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Mozilla Will Be Netscape 6.0
menthos writes "In this story on Cnet, the talk is about the latest speech from an AOL executive. Some of the most interesting things include that they are preparing to launch the Netscape-branded version of Mozilla "this spring", and it will be labeled Netscape Communicator 6.0.
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Why?
There's no beta. Or even an alpha yet. Sure, Mozilla M-whatever is now considered "alpha", but *that is NOT what Netscape will ship*. Netscape will be adding crypto, java, and whatever other AOL-friendly customizations they decide on, and the simple fact is, these additions warrant a beta cycle. Netscape has never shipped a major release without a several month long beta period. Even if they start *today* we'll likely not see a release until May.
Now, bear in mind that Netscape is no longer controlled by Netscape. AOL will be deciding what's released when, and if their latest and greatest AOL 5.0 fiasco is any indicator, we could expect to see a bug ridden but colorful Netscape 6.0 released with no beta cycle... I just hope this isn't the case...
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Just lurking, thanks!
Why would my boss care which browser I use? Why should I care which browser he uses?
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Check this download from Netscape's developer site. It's example code and documentation for you to plug-in third-party mail and/or news systems. I have Netscape launching Pine with the To: line filled in on my machine, and I don't see why you couldn't get it to launch mutt.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Password authenticated news works fine in the latest build. It does Java provided you have java 1.3. Most plugins are working via the backward compatibility layer.
The current problems with Mozilla as I see it for a daily browser are:
SSL isn't included (won't ever be in Mozilla?)
There are still dynamic reflow issues.
It still occasionally locks up with 100% CPU.
Opening new windows is slow.
Other than those things, I've been using it for ordinary browsing as much as possible. It makes reading slashdot a breeze, since it reflows as the page is loading.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
If I sound fed up of this cycle, it's because I am. The developers can step off it any time they choose. Users and admins can't. They're stuck, until the developers get on with it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm unashamedly a programmer, and you can be sure I will dig in the moment I get a chance. And, no, that's not a put-off. I -do- patch code, as and when I can, according to my ability.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This -summer-, maybe. But SPRING? AOL must be really into IE to do something =that= fatal to Mozilla.
It needs -much- more debugging, and (at the very least) testing time with all the new stuff Netscape handed out for it. Rushing isn't going to go anywhere, but down.
At the VERY VERY LEAST, Mozilla needs to be as fast as Netscape 3, feature-complete as per the current HTML/DHTML specs, be fully capable of SSL 3.0 at 128 bits (with security auditing, to ensure that unencrypted data isn't retained in vulnerable sections of the disk or memory), have ALL the features of Communicator 4.x, AND support IPv6.
If it's not at that point, it's not ready for shipping.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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It's at the stage where "the dogfood company is having to test it's own product by eating it themselves." Of course this isn't to be taken literally. It's just that all or most of the employess are now using the product to really hone the debugging to a sharp edge and ferret out every last little bug (theoretically of course.)
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I don't think the problem is debug code. Rather, there are probably still unoptimized hot-spots in the code. Check out the .performance newsgroup; people will report that profiling shows a method is getting called 2000 times a second, and the function is either optimized or code rearranged to call it less often.
Does Mozilla do "select equals copy"? If so, that's irritating - what many UNIX applications do is "select equals select, and you can paste the current selection with the middle mouse button, but selecting leaves the clipboard alone - copy equals copy, and that copies to the clipboard".
I.e., if you select something, it becomes the primary selection, but does not automatically get copied to the clipboard; to copy to the clipboard, you have to do, say, control-C (or Alt-C, in Netscape Classic, sigh). The middle mouse button pastes the primary selection at the insertion point; paste, which is typically control-V (or Alt-V in Netscape Classic), pastes the clipboard at the insertion point, or replaces the current selection if there is a current selection.
(Qt, on UNIX/X, has the irritating habit of "copying" to the primary selection, rather than the clipboard, so this doesn't necessarily work correctly with Qt applications such as those that come with KDE.)
My company has standardized on Netscape 3.0 (!) and they have a customized icon...
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Mozilla is the only app I've seen that puts a custom icon in the Gnome Tasklist - anyone know how this is done?
