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add in the classic cracking/yellow plastic on prior models, the crappy 15-bit TN screens they've used in the past (fixed under performance guarantees, IIRC, after legal action), too much thermal paste causing massive overheating, nVidia gfx chips cracking and falling off, exploding batteries, cooling ports blocked by plastic film and numerous HW failures-by-design - well, it's no wonder he's looking for a heavy duty warranty.

Apple's biggest design flaw is that they use the same name ("Macbook") for all of their laptops, year after year. So a Google for "macbook battery" or "macbook screen" returns every rant anyone has ever posted about every Apple laptop ever sold.

All the other manufacturers keep changing names so you can't keep track. HP has added "Envy" and "ProBook" to the "Presario" and "Pavillion" and "EliteBook", plus they add random model numbers like "dv5000." Makes it a lot harder to keep track. Dell does the same thing: What the hell is a Vostro? Is it like an Inspiron or a Latitude? It's certainly not an XPS, right, because that's the line they built to compete with Alienware, except now they own Alienware, and use that name, too.

Changing names often helps to encourage the short memories of consumers. I don't know anyone that's had a problem with a Vostro or an Envy...because I've never known anyone whose owned anything other than an Inspiron or a Pavillion.

add in the classic cracking/yellow plastic on prior models, the crappy 15-bit TN screens they've used in the past (fixed under performance guarantees, IIRC, after legal action), too much thermal paste causing massive overheating, nVidia gfx chips cracking and falling off, exploding batteries, cooling ports blocked by plastic film and numerous HW failures-by-design - well, it's no wonder he's looking for a heavy duty warranty.

I'd recommend a Dell, if you can stand the hardware - their NBD warranties kick ass. You can practically (ab)use the hardware for anything except hammering fenceposts & they'll replace it for you. Plus there's the data recovery option, might be worth it if you're special enough to keep important data on a laptop.

Netscape didn't come out in 1998. Netscape Navigator 3 was out in 1997 for instance http://sillydog.org/narchive/full123.php

I was using Netscape Navigator 2.x with AOL in 1996. I remember because it was a big deal that AOL finally got 32bit winsock support for windows 95. Netscape was definitely out in 1995 as well. I remember "best vieweed with netscape" buttons on websites when I first got on AOL in 1995.

Are you talking about a specific browser version? Like Netscape Communicator 4.0 ?

Both Internet Explorer and Netscape were available in 1996. IE was based on NCSA Mosaic.

Not on my Mac it's not, but you're right, it's near the home key on some (older?) Mac keyboards. I have 'Fn' instead of Help on my keyboard, use it all the time to control/mute the volume.

"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"

How would you know?

For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.

Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".

http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php

http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html

"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."

And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.

Mozilla sat on their asses in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Yes and no. When FF3 originally came out, it fared a lot better compared to the competition of the time. To show you what I mean, notice the memory graph that the Mozilla people gave when they initially started preview releases of Firefox 3. Since IE8 and Chrome came out, the bar has gone up substantially. At least give a bit of time for Firefox to counter back before before calling them folks the scum of the earth.

Now maybe Mozilla can start working harder on memory leaks, multi-threading, making Firefox not suck on a Mac, and getting rid of needless bloat like the Awesome bar.

FF3 made large strides on a better Mac interface with 3.0 which is somehow forgettable now. If the interface still bugs people enough to run away from it, they should probably just be using Camino. Or would they rather be using this or this?

I think that with chrome catching on (on Windows), multi-threading has a large chance of becoming a focus in Firefox 4. If I remember, Chrome appeared from nowhere when the Firefox 3.5 development was froze so no new features could be added, let alone an architectural rewrite.

Not for I am not going to comment on the Awesome bar.

To the person who modded me troll,you want links? Here you go. MSFT lied to the Justice Dept,MSFT lied to get a better deal on the DVR patents ,MSFT lied with a fake ad trying to fight the "Mac VS PC" ads,MSFT lied about Xbox 360 features,hell I could do this all day long. Hell just typing "Microsoft lied" into Yahoo brings up over 3 MILLION hits!

So answer me this if I am a supposed troll: Given the fact that we are talking about a company that has a proven history of lying and only fessing up when actually caught in a lie,why should we take their word now? I mean if Diebold says "Sure the voting boxes are safe,trust us they are hack proof!" would you believe them without proof? Considering how much information can be gleaned from the average persons searches and how much money that could potentially be worth to data miners,give me one good reason why now we can trust Microsoft simply because they say it is so? After being lied to by MSFT so much in the past I don't think it too much to ask to have an independent source at least look at what is going on there with that data,do you? But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Just when I thought I played it too much, this guy apparently found some sort of wraparound bug. I don't know whether to congratulate him or just run from him.

http://sillydog.org/narchive is one place for starters.

http://home.netscape.com/download/archive and http://home.netscape.com/download/archive.html are the older locations that used to go back to version 2.02, but most of the links no longer seem to work since the last time I checked....

I don't have the time to write every reason I loathe Microsoft. In a nutshell, I hate what effect they have had on the IT industry, I hate their products, and I hate their practices.

However, someone wrote a good essay that covers many points. See http://sillydog.org/msbad.html

PS I also hate the way Bill Gates ripped off all this money from people and companies, then gives a bit back to charities to make it look like he's generous or something.

Actually it appears JavaScript debuted in Netscape 2.0. (Link via this.)

Heh, you're right. Info here.

Still interesting for those that might not have heard; the Apple press release doesn't mention it.

never mind, found the answer. its a win98 bug.
solution (in 4th post). solution in an extension, and discussion.

Recently I learned of a bug in Windows Firefox versions prior to 1.01 which was fixed in this version. This bug wipes user's hard disks. I've located 15 users who've suffered from this bug.
Why did it take over *one year* to fix this serious bug?
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2257 31

The bug only occurs when a user uninstalls Firefox. A user who uninstalls version 1.0 to prepare for installing version 1.01 is vulnerable. Why has the Firefox homepage not been updated to warn all users about this fact, and to offer a safe remedy?

At least 15 people reported the bug. Assuming that 5% of victims would post publicly about it, this would leave around 300 actual victims. Even 5% is probably too high; a 1% estimate would leave around 1,500 total victims. Since the bug only occurs when Firefox is uninstalled, many hundreds or perhaps even thousands of potential future victims exist.

The bug was reported in bugzilla and discussed without fixing for over *one year*. At one point a developer didn't remove the dangerous code because he said "This is not an acceptable solution to force on all users because some people make bad assumptions and then don't read dialogs." Is Firefox truly ready for "the masses" when developers maintain this sort of attitude towards users?

(copy, remove spaces, and paste bugzilla links since they won't work from Slashdot)

Original bugzilla bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id =23362 5

Firefox advocate ivanii attempts to raise concern about this bug (10/07/2004)
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/2808

Here's links to a few people who suffered from this bug:
1.http://computercops.biz/postp82180.html
Thu Feb 12, 2004
"Using the Firefox uninstaller has deleted almost everything in the Program Files directory..."

2.http://www.terryfrazier.com/1391
10/5/2004
"What idiot writes an uninstall routine that wipes out everything in the parent folder?!"
"This is not some minor issue. This is a show stopper. I mean, damn!"
"..every last vestige of that vile firefox has been eradicated from my registry. "

3.http://sillydog.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4062 6
04 Aug, 2004
"After un install Firefox lost all ,MBX Eudora mail files"
4.http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic. php?t=64 871&sid=2d93836acbfea243769078b48c3eff90
2004-03-28
Also posted on Bugzilla as user "Cy"
"This is not a minor inconvience. This is CARNAGE!!! Uninstalling a browser and ending up wiping out almost your entire hard drive."
"This is ruining mozilla's reputation. I now have a distrust of any win installer release by mozilla"

5.rajarajan.sampath final bugzilla victim to post.
2005-02-04
"The uninstaller wiped off, 2/3rd of my programs. This shouldnt be the case, no matter what."

6. Thomas Passin (original buzilla poster)
2004-02-09
"This is DANGEROUS."

7.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2 42 118
2004-04-29
"...I uninstaled the whole directory "E:/Program Files"!! It wasn't very nice for me..."

8. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26969 9
2004-11-13
"All my backups and irreplaceble files are now lost.....Thank you for making a shitty uninstaller....i fucking hate you now"

9.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2 71 805
2004-11-25
"Firefox will deleted all my other program in c:\program files. very unlucky,I did it!!"

10. https://bugzil

There was no NS5

Actually, there was. I had it. It sucked.

It was originally the next generation evolved from NS4. It looked mostly like NS4. Netscape opened the source. And is was a mess. Mozilla took one look at it and realized they'd do better to start over.

Which they did.

But the point is that you can't bypass it.

Hmmm...what's this then? Or this? Or maybe even this?

Aw gosh, I've gone and broke your argument. Hope you kept the receipt.

My sister called me a couple days ago telling me that she cannot log into her netscape.net e-mail account. I wasn't sure if if she was hacked, but now it's all adding up. First there is the "Massive Layoffs at AOL" and then I read several forums last night about the same issue. It almost makes me wonder if some disgruntled employee decided to take out some customers on the way out. (Note that this is purely speculation.) As if AOL weren't already having enough problems....

Have a look at this for some more information.

maybe

Netscape 0.9x thru 3.04 and 3.04 Gold thru Current

For the Mac nuts out there. Be gentle, it an Earthlink account.

Netscape 0.9x thru 3.04 and 3.04 Gold thru Current

For the Mac nuts out there. Be gentle, it an Earthlink account.

The forums on sillydog actually record your user-agent string at the bottom of the post, which is, IMO, a pretty cool idea, and maybe one that slashdot ought to consider.

It[Konqueror] also has features I love, like spell checking.
So did it come with the "Windoze" spelling installed or did you have to teach it to remember that?

or just get Mosaic

See the Any Browser Campaign.

I'm no web designer, but ugly-and-boring is just that...they want to push a message about how to code in HTML, they should at least make their site appealing...or does this just highlight that an appealing Any Browser site isn't possible??

There was a bug in the 1.4-1.5 timeframe with rising GDI levels caused Mozilla to fail. I'm thinking you were effected. See Mozilla Bug 204374 and this thread at Antony Shen's forums.

Here is a site that has some old versions of browsers. Silly Dog has 513 browser versions including browsers for Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.

Just do a quick searcn on google, you'd be amazed what you can find out there.

Very cool site, thanks! It even works in Netscape 1.0 (yes I tried!)

Thank you. We now return to our regular scheduled programming...

But unlike with OS X, when you faithfully download those Windows patches, you introduce ugly and scary conditions into your computer. Basically, with Windows you just can't win.

Netscape 2.0 enabled framesets and was introduced March 1996.
It was added to HTML 4 at least as early as Dec. 1997.
A note on frames with CSS dated 08-Jun-1996 exists also.
The article mentions having an invention date at least as early as May 1996
Even the patent is completely silly, but the dates are wrong, March happend before May in the year 1996, didn't it ?

Info from Sillydog.org:
The release notes for Navigator 2.0 are here. You can see the mention of Frames as a new way to present documents. Unfortunately, the link to the demo is broken -- perhaps Netscape kept an archival copy.
Version 2.0 of Netscape Navigator came out in March of 1996.

If the prospect of using a program called Mozilla terrifies her and you don't want all the extra crap that comes standard with Netscape, use SillyDog's steamlined Netscape. Then add the mother-friendly pop-up blocking feature back and she should be good to go.

Here's an interesting look at purposefully hidden files under windows. It's amazing if you look through it all. Your browser history doesn't go away, etc... Stuff like "show all files" and "find" have been purposefully written to ignore this stuff.

http://sillydog.org/mshidden.html