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Netscape Communicator 4.72 Released
Quite a number of people have ants in their pants over the latest release of Netscape Communicator. This latest release, 4.72 to be exact, can also be grabbed through their Web site. Here's to hoping it's more stable than my current release. 'Course, Mozilla's getting really really close now...
I was going to post a more insiteful comment, but then Netscape crashed.
What I want to know is, when will the netscape-common & netscape-communicator RPMs for Red Hat be out? Why do they always lag behind the "official" releases, anyway?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Mozilla might be getting close for some people, not for me.
It still has a long way to go. Netscape will crash about once an hour for me when I am doing heavy web browsing.
My longest Mozilla uptime is 5 minutes. No joke. Slashdot is the only site I can use with it. www.deja.com main page crashes it right away.
I'm sorry, but Mozilla isn't useable for me. I remember the early Netscape betas years ago and they wer not this unstable.
And yes I submit bug reports.
I wish all the mozilla developers good luck, but its a long road ahead to the point where Netscape is replaced.
I really hope that this works as well as other releases. I have seen less and less of Netscape lately but this could be something of a turning point.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
preliminary testing on linux 2.3.45 seems pretty stable (standalone version). so far i can't really see any differences, other than the fact that it isn't crashing and freezing my X server.
darren
(darren)
Yes - I've already downloaded and installed 4.72. Why? Because I'm fed up with having the 4.71 browser flake out every day or so with another error. So far, so good - nothing has died yet :-)
I've been tracking the Mozilla Seamonkey Milestones since M11, and it seems to be stabilizing up nicely but I'm stuck with using it for browsing behind the firewall at work because we use a SOCKS proxy to the outside world. Alas, as far as I can see this is not supported in Mozilla yet. Anyone have any clues on this one - what is needed to persuade Seamonkey to use the SOCKS proxy? Or does some SOCKS expert wish to sign up for this post on the Mozilla team? It was empty last time I looked.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. If I see any posts with the title 'Shoes?' following this one ... :-)
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
... at least for me. I'm running Netscape 4.7 (browser only, Communicator is huge and pointless, other tools do a better job) and its not crashed on me in months. I have had to disable Java though. Not that thats particulalry upsetting for me...
Bottom line: Browser only without Java is pretty stable.
Quick summary:
Keep Netscape/Unix From Crashing Like the Overextended Hack Job Piece Of Crap Code It Is - HOWTO
1) Your distro manufacturer may have packaged netscape incorrectly. See their site for details or upgrades.
2) Turn off Cascading Style Sheets (Style Sheets) support in your preferences. It generally doesn't work well at all and really isn't all that necessary. And IME it makes NS crash. A lot.
3) Turn off Java. Turn off Java. Turn off Java.
4) Turn off Javascript if you don't use somewhat sophisticated sites.
5) Don't invoke mystery components like Messenger and Composer and all that crap unless you actually need to use them. They tend to suck a bit.
6) Feed it lots and lots and lots of disk/memory cache, or none at all.
7) Upgrade. 4.7x is much nicer than previous 4.x releases on all platforms, IME.
-------------------------
This is just my experience. With these changes, NS tends to stay up for a few days for me, as opposed to an hour or less previously.
Take this at well less than face value.
-troll taker
I agree whole-heartedly that IE5 is in every aspect superior to Netscape Communicator. I just don't like IE5 putting its fingers in places it shouldn't be.. like on my server!!! In terms of a latest and greatest web integration tool, IE5 beats Netscape. I use Netscape only for the fact that I install a browser, and I get a browser. Not a "whole new computing experience".
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
user_pref("browser.chrome.disableMyShopping", true);
I've been royally pissed at Netscape ever since they added the stupid "Shop" button in 4.6. "Shop" differs from "Stop" by one letter - and they put it right next to the "Stop" button. At 1600x1200 with text-only toolbars, I can never tell the difference between the two.