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Actually, IE5 is enormously better than Netscape 4.7. Though I prefer Netscape's UI, the fact remains that the Netscape 4.x rendering engine has not seen any significant change since 1997. Netscape 4.x does a miserable job with stylesheets, and is utterly clueless about XML. IE, on the other hand, seems to do quite well with these, even if it does not fully conform to the specs. I don't mean to imply that IE is better in every respect, but I am saying that under the hood, IE5 beats Netscape hands down.
It's a good thing that Mozilla will enable Netscape to catch up with and surpass IE5 in terms of under-the-hood excellence. However, I still think that skipping Netscape version 5 is a really bad idea. Although Mozilla is becoming quite capable and usable, it will be months before it is stable and feature-complete enough to release as Netscape 5.0.
I think that for Netscape to be so brash as to call its next browser version 6.0, the browser should be able to trounce IE 5.x by fully supporting CSS2 and XSL, among other things. It's not even close. Calling this well-intentioned-but-underdone browser "Netscape 6.0" will just set it up to be beaten by a superior IE 6.0. Netscape should just cut the crap and be honest about its version number, because otherwise it will just lose more credibility in the long run.
Admittedly, this sort of control over the UI is also one of the driving forces behind Microsoft's integration strategy: the difference is that the Microsoft way means Windows-only, and the XUL way works the same across all supported platforms.
The other nice difference, at least for many Web developers, is that we don't have to code in C or Java anymore -- we can use XML and JavaScript instead.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion caused by the AOL droid's misuse of terminology. :)
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have always felt that the value judgements in the moderation system were not a good idea, and that it was better off with straight points up/down. For some reason, "insightful" really makes me twitch ... having a dozen posts marked up as "insightful" just feels too damn touchy-feely, too loose with the term. And "interesting" is as subjective as it gets.
I imagine "overrated" was supposed to be used to mark down posts that were moderated up for no good reason, as a check against moderation inflation. The one I see abused most often is "redundant", actually.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I don't have a Netscape file under app-defaults, so I'm not sure what has to be in it.
.Xdefaults file:
;) Maybe if I can get it figured out, I'll write one.
I assume it is like an
app*attribute: value
But what attributes are to be set? (Is there a howto on this?
This sig is false.
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This sig is false.
The customizable throbber icon thing first showed up in, of all things, OS/2's WebExplorer.
It was, at the time, on my 14.4k modem, the most amazingly interminable thing i'd ever seen embedded in a web page, I mean, damn, like 40k at the front of a web page just so the activity indicator would look different.
WebEx also had a simplified version of IE's browsing history.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
The RSA patent expires in 6 months.
it sure will be interesting to see where cryptography goes after that.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I hope, but how much is all speculation. I'd kinda like to see someone strip all the debug code out of a milestone release if nothing else just to see what kind of difference it makes
With an inflated version number, how can we lose?
:)
Why not just call it Netscape 2000 and get it over with.
Hell let's bring the linux kernel up into the current decade, considering that DOS 3 has been dead for years, it's embarassing that I have to use an OS that is still in the 2 series. I mean, get with the times, Linus.
Finkployd
Oh, and seriously, I'm eagerly awaiting this release, go Mozilla!
...is the "over-rated" category. Nowadays, "over-rated" is a synonym for "You weren't trolling or posting flamebait, I just don't like your opinion." I see posts which had freakin' "1" scores get marked down as "over-rated" simply because the moderator wanted the poster to get marked down for his views or because the moderator didn't want other people seeing his viewpoint. Moderators know that nobody ever marks "over-rated" posts as unfair in metamoderation, so it's the safe, coward's way of stifling dissent without risking anything.
And yeah, this post is off-topic with regards to the Mozilla article (although not to the parent post), so I'm not going to feel ripped off if someone marks it down as such. I just feel the matter needed to be pointed out, though, and that's why I'm posting it with the +1 bonus.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"The new browser looks similar to Communicator 4.7, with some noticeable differences ... the most notable difference is the way AOL said it will distribute the product ... The company plans to allow Web sites to launch their own branded versions of the browser"
That tells me it's not Mozilla (which doesn't look that much like 4.7, according to screenshots I've seen.) More likely, it's just good (?) old (!) Communicator, with some little frills, and the ability to distribute branded versions.
