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NeoPlanet to Release Gecko-Based Browser 77

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-not-for-linux dept.
An anonymous reader writers "NeoPlanet will tommorow release a beta version of a Gecko-based browser. They plan to release a final version by May. Nice to see the technology see the light of day before the end of the year." To bad its not for Linux.
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NeoPlanet to Release Gecko-Based Browser More

NeoPlanet to Release Gecko-Based Browser

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  • Not that bad.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I decided to check it out from a windows box, and despite most the criticism I'm hearing, its very nice as far as what the end user gets. clean, fast, small, etc. The advertisments in the conner DO get annoying though. Probably worth a gander if you haven't checked it out yet...
  • I think Netscape Navigator 3.0 fulfills those three requirements, although its dependence on Motif and its closed-sourced nature makes it much worse than kfm from an OSS point of view.
  • NeoPlanet is mostly just eye-candy, though it does provide a nice browsing experience.

    Now if only it didn't report oddly encrypted data back to the NeoPlanet collective every time you start and quit it...

  • Um.. how? I've looked through the configuration pieces (those that I can find, they're all over the place in this thing), and I don't see anything about Mozilla. Perhaps I'm missing something.
  • Opera [operasoftware.com] fits all those requirements. Well, except for the Linux one.
  • Posted by Mike@ABC:

    NeoPlanet is a newbie browser at best. It's designed to package up a whole bunch of links in the browser "shell." That way, the new user can find information in NeoPlanet's playground and view their ads, instead of getting distracted by going to a portal or other search engine.

    I have to say that the "toggling" idea is cool, switching from Mozilla to Microsoft on the fly. But I don't understand why they're doing it in the first place...! Most new users wouldn't know what it means, wouldn't understand why you might want to do it, and generally don't care as long as their browser gets them from point A to point B. They already had a solid product. If they wanted it to go faster, they should've just switched to Gecko and left IE out of it.

    In the end, I think the folks at NeoPlanet are co-opting the open source "buzz." It's not the first time, and it won't be the last.

    But this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
  • Netscape 3 is HORRIBLY unstable :)

  • kfm is probably the best alternative to Netscape, but it still is no where near ready to be a permanent replacement.

    Opera is coming soon, but it will be written with Qt.

    on the bright side, Qt 2.0 will be free, so silly anti-Qt arguments will hopefully will diminish [unless of course, you just don't like the feel of it].


  • The Gecko release from the Netscape Developer site is probably a fair amount older than the one in Mozilla M3 ... Mozilla M3 renders that CSS testpage perfectly, as you say.
  • most web developers WANT to switch to pure CSS. The whole reason we have these CSS-intensive tests is because web developers want it.

    It is only a matter of time before we're going to have complex CSS, especially in controlled environments like Intranets.

  • Surely somebody has written a browser for Linux that is

    A - Stable (ruling out Netscape & Mozilla)

    B - Graphical (ruling out Lynx)

    C - Doesn't require Qt (ruling out KFM)

    Anyone got any ideas?

    --

  • Dumb. (Score:1)

    by Matts ( 1628 )
    This is just plain dumb. Mozilla is already completely themable via XUL. Why on earth would they build this proprietary, windows only 4 MEGABYTE (compressed) skin technology when mozilla has it built in from the core in a completely open and cross platform manner? They would do a better service to the community by helping out on XUL development. But of course, they don't care about that - just about sending your email address and other info about you to companies who pay them...

    If anyone knows the answer, please tell me...

  • Netscape, Mozilla (which was the beta netscape, and now I don't know WTF it is), GTK-Mozilla, and now NeoPlanet's hack of Mozilla? How many of these can we even expect to have stable releases? How many are just unstable spin-off ideas from Mozilla.

    Is it just me, or does this seem redundant? Someone really should do a head to head, up to date, comparision of all of these, IMHO. And throw in IE, Grail, and anything else for completeness. Compare what features each one has, the themablity, the plugins avaliable, and the platforms avaliable. Anyone know of a comparison like this?

    XML, HTML, ActiveX, Java, Shock Wave, etc etc etc... I still can't get the Real Media plugin for Netscape in Linux to work correctly.

    I guess I am just going to stick with Linux/Netscape, because everything else seems to be unstable Beta. Anyone here actually got the GTK-Mozilla to work? Is there a URL for a "Linux web browser comparison (oh yea, kde's browser.. forgot that one).

    Mostly, I guess I am still deeply confused to the whole "Mozilla" thing. I thought it was just Netscape Beta, but it seems with all the directions they are going and all the diffrent groups working from "Mozilla Source," I just don't see how they could all result in getting one good browser as the finished project.