Every time I try to kill a loading page, I find myself whisked away to some "Netscape Store". Sheesh.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I just don't use Netscape for downloading files now. What I do is right click the download link, copy link to clipboard, open an xterm, and then use wget to download the file. That way, if netscape crashes (like it always does), the download is unharmed. Plus, wget is smarter than netscape. If the server isn't letting anyone in at the moment, wget keeps trying. If the connection gets dropped, wget keeps trying and will resume where it left off as soon as it can get reconnected.
Looks to me like Navigator (The only useful part of Communicator IMO) is still 4.08... which has been out for months... Unless they actually modified it and didn't change the version number.
Well, besides this:
As of Netscape Communicator 4.72, Enterprise Calendar is no longer included with your download.
I don't see any What's New section. It's amazing how hard it is to find any information about Navigator on Netscape's home page.
The quality of Navigator/Communicator seemed to be going downhill long before AOL took over Netscape; the fact that 95%+ of the original Netscape programming staff left after the takeover isn't going to help any. Given the quality (or lack thereof) of AOL's software, I shudder to think about the future of Navigator. I really don't want to have to switch to M$ Internet Exploiter, nor would I want to see a Navigator dumbed down to the level of the AOL client.
Communicator 4.7 is pretty stable for me under NT, but I have pretty robust hardware (Athalon 550/128MB); it seems much less stable under Red Hat on my K6-II/400. My main gripe is it's speed; it seems to take forever to render a page, even on my Athalon. My other major gripe is that the email and news facilities are annoyingly primitive for such an otherwise mature program. (Plus, PGPFreeware dosn't have a Netscape plugin)
I havn't had a chance to play with Mozilla yet; but I'm looking forward to seeing the final release. Hopefully Mozilla will fix a lot of the annoyances of 4.x
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The Linux NS is much more stable than the FreeBSD NS (scary, eh?). I'm posting this from Linux NS running on FreeBSD 3.4, a common enough option that there's actually a port for linux netscape in the freebsd ports collection.
----------------------------
Slightly offtopic...
:)"
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
On the FIX BBS I recently posted this:
"The problem has oocured in versions 4.6 and 4.7 on Win95, Win98 and NT.
Sometimes, Netscape doesn't allow you to follow links. Like, the pointer will change to the "hand" when you move over the link, but a click doesn't do anything.
The only way to solve the problem is to reboot windows. It's very strange. It's happened to me regularly for about 6 months, I can't be the only one?
I'm considering reporting it to Netscape.
Mo."
I got the following within a few minutes. Come on NS! I'm using IE5 now - it's better, a lot better!
"No, I experience the same thing. Except that sometimes, a click *does* do anything, even when the mouse pointer isn't in hand shape."
"I've experienced this with Netscape for Linux. It only happens when I have two or more windows open at the same time, and another one (than the one I'm clicking in) is trying to load something. If I cancel that load by hitting ESC,things usually "pop" back into working order. Usually, I say, but it's only happened to me two or three times."
"Have the same problem (Netscape 4.6 on Linux and also on Digital UNIX 4.0D), but: It even happens, when there's only one window. And it doesn't change back, only restarting of Netscape is a cure.
Seems to be a coded feature.
Really NS - Can we have our favourite browser working properly in it's next release? You know? Links, that can be followed?
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
I headed over to Google and searched for "Netscape Navigator 4.72"... Check out who comes up 1st (and 2nd, and 3rd, and 6th) with Netscape.com nowhere to be seen.
Have they finally fixed the bug where turning off JS disabled CSS even if you have CSS enabled?
As if that weren't sufficiently annoying, there's not been a Linux/SPARC version since 4.51, but there are five Solaris versions. Of course, none of those are for current versions of Solaris either. All this, of course, would be excusable if they didn't have any systems to build on or they weren't going to support oddball platforms (I will admit that Linux/SPARC is marginal, though it has multiple supported distributions and a growing user base), but then why oh why are there two SINIX builds??? Most people don't even know WTF SINIX _is_, much less have it.
