Why not just use Firefox? (Score:5, Informative)

    by cflorio ( 604840 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:48AM (#11539898) Homepage
    In November, Netscape released the first test, or "alpha," version of its new browser based on Mozilla's Firefox software.

    • Don't you mean "Netscape released the first test, or "Developer Preview" version of its new browser"...

      As to why they don't just use Firefox directly? Because owning the user's homepage is money and power. People hear the name "Netscape" which has a long history prior to AOL cannibalising it and they decide to download it rather than this new "firefox thing".

      So, by using that name and that slightly customized/modified browser, they draw a larger group of users. And a lot of those users never get around to
    • The opening line in this story read:

      Netscape is building Netscape 8 which will...

      when it should have read:

      Mozilla developers have built 99.9% of Netscape 8 which will...
      • Don't be ridiculous. While the Mozilla developers have done a lot, they never would have even gotten off the ground if Netscape hadn't written and then open sourced their code.
        • You do know that there's no netscape code left don't you?
          • I don't know. Do you classify the majority of Mozilla, which was written by paid Netscape developers, not Netscape code?

          • Re:They are, aren't they? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            You do know that there's no netscape code left don't you?

            You do know that your talking complete rubbish don't you?

            The majority of the Mozilla code was written by Netscape employees.

            Now I know what you mean. You mean that all the old Netscape Communicator code was rewritten. Well, firstly, that's wrong (things like NSPR [mozilla.org] and NSS [mozilla.org] are still kicking around) and secondly, most of the code was rewritten by Netscape employees.

            While Netscape may not have written any Mozilla code since July 2003 (the fact tha

          • Have you ever written any real-world code? Just because no Netscape code is left doesn't mean that Netscape's work doesn't still make up a huge part of the project. Rewritten code leaves its mark in design, implementation, data structures, algorithms, everything. Just because the individual characters have been retyped doesn't mean squat, and the old code is still a large part of the work even if it's all gone (which, as another poster pointed out, it's not).
        • Don't get me wrong. I remember waiting an hour and fifteen for Netscape 1.0 to download over a 2400 baud modem...

          I know that Netscape is the base - and today when I use Firefox I no doubt look at it and see that same ol' application.

          I know...

          I was just pointing out that "Netscape" is no longer building browsers on their own without any outside influence. I'm sure most of the code which makes/will make the browser run smoothly on today's computers comes from the mozilla foundation developers. Not all code
          • I certainly don't mean to disavow the contributions of the Mozilla team. Their work is significant, and probably the majority of what's there by now. However, the work done by Netscape is far more than 0.1%, and that was my objection.

    • Re:Why not just use Firefox? (Score:5, Informative)

      by superyooser ( 100462 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @12:18PM (#11540902) Homepage Journal
      It is, but it can also use IE's rendering engine. I am a beta tester. See my post [slashdot.org] under the last Netscape story.
    • Better question, why use Netscape at all?

      Netscape was cool like 10 years ago, and that was only because there simply wasn't anything else. To be honest, in looking back, all of their browsers sucked. But the company has been bought and bastardized and not even used by AOL. The only thing I know about Netscape nowadays is that they their name has been now sold by AOL to some cheesy dial up company that is competing with Netzero for $9.99 a month internet access at blazing speeds at 56 whatever or less.

  • Go for the Gold. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:49AM (#11539908)
    "Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security"

    OK, and what were they emphasizing before? Market Share?

    • Of course (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's nothing funny about it really. All browsers' end goal is market share. Firefox may be arguably more secure than IE, but its focus on providing something IE lacks is just a step in its end goal of more market share. They happen to, at least for now, not be financially motivated, but market share is still what they want.
      • Actually, considering the community aroudn firefox, it has more to do with providing a quality browser as an option than incresing marketshare

        There's now an emphasis on marketshare as well, but it doesn't seem like it's being engineered specifically for mass-appeal. the marketing is a seperate effort.

        And in general, for companies, the motivation is profit, not marketshare. Marketshare is a means to that end. If a company can be profitable with a fraction of the market (think apple) it's doing pretty well.
    • Naw, they stopped emphasizing that after Netscape 4.

  • ActiveX on Netscape (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gambit3 ( 463693 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:50AM (#11539918) Homepage Journal
    When did THAT happen?

    I thought that was one of the reasons to use Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.... cuz they DIDN'T support ActiveX... ??

    • Re:ActiveX on Netscape (Score:5, Informative)

      by tigershark97 ( 595017 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:57AM (#11540004)
      The new Netscape lets you choose between the gecko engine or IE's engine to render any page. You can have a few tabs open rendered by gecko, and a few tabs by IE, at the same time.
      • If this is so, I will probably give it a shot. Some very annoying website still requires IE and being able to integrate it in my Firefox would be pretty cool. Maybe this Netscape thingy is a good compromise...

        Not counting that my wife and myself use the same PC at home and if I could have two hotmail sessions opened at the same time (one in IE, one in Gecko), it would be pretty cool too.

    • Re:ActiveX on Netscape (Score:4, Informative)

      by eggz128 ( 447435 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:04AM (#11540062)
      A while ago.