    Mozilla open source was suppose to increase the speed of development of Netscape. I guess it did for a while, but now it looks like all it's doing is causeing the workers to rip off the source and fragment into thier own projects, which is a bad thing IMHO. Can someone give me a quick review of how closely Mozilla is tied to Netscape now that it's part of AOL, and Sun is an AOL partner? Are they even working together on it (SUN would be the ideal place to optimize the Java environment for a browser, a good thing, and the past shows AOL can screw a browser up really good, a bad thing).

  • NeoPlanet's "hack of mozilla" will be a commercial product maintained by NeoPlanet.

    GTK-Mozilla is no more. GTK has been adopted as the X front-end for all unix Mozilla ports, has been for awhile.

    The ability for people to "rip off the source" is one of the powers of OSS. It's a GOOD THING. And why has it taken so long? Can we say almost a 100% rewrite? Jeez.

    Mozilla is the open source netscape browser. Netscape will use Mozilla as a basis for Communicator. Anyone is free to make their own custom Mozilla using the source code, provided they follow the license.
  • every OS deserves a mozilla browser. Amiga, Win CE, Mac, Win 3.1, java, freebsd, linux, Windows 2000 and of course BeOS :)
  • Just check out Neoplanet's website
    http://neoplanet.com/research.htm

    NeoPlanet would also like to thank Adam Locke for his contribution to the Mozilla effort. NeoPlanet used Adam's Active-X wrapper for Gecko as the basis for creating the NeoPlanet Active-X wrapper. NeoPlanet plans to post this updated Active-X control to Mozilla.org shortly
  • maybe after AOL comes to linux :)

  • Eye candy (Score:1)

    by jlv ( 5619 )
    Over 10 years ago, in discussing X, Motif, and Open Look, Rob Pike said

    "More and more pixels doing less and less work."

    How far we've progressed.
  • Found it in the archive, here [geocrawler.com]

  • Along with switching engines on the fly, it also says it will do a "side-by-side" layout with both engines (i.e. same web page, displayed in both Gecko and IE5). I don't know about you, but that will sure save me some wear-and-tear on the old Alt-Tab key.

    Of course, that wouldn't be necessary if browsers actually supported the standards correctly. Gecko is very promising in this direction, especially regarding CSS and the DOM, but IE is an absolute disaster. According to the stats on one of the web sites I administer, about 36% of our visitors are using IE 3 or 4, 31% are using Netscape 3 or 4, and 25% are using AOL 3 or 4 - what a nightmare to have to keep all these in mind when designing the site!

    Of course, the day that MS actually adheres to standards, rather than "embracing and extending", is the day I go into floral design.
    ________________________

  • All non-Lynx browsers available for Linux boil down to this sentiment for me. When there's a fast, clean, GPL'd shell surrounding Gecko, with keyboard equivalents that blend the best of MSIE, Opera and Lynx, with plugins that replicate the functionality of Alexa and Altavista Discovery, I'll be farting through silk; 'til then, anything but Lynx is strictly for "emergencies", and definitely not an experience I would call pleasant.

  • Ironic (Score:1)

    by Cjoh ( 8885 )
    Does anybody else find it Ironic that the Neoplanet code requires an ActiveX component to run Mozilla? Sounds like the Neo-punks are trying to pull a 'Gore' and jump on the "We're cutting edge technology because we are part of the open source revolution!" Glad to see they are using Microsoft Products to promote Gecko.
  • Actually it's terrific. Microsoft has Actively (groan) resisted commoditization of Windows with strategies of lock-in and presenting the API as a moving target. But now that IE is a component, it's a commodity, and a replaceable one. Windows can be taken over piece by piece, much like the GNU project has been doing to commercial Unix.
  • If you want to really test a browser, see how fast it renders a schwab page or a my yahoo page or an ebay page or any other page that people actually use.

    This is a common flaw in useability testing - demonstrate your strengths on corner cases. And yes, CSS is a corner case - no popular sites use it or are likely to use it.
  • Nothing new to see, move along please.

    Seriously, if this is supposed to be a new browser why does it claim to be Internet Exploder?

    Someone else mentioned that it could be made to use Netscrape. Whu? Can't find /that/ particular option. And anyway, why would it need another browser to run?

    In short: A pile of pants, big and old. Nothing `Neo' 'cept the name, and it doesn't even work very well (maybe that's due to it being Internet Exploiter with a pretty jacket on???)