Branded versions of Netscape are nothing new. When AT&T WorldNet Services first launched, we distributed Netscape (2.0 I think) with a "death star" logo in the upper right.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Maybe the Slashdot people could help a bit on optimizing and debugging it (there's very few "hackers" working on Mozilla; it's mostly Netscape staff)
:) There's a GTK module called GtkMozilla but Mozilla's too stable to consider something like this at the moment.
I sincerely hope this become stable enough so I can make a customized version of Mozilla with GPLTrans logos on it
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
If I use NS 4.7 for Mac and visit a page with a style sheet link in the and then change the style sheet -- add a special attribute for all TD, for example -- Netscape does not reload the style sheet when the page is reloaded. I don't think this really affects the average joe, but when you're testing to see how different attributes look on a page it's very annoying. IE 4.5 DOES reload the style sheet when you click reload.
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rooooar
It's possible with netscape: have a look at muttzilla.
It's not only removing the if (DEBUG) { } parts
(Yes, I know about #ifdef, that's not the point),
but also optimizing lots of functions. However, optimized they are very difficult to debug. Optimization is a lot of work, and it's senseless to waste time on it if a lot of things are going to be changed anyway.
Hmmm, for some reason /. posted that message as AC there, so I'll repeat:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Netscape
In netscape, you can have hjkl motion keys, in case you didn't know:
have a look at
You don't want to beat IE. The only thing bad about IE is it's potential to be forced onto consumers. Having one dominant product in an area is bad. So what if Netscape overtakes IE? With AOL/Time Warner/Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/whoever, we have just as dangerous of a situation, a huge company that can force a product on the market. Whether it's netscape or IE, it's still going to hurt the general public.
Even with two, you can see this "browser war" as the media likes to call it is not beneffiting us. It's creating a bunch of web sites that either customize content to one browser, or maybe both netscape and IE. Great, so when I go to Nissan's website with iCab, all I see is a black background because it doesn't know what browser I have and uses JavaScript to check for IE or Netscape.
The only way *we* can win is with standards. Unfortunately, no one cares about this stuff. Websites want flash, and they don't seem to mind alienating customers by requiring the latest browser with javascript, flash, etc. Now a lot of people think Netscape/Mozilla can save us because it's supposedly standards compliant. Well, read the article here. Customized browser versions used to customize conent for the browser. Does that sound like an idea from a company who is really commited to open standards?
No, the web should be accesible to anyone. I'm sorry to say at this point though, it looks like we're all going to loose no matter who wins the browser war.
Well you could paste first, then rehighlight the part you want gone then hit delete. But I bet there is a better way, but as I don't use *nix I don't know, anyone out there know the proper way to select an area to delete without destroying what is in your clipboard?
I'm using IE 5 right now (note that I'm not the original poster). What I really dislike (apart from the eventual 'an internal error occurred' message box that pops up after program termination) is the fact that sometimes (cannot really say why this happens) I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...
;-) Not that surprising!
After a very long period of surfing (> 5 hrs) problems arise that will make opening new instances create new windows that never really render and simply have a sand clock in them.
RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though
But with all the problems, IE is way better than Netscape (from my personal experience). Opera, for me, doesn't render certain pages properly. But it has a nice zooming feature...
If Mozilla fulfills only part of what I've heard I will drop every other browser instantaneously...
I entirely agree with this comment. The same goes for typography: an em-dash is — for example (that's: —), double quotes are “ and ” (like “this”) and so on. My pages are full of things like that: if you see them as funny — strings and so on, your browser is broken.
The Bugzilla bug-tracking system is sooo cool it makes you want to file bug reports just so you can play with it.
Why, you can even vote for your favorite bugs to determine which ones should be fixed prioritarily. I voted for bugs 4722 and 27505. I encourage Slashdot readers to give the Lizard a try and to file bug reports (or at least to votes for the ones you find more troublesome rather than complain about them here).