      Nescape 7.1 (or maybe it was 7.2) came with the Mozilla ActiveX plugin preinstalled, although it was whitelisted to allow only the Windows Media Player ActiveX control.

      The Netscape 8 betas however can use either the Gecko or Trident (WinIE) engines for rendering web pages. If the user decides to use trident for viewing a web page that tab is marked as "low security" (little red or yellow sphere in the top right corner of the tab) IIRC.
    • Netscape 7.1 and 7.2 support ActiveX controls, but only for scripting the Windows Media Player.


      This new Netscape 8 (for some ungodly reason) appears to supports hosting IE rendering engine in addition to Gecko so perhaps there is a more pressing need for blocking ActiveX after all.

  • Of course (Score:5, Funny)

    by WhatsAProGingrass ( 726851 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:50AM (#11539926) Homepage
    And if you black list all those sites, how am I supposed to look at free porn anymore?

  • I wish they'd come up with... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:52AM (#11539953) Homepage Journal
    Netscape next month is expected to release a test version of a Web browser designed to resist phishing schemes

    users designed to resist phishing schemes and ENLAR6E Y0||R PE|\||5 spam.

  • Should have taken the *easy* route (Score:4, Insightful)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:54AM (#11539971) Homepage
    I.E.: Speakeasy

    Just give users an extension:
    http://www.speakeasy.net/software/fire fox/

    That way, they can keep up to date with Firefox.

    Now Netscape, as usual will lag in updates... which means security holes may remain, etc.

    If they did an extension, users could likely update with no problems.

  • Blacklists don't work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jack Taylor ( 829836 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:58AM (#11540007)
    The decision to use blacklists with ActiveX is an unfortunate one. In an environment as fluid as the internet scam industry, there will be vastly more new sites set up than human-controlled blacklisting can stop, especially if web servers are set up on botnets of unsuspecting home XP users. Let's just hope the default rendering engine will be Gecko.

    Having said that, there are a few javascript phishing techniques that work perfectly well in Firefox with Gecko...
    • Yes, the default rendering engine is gecko. But for capatibility many many people and even entire companies will set netscape to be IE only. That is if they use Netscape at all.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @10:58AM (#11540015)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Some people I know think that AOL is using their netscape brand as an attempt to divert their operations onto a brand with not such a long history in customer complaints

      Yeah, but Netscape 4.x went through so many "beta" versions that most people thought Netscape to mean "crap". And Netscape 6 was a total disaster. Plus, most people believe that Netscape "lost" to IE (which, let's be honest, they did). So AOL wants to change to a brand notorious for buggy software and losing?

  • Honestly, I had completely forgotten about them, and didn't know they were still around.

  • hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Christoff Ka Sin Chu ( 839334 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:07AM (#11540099) Homepage
    What's next, Mosiac?

  • a few tidbits (Score:2, Insightful)

    by LuserOnFire ( 175383 ) *
    1) I agree with what has been said a few times: using blacklists sounds nice, but really doesn't work well. Spammers and Scammers can create new sites faster then we can blacklist old ones.

    2) I still think FireFox is the way to go. Much more attention to security and features. Easier to use and less bloat.

    3) This is more of a question: Does anyone have any statistics of what browsers and versions of browsers are most being used? I mean, I'd love to see that broken down by country and by versions.

  • the window of opportunity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChipMonk ( 711367 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:17AM (#11540192) Journal
    It isn't closed, merely narrowed. Think of this: new rogue website, not yet blacklisted, and it has an ActiveX which is designed specifically to clear out your blacklist. Bonus points for pulling this off without administrator privileges. Five clicks later, and you're ready to re-install Windows.

    Stay with Firefox. It's sensibly disconnected from the #1 security weakness in Windows.
    • I run mozilla, and its 100% disconnected from any and all security weaknesses in Windows - I run it on Linux (and occasionally FreeBSD). Windows itself *is* a security weakness.
      • Nah, I've eliminated the security risks on windows at home.

        There's nothing vaguely resembling a modem or other network connection.

        For that matter, there *won't* be a modem attached even for FreeBSD until I've figured out how to rip enough out of XP that it can't connect or even recognize that the modem is there . . .

        hawk

  • A little slower than Firefox but much more solid (Score:3, Informative)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:36AM (#11540397) Homepage Journal
    I've been using NS for years and there really isn't anything in Firefox that isn't already in NS. The Profile Manager in NS7.2 works much better, plugins work better and it's generally more solid. The trade off is that it's a little slower than Firefox. I tested out FF on my family and they couldn't really detect any difference in behavior from Netscape7.2.

    NS4.72-4.78 were the reference standards for years and were the coding baseine for a great deal of web apps. There was no NS5 and NS6 was shit. Admittedly it was slow buggy crap. NS7.1 was a huge improvment and NS7.2 was a polished version of that. It's got all the biggies that FF has; tabbed browsing, popup blockers, profiles.