  • Check out the disclaimers on their reseach page. Its pretty clear this toggle is a research / development thing.
  • Then you think wrong. Commercial developers are certainly welcome to use and add proprietary code to an NPL/MPL project, but the NPL/MPL part of it must remain and be acknowledged as open source. See the license on www.mozilla.org
  • The ability to toggle would make for a great development browser. Of course, I don't think a developer would want to use NeoPlanet. Of course, couldn't Mozilla just embed the IE viewer, if it wanted to? I mean, this is Windows only...

    ...but something like that would rawk for development if a platform-neutral way of doing was found.

    Of course, many of these cross-browser issues go away once the browsers comply to an HTML spec.
  • I gave NP a try a while ago. Basically its a frontend to IE's renderer, which blows, therefore NP does too. The interface is ridiculous - it uses the lizard-brain 'channel' analogy, which failed miserably with MS's channel bar.

    Why doesn't this company put some effort into actually making a competitive BROWSER, instead of making a skin for an older, crappy one? If someone is wanting a new browser experience on the Win32 platform, give Opera a shot. At least they're doing something new - it works better than both IE and Netscape, and trounces them both in standards-compliance.

    -lx
  • Gecko is definately the best browser for rendering, from what I've seen. If you haven't seen the CSS torture test results yet, take a look. It's going to cause a lot of pages on the web right now to render improperly, but that's a small price to pay for near-100% (well, probably 100%) support of standards.

    I wish Microsoft and Netscape didn't get into their original "let's add all this proprietary crap into our browsers" phase as it fragmented the web for a while. I would rather design a single page that functions under both browsers equally well. Gecko's going to set a new standard that will have to be matched by everyone else.
  • I think the important thing about CSS is that it allows you to separate your content from your look and feel. Having stylesheets allows you to swap different looks in and out without recompiling/manually editing all of your pages. It's not a big technology right now, but it's slowly gaining ground.

    IMHO, people *should* be using CSS to design pages instead of embedding all of the font/color/layout stuff in the HTML document. Unfortunately, technology that offers the greatest benefits isn't always the one that gets used in the end.

    If you want to see CSS in the real world, take a look at a lot of the big-name sites. You'll find that a large number of them *do* use it for layout (ie: Microsoft, Hotbot, etc..). When the new third- or fourth-generation browsers start taking over, I think you'll see a lot of people dropping support for the old, braindead browsers.
  • I guess I should also mention that CSS and XML go hand-in-hand really well. One technology handles data and metadata, while the other is concerned only with the presentation of that data to the end user. This is really cool stuff -- you should see it really taking off within the next year or so.
  • Neoplanet isn't derived from Gecko; It uses it as a layout widget. I seriously don't think that Netscape intended to keep commerciasl developers from using Gecko by insisting that any product which used it must me OSS. :)
  • No, I don't think wrong. I (perhaps) communicate unclearly, but to restate in an i'll-speak-slowly manner, i'll give an example:

    Mozilla must remain free, but if Quicken(tm) wants to use Gecko as their HTML widget, that doesn't mean that they have to give away the source to Quicken(tm), which is what the original poster was implying that Neoplanet had to do. They might have to publish the source code to whatever version of Gecko they used, but *their* code, inasmuch as it is not a part of Gecko but uses it through a well-defined interface, remains their own. Any other arrangement completely obliterates any commercial adoption of Mozilla, and I can assure you that that was not Netscape's intent.
  • fairy theme [seahorse.com]

    I have no idea why NeoPlanet doesn't link user-developed skins. I haven't tried this one. NeoPlanet is not my favorite product, I uninstalled it about 5 minutes after I began to use it.
  • I've tried every browser I could get my hands on, just for the hell of it. Using ie5 presently (cough) but the novelty of the little radio thingy has worn off. MP3's or good ol CDs beat the crap out of streaming radio stations...
    Here's the list of browsers I've used:
    Netscape 2.x, 3.x, 4.0, 4.5 and Communicator for Linux
    Gecko whatever...
    IE 3, 4..., 5
    Opera (some old version and the most recent one)
    StarOffice's integrated browser (ick!)
    Neoplanet 1.0...
    AOL 4.0
    that K thing (briefly)
    Crystal Atari Browser through an atari emulator (so, I wasn't actually online)
    and some Russian-sounding browser that Sucked
    Just downloaded Lynx, haven't used it yet...
    Are there any more out there? hehehe
  • Why do web designers want homogenous users? If you don't throw in the latest, greatest features of CSS, and don't use any browser specific tags, most browsers will see your page just fine. Is the content on a version NS3 page going to be different than that on a version NS4 page?

    It would be great if all of the browsers had perfect 100% compliance with the current standards, kept up to date with the standards, and made sure all the users had the up to date browsers. But that's not going to happen!