A pre-release of 5.0 was the code Netscape opensourced to Mozilla. After the stuff Netscape didn't own was ripped out, what was left was a basket case. After 6 months Mozilla tossed it and started over. Netscape 5.0 existed but wasn't released. So the new browser IS 6.0.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Not entirely correct; The Word re-versioning brought all Word versions to the same number; at that point, IIRC, there was Word for DOS 5.2 (because of WP 5.1 ;-), Word for Mac 5.4 (or 4.5?) and finally Word for Windows 2.0. Which was moronic of course, sine WfW was more advanced than the DOS version...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm getting tired of pointing this out, but you can't say that the final Mozilla will be slow just because the alpha is slow. Prerelease versions are full of debugging code which slow things down but make it easier to spot bugs. When a final version is released, all this will be gone. So wait for a release before you judge Mozilla's speed.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I don't know how you managed to get that impression from the poster's comments. He just said "IE had an advantage cos ISPs could customise it". And also that there are things he hates about IE.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Yes, M13 (the most recent development release) doesn't reload the page when you resize the window. It also remembers which bit of a page you were up to, when you press the back button.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Go on then, what's stopping it? Remember that nearly the whole of Netscape is now using and working on Mozilla (since M12ish) and that bugs can be squashed very rapidly once the program is feature-complete.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I think it's silly to care what version number Netscape gets. I believe it is a marketing ploy. But given that it is a marketing ploy, I see nothing wrong with it. The consumer is not being decieved. There really is a big difference between this and Netscape 4.7.
Windows 98 is very similar to Windows 95, so the differential version numbering is more likely to give a false impression that there's a big difference. But then again, if you're stupid enough to buy something on the basis of its version number, then you're buying the hype and not the product, so you've got what you paid for.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Try selling it to your boss as Netscape; you'll find it much easier than as Mozilla.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Erm ... hacking IE isn't possible unless you're Microsoft, cos you don't have the source. You can possibly embed the rendering engine in your own app but no more than that. And in future, if MS wish to remove certain functionality from IE for their own reasons (e.g. breaking HTML 4 compliance some more to make it harder for other browsers to compete), then IE users get left high and dry.
Instead, for the last two years people have been hacking Netscape into something more useable. You will have a good web solid web browser and nobody can stop anybody from adding building on it. Sounds like a much safer future IMO.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Seems ok to me ... if you ignore the MS nagger screen saying "get IE" that is. But if there are any problems, then remember that hotmail is MS and that writing a browser which can parse shit in the same way as IE, yet is also standards compliant, is a very difficult and moving target. BTW, at least in Linux, it is *never* necessary for something to have X amount of RAM, though it will run bloody slowly if you don't have a certain amount.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Are you saying that it's important to have a web browser which can access hotmail, but it's not important to ensure that other people can't then access your hotmail account? Or reformat your hard disk?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Hmmm it just works straight off for me. Maybe it is only partally implemented, so it works on some stuff but not other stuff, or something like that. Where are you having problems?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
but I've been using the Alpha version of Mozilla and I'm impressed. There is a certain elegance and ease of use that is not present in any other browser. It renders pages beautifully and quickly, even in light of the fact that there is still a lot of debugging code. I think we all owe the developers/testers a huge debt. They are giving us a first class browser and almost as important, they are giving us a choice.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Interesting that they're now allowing ISPs and others to make customized versions, with their own title bars, throbber icons, and the like... this is one thing that Microsoft did that really got them in good with ISPs, and probably has a lot to do with why that piece of crap browser is gaining so much ground in the Windows arena.
List of why I think IE is a piece of my shit is available upon request.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I was thinking that too. When I hear "Netscape" or "Communicator" I just shudder now. Such bad bad bad experiences.
So naming the browser Netscape Communicator 6.0 is very bad IMHO.
ROFLMAO What total FUD. Care to bet with me that Netscape on Linux is more stable than IE on NT?
LOL IE take out a machine? What a ridiculous thing to say. As if. I wasn't talking about it taking down the OS anyway (wtf kind of OS is that?). I'm talking about the browser CRASHING.
Actually, I think I know why... try going into your IE settings, and turn off "use smooth scrolling". You need a fast processor and fast video card for that not to be obnoxious.
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...for them to make their sites workable for the lowest common denominator, they would. It is not, so they do not. Don't get righteous, this is just greed as usual. I'm not saying it's a good thing--I certainly wish they were more adaptive--but keep in mind that it takes a lot of extra effort to make sure that a site works for the blind, with Lynx, with Netscape, with IE, with Opera... not to mention all the different versions of those browsers that all do things differently.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
My version is higher than your version! (my dad can beat your dad, etc...)
I have the highest version number, so I win, right?
Ignore Alien Orders
I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...
I put all my menus on one row, so there isn't enough space for the entire menu bar to appear. So IE displays a >> which pops up the hidden menu options when clicked upon. When the file menu gets stuck, click on >> and everything will be ok.
IE has its problems, but it's still way better than Netscape.
I've tried mozilla (m13), and it is slow. It'll probably get better, but it's not really suitable for use now
Do a build with ./configure --enable-x11-shm --disable-test --enable-optimize --disable-debug to get a realease build.
When I did this for the PowerPC M13 build I got a binary that only took 300 megs to build (not 900) and ran *significantly* faster than any other browser I've ever used (except lynx, but...), espescially on table-heavy pages like slashdot. Overall, IE 4.5 (macos) has a UI that feels a little snappier, but the total rendering speed on mozilla blows it away. My only remaining performance complaint is that reflows are not done in a threaded manner, so the reflow of a huge page (say, slashdot with 500+ comments, or the 2.5 megs of raw text in the build logs from mozilla's tinderbox) can freeze the UI for too long. I suspect that this, on a smaller scale, is also the source of my feeling that IE was snappier (since everything is done through the layout engine).
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
In all my experience with IE, especially with 4 & 5, it has been solid.
It's quick, hardly *ever* goes down, and if it does, just kill the process.
Netscape, in my book, took a crap with their first release of Communicator 4.0. They tried to add too much functionality in a catch up game with MS.
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This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
First, a note on Solaris.
Rumour has it that Sun changed Solaris 2.7 to 7 because they wanted to beat out the upcoming NT5.
It was less than a week later that MS announced NT5 would be renamed to Windows2000.
*sigh*
Also, there's lots of precedent in the free (and relatively noncommercial) world. Consider BIND that went from 4.9 to 8.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Hey, go wild with the style sheets. As long as you adhere to the HTML standards, it's up to the browsers to interpret them correctly. In fact, it's worth putting a disclaimer on your page to that effect: "This page rigidly adheres to all official HTML standards. If you are not seeing it properly, please complain to your browser vendor, and demand that they fix their software."
Come to think of it, everyone writing web pages could start doing that. I'm sick of web browsers that support their own silly extensions but don't adhere to the standards.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Well, they're playing the version numbers game, which will look good for everyone who doesn't know any better. (insert same reasons given by Slackware here...)
:) Since AOL controls ICQ as well, it would be interesting to see one of the "universal IM" clients integrated instead. Also, why not integrate WinAmp?
As for AIM being integrated, that is not at all surprising; it was already pretty much forcibly bundled with the previous version of Netscape (under Windows, anyway; even if you told it "No, I don't want anything to do with AIM, go away", it would prompt you AGAIN every so often, and the option would always be there in the menu system. Now that I'm not using Windows, I don't have to think about that
To now contradict myself, anothing thing I'd really like to see is some modularity. I will NEVER user the mail client (mutt), news reader (don't), or HTML editor (vim), and I'd like Netscape to give me the option, as w3m does, of launching mutt for mailto: tags.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
It says so on their page. There's a good reason, of course, and that's the RSA patent...right now SSL technology is proprietary in the US, and so can't really be included with something like Mozilla.
:)
I'm sure, however, that Netscape 5 or 6 or 2001 or whatever it is will still have SSL in it, but don't expect SSL in Mozilla until after September.
As for me, I've been using Mozilla for everything under Linux except SSL stuff, and I'm much happier with it than Netscape. I only want 3 things:
1. Let me use button 2 as "open in new window"...that's what makes Netscape better under Linux than under Windows, 3 buttons.
2. Let me do UNIX pasting! I can paste something _to_ mozilla with "highlight, button 2", but not _from_ mozilla. I REFUSE to submit to the Windows retardation of "copy and paste". Don't be StarOffice!
3. Let me define my own text shortcuts (the first thing I would do is to set hjkl to be motion keys
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.