  • Embarassment coming... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fitten ( 521191 )
    Well... with a marketing campaign of "Focusing on Security", every security hole/bug found in it will be just that much more embarassing for them. It was that way with IE for a while with their security releases but it's happened to much that we've all become desensitized to it.
  • This is all well and good, but this is coming from the same company that offers a free chat client [aim.com] that comes with a free copy of WildTangent [pchell.com].

    How long before Netscape offers a "preferred partner program" where they promise not to blacklist the spyware produced by any of their partners?

  • What is it with the on again/off again Netscape browser? The last few releases have been so bloated with mostly unnecessary "stuff" that Mozilla was a better (if not yet as well branded) choice.

    I understand that the name "Netscape" itself has huge mindshare, but does anyone really associate that with AOL or Time Warner? Does it give their brands any additional mindshare by association? The article says Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser now, but how much of that is due to people like me who have an ol

  • Blacklisting ActiveX - Backwards! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DevolvingSpud ( 774770 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @11:59AM (#11540635)
    It seems to me that it would be much, much more secure to allow the user to whitelist sites they wanted to use ActiveX on. For example, Windows Update, and my stupid online paystub page.

    I only have a handful of pages that I *need* ActiveX on, and the rest can go pound sand.

    Solves the problems of Netscape having to maintain the lists, too.

  • People are being too hard on AOL/NS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oboylet ( 660310 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @12:10PM (#11540788)
    I think people are reacting too harshly to this.


    I can understand why some people are angry at AOL, and why all of NS's exemployee's are still peeved at them. However, from what I've read NS8 will use a tweaked version of the Gecko in Moz 1.7.5/FF1.0 and anything that might increase the marketshare of standards-based browsers is a good thing. And if AOL can use its muscle to drive even 2% of users over to Gecko, it will be a huge accomplishment.

    And I think NS8 represents a challenge to IE users, not existing Firefox users. I don't see it as stealing marketshare (or even potential marketshare) from Firefox, and even if it does, its still less marketshare for IE. Netscape, if managed properly, presents another flank in the battle for desktop browsing. They are allies, people, not the enemy. Sure, they could be doing some things better, but let's give them a chance to win over some new users before we hang them out to dry.

    And to those who would say that AOL should give more to the community, we shouldn't forget that they did pour a shit tonne of loot into NS/MoFo. There are plenty of reasons to be pissed at AOL/NS, but we shouldn't attack them for this.

  • First things first (Score:5, Informative)

    by jalefkowit ( 101585 ) <jasonNO@SPAMjasonlefkowitz.com> on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @12:35PM (#11541153) Homepage

    Based on the interface I saw in the preview version [jasonlefkowitz.net], it might be better if they concentrated on not sucking first.

    The "Netscape Browser Preview" had the most God-awful UI I've seen in a desktop app in a long, long time. It was like they went out of their way to avoid learning the big lesson from the success of Firefox (which was keep it simple, stupid), preferring instead to chrome it up six ways to Sunday.

    They even pushed the menu bar over to the right side of the screen -- in complete defiance of the way every other app does it. Who goes to look for "File", "Edit", etc. over there? Nobody. So there's years of muscle memory that you have to un-learn to be productive with the thing.

    Their ActiveX "solution" sounds similar. Why go to all the trouble of keeping blacklists, etc. when there is a much simpler and easier for users to understand solution at hand -- just leave ActiveX out of the default install altogether, and offer it as a plugin. Users who need ActiveX for vertical apps are also likely to have sysadmins handy to keep their network secure, so installing a plugin is no big deal. Everybody else, why do they need ActiveX? The only ActiveX control I've seen in mainstream use in years is FilePlanet [fileplanet.com]'s download manager, and they offer standard downloads for the ActiveX-challenged, too, so you could ditch ActiveX without too much pain there as well.

    Somebody put a silver bullet in the zombie corpse of Netscape already before it embarrasses its legacy any further...

  • Well I have one such blacklist installed, and I must say it is awfully big, it takes minutes to open the "restricted Zone" settings in ie.

    I'm not sure the concept works.
  • TFA says that NS8 wont be released that day, at least not in final form as the /. headline suggests. Only the second preview will be released
  • Does anyone know if it will have an email client or is this anti-phishing stuff just for webmail? Are they are also including a modified and rebranded thunderbird? The story makes it sounds like this is just the web browser and not the suite..

  • Netscape exec: Ohhh so thats what they wanted. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2005 @06:21PM (#11545398) Homepage
    Firefox was exactly what I wanted. A while ago, the options were limited to 3 bloated browsers (mozilla taking the extreme end of the spectrum), and a fast commercial one... Opera. I'd have issues installing or compiling Opera on AIX or Solaris on x86 etc, and wished there was a free Opera sourcecode somewhere.

    What kills me is how in the world did companies like Netscape miss what the public wants? They made netscape communicator, a monolith for people who only wanted yahoo.com to come up faster. Next they made netscape 6, then 7, never slower or smaller. IE was competing with Opera easily since you have to purchase opera, and IE is free for the most part.

    Mozilla was a joke. Period. I always thought mozilla was an org of programmers with itchy fingers who just wanted to make an OS-in-a-browser.

    Someone grew brains there.

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