The point? It doesn't seem like Netscape understands what people are actually using today. If the objective is to be compatible with as much as possible, then not having up-to-date Linux builds for at least Intel, SPARC, and Alpha makes no sense. For that matter, they don't even claim to support Solaris 7 or 8. 2.5.1 is itself archaic. If the objective is instead to support only the most popular platforms, then I certainly don't see the need for five Solaris builds, two AIX builds, anything related to SINIX, or a Linux 2.0/libc5 build. The obvious platforms to support would be Solaris 7, Linux 2.2-intel/glibc, the latest AIX, the latest Digital Unix, and IRIX 6.5.
So what can we do to increase their awareness of this problem? Numerous polite letters have garnered either no response or a polite "get lost" form letter. Ideas?
Alternate paranoid theory: AOL wants all the Unix builds to be against old systems so that people will switch to windoze and buy more aol service. Pretty paranoid, but aol is pure evil after all.
PS: Kudos to the mozilla team for recognizing the value of compatibility and multi-platform support. The Linux/SPARC build works as well as any other.
--TM, still using 4.51 on Ultralinux, the preferred platform of all major deities
Well I think Netscape's great- twice the performance and a lot more stable than anything else made by other people who haven't paid me as much cash to say that.
Barry Fishcake
Senior VP, Mindcraft
I've been using M13 as my ONLY browser (at work) for two weeks. I use it pretty heavily, and I go to Deja approx once per day.
I have not had one single crash of the browser. (I have had mail crash on me).
I was anxiously waiting for M14 to clean up some interface/formatting/speed problems, but apparently they aren't going to do one(?)
--
Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
if you have no other reason to use IE other than Microsoft hatred that's fine. But if you want to see what Mozilla will hopefully eventually being like, just download IE and see for yourself.
After installing it I launched it... comes up much faster than 4.7 (on NT). Certainly faster than Mozilla or IE. Also, for those that haven't tried... copy your Netscape plugins directory contents into the Mozilla plugins directory. Quicktime works pretty well (it skips a little but wasn't that noticable on the X-Men preview). Flash is... "not entirely stable" (to steal from C3PO). Works on some sites and doesn't work on others (shockwave.com of all things)
For example, in Composer 4.71 (glibc 2.1.2, Linux 2.2.12), I highlight text and click on the link button to change text to a URL link . I insert the URL into the link dialog and hit either 'Apply' or 'Finished' and the entire application crashes.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Yes, many of the above points are true. If I even attempt to start JAVA, communicator crashes. JS is okay, and the Style Sheets suck. I have this problem with netscape sucking up between 64-96 MB of physcial memory after extended surfing and making my PII run like a 486 with a hardware conflict. Does anyone have any experience making netscape behave like this? I have Communicator 4.71 on RH6.1 kernel 2.2.13 (patched for JFS).
Also, I found the best way not mentioned to fix the button toolbar. Go to View, and Deselect Navigation toolbar. You can use alt-arrow to go forward and backwards, ESCAPE stops loading and alt-r reloads. Gives me more desktop and less suck from Net$crape.
If you want to see what's changed, check out the Release Notes! Looks like a lot of changes, few fixes.
æeee!
If each of us had paid $25 for it, I think there would be a better product.
Alternatively, what can one expect for free?
Find a browser and BUY it, or contribute code if you are able. Anything else is pathetic.
Most people don't even know WTF SINIX _is_, much less have it.
Ok, I admit I have never heard of SINIX..
cpeterso
You can download Navigator standalone 4.72 for *nix here. I don't think there's a Windows Navigator 4.72 though, that's probably still at 4.08. Oh well.
I'm certain that there are valid uses for javascript out there. So far, though, the only uses I have seen are
a) popu-up advertising
b) taking control of the display away from the user in general
c) creating links where a real link would have done at least as well
d) forcing of automatic forwarding to an advertising site
e) a single case where it was used to enable nested choices--choose the textbook then the chapter.
Only e) even vaguely benefits the user, and this is arguable. a-d all either affirmatively harm the user, or are crummy programming.
If your page requires javascript to function, unless you're doing something rather exotic with user data, it's almost certainly wrong. More than that, I'll go to one of your competitors--I used to use foxnews, but they're not enough better than CNN to put up with this.
hawk
At least this is how I got mine for my SuSE 6.2 system.. Get a hold of a RH GPL CD. The Navigator and netscape-common files are there along with the communicator files. I am running Nav 4.61 NO COMMUNICATOR this way. Anybody want to moderate this up as "usefull"? Greg
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
You're probably visiting the 'wrong' sites. Mozilla doesn't crash if you stick to nice sites like www.mozilla.org, but if you try visiting fancier sites, it does crash,usually quite predictably.
Check out this link. Lots of interesting tidbits & tips. It doesn't cover some of the newer options (like disabling the shopping button), but covers a few other interesting things.
http://www.inmind.com/p eople/phrank/commonly/userprefs.html
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Watch out for BeOS! It's a user's worst nightmare! They even expect you to unzip your own packages when you install them!
--
Actually, in Internet 101 they taught me to try something out myself before I suggest it to someone else.
Like this.
For all those who criticized 4.71. That the is broken. Seriously broken. It was on their sites for a few days and a lot of people fell in this trap (me one). Unfortunately information didn't reach many. I managed to hold it for a week and have a few hundred students to fell the "beauty and the beast". The result was linux boxes crashing every hour, mail broken, news in Hell.
:( ). 4.7 glibc2 didn't go. It wrongly called NIS+ data. We turned to libc5 one and almost everything worked. Except Java. Due to the huge delays in the upgrade we sticked to it.
We had to turn back fast. But at the same time we managed to seriously upgrade the system. 4.61 worked no more (and we were holding the upgrade due to this...
Sincerly, my experience with Netscape has been, for the last year, desilusion after desilusion. Their closed source, their huge delays, their lack of intermediate patches, their lack of support for most of the new standards, has turned its use into a growing Hell. What mostly admires me is that, among all this, they started to add more and more "features", scrapping stable old code and creating more problems. If anyone has traced it on Linux he can understand what I mean. I have been doing this and I'm admired that calls, that worked well in RedHat, Slackware and Mandrake, now are changed and Netscape horribly crashes in these places. They don't follow the libraries and sometimes mix them with beta and alpha versions from rawhide libs (some of which don't manage ever to reach RedHat dists). Use code that everyone has dropped long ago. And the most worrysome is that their support and documentation from miserable has been turning to none.
Hope that Mozilla comes soon. I have tested it and liked a lot. Really I don't want to go back to MazDie only because I want to roam the net...
Actually NS5 will never see the light of day.
So there will be no actual NS5 release? Do you have any links to more information?
thanks!
cpeterso
It reminds me of the 4.0 browser wars ... and the old java support wars, and then the push technology wars (which are now removed from browsers).
One of the above (ahem, Mozilla?) should remove support for extraneous garbage and make a browser, not an operating system.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I second that, god, i would pay good cash for a stand alone browser, that looks good (not you opera), and is faster than greased lightening, or some similar fast thingee and is cross platform, and did i mention that it is JUST a web browser?
ALSO, it has to have a REAL preferences menu, where you can disable ANY HTML type, (blink comes to mind), and ANY feature in the browser, and can be completly controled from the keyboard if need be.
Is that too much to ask for?
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
"Using the Insert Link command (or the Link button) in Composer or when composing HTML messages may cause Communicator to crash." This is a brand-spanking new bug in Netscape 4.72 Why don't they fix this stuff before they release it? Or, barring that, at least take out the feature so people don't crash Netscape by using it.
"If you attempt to use Messenger the very first time you run Communicator, it may quit with an "Illegal instruction" message."
"If you delete your only IMAP server and then add a POP server, Communicator may quit."
"A previous workaround for Unix systems, to avoid the freezing on startup of the edit or compose window, has been changed." Is it just me, or does this just sound silly? Changing workarounds, why don't they just fix it!?
I wouldn't mind this so much, except they're introducing new features, mostly useless features, before they even bother to fix these bugs.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Anyone else having problems downloading the strong encryption version?
Go to http://www.netscape.com/download/ unsupported.html