    I think that many of those sites that serve up different versions to different browswers are trying to treat HTML as a DTP or paintbrush.
  • A simple check of the source tree will confirm this. If the Mozilla folks verify it, neo's going to be in a world of humiliation.
  • Since you're asking about viable alternatives, I can assume that you consider Qt non-viable, as opposed to merely politically incorrect. Why is Qt non-viable? I've always felt that Qt was quite viable for Linux, with free source for non-commercial use, with even more openness when v2.0 comes out. Am I grossly mistaken? Can you please explain why?

    I'd hate to be slumming around in slashdot with a non-viable browser!
  • I thought this at first, too. But, they have a "special" configuration dialogue which seems to be the one which gets used. Once I found that, no problem!

    It's View -> Control Panel
    Or F2

    Just FYI

  • If I'm not mistaken, the NPL also requires that the source code of any derived products be made available. And yet... I don't see code anywhere on their web site. What's up?

  • As far as the layout engine, the linux version is on track with win32.

    There will be a wysiwyg xml ui creation tool real soon now my: Xultool [pimpmaster.org]
  • Actually the real reason there aren't any skins on their site that aren't by them (or anywhere for that matter) is that the vast majority of skinners for windoze customizable apps use Netscape. They're too busy skinning their mp3 players and building themes for Litestep(an Afterstep lookalike, replacement shell for windoze) to bother wasting their time on Neoplanet.
    :)
  • hooray for css! xml too, they rock.
  • maybe they like scifi
  • 1) Only to be expected that a windows version woud be he first released given that the windows versions are ahead in development from all the others.

    2) I think Mozilla is such a cool technology and this just confirms it (a pity I could never get it to work but).

    3) What I really like about Mozilla is the XML based interface design. How long do you think it will be before there are wysiwyg XML editors for customising your Browsers?
  • Just in case anyone was thrown off by the /. headline, the beta is available now, since the article mentioned was from 04/14. Cheers
  • Just in case anyone was thrown off by the /. headline, the beta is available now, since the article mentioned was from 04/14. Cheers
  • I hope as the product grows, you'll consider us more than just eye candy. We're working hard to make it as complete a web solution as possible. As for the encrypted data being sent to us, I suggest you check out our Privacy Statement at http://www.neoplanet.com/a_privacy.html

    I hope it proves helpful in understanding precisely what information is shared...
  • Check out www.skinz.org. There are user-defined NP skins there.
    We don't put them on our site because we haven't spent a lot of time developing a place for them. We're redesigning the site though, so look for a user-submission are SOON.
  • Just to set the record straight:
    We do NOT send users' e-mail addresses to ANY of our partners, and we do NOT collect individual user information. The only way we could have your e-mail address is if you have registered the product and included that information in the form. It is not required to use the browser, though.
    If you like, check out our Privacy Statement at:
    http://www.neoplanet.com/a_privacy.html

    I trust it will prove helpful...

  • WARNING! PROBLEM! STOLEN CODE? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While participating in the Mozilla development mailing lists, I read a post this morning that mentioned this exact same story. This guy writes something along the lines of:

    An ActiveX component that delivers the Gecko rendering engine output was written by me. This component was checked out, and later returned with no code changes as something like "NeoAXCOM.xxx" or something and credited as their work. I am pissed off.

    I would GREATLY appreciate it if someone could verify this and the technical details of what he was talking about, because I threw away the e-mail and don't have a copy anymore. But it is about as accurate as I can remember, it is NEEDING CONFIRMATION, and it is allegedly pissing off the author.

    Mozilla is coming along extremely well with or without NeoPlanet. It can use all the corporate support it can get, but if this is the kind of poop we can expect from the corporate world, maybe we should remind them to be more responsible and open to their customers and the open source community.


    In more entertaining terms, slashdot them to hell and back if it is CONFIRMED they are crassly claiming work they didn't do until we get an adequate response or an apology.

    Cheers...
    valpohl@hotmail.com
  • Isn't Gecko supposed to be the new 100% HTML standards compatible engine? I went to the test page for the new standards, and it failed miserably. It looked NOTHING like what it was supposed to. Granted, it did come out looking better than Netscape Communicator 4.5, but it is still wrong. That seems truely odd, as I tried the tests of the Mozilla engine that I got directly from Netscape the other day, and it rendered correctly! Perhaps I'm missing something here. Are these two seperate engines? Is Gecko not the same engine as what is being used with the test Mozilla?

    On a side note, I do like the interface. It's about time someone made an attempt to make their software look nice. It's almost as good as the customizable interfaces from X (not quite, but it's a nice start). I'm interested to see just what this company is going to produce in the future. Worth a looksee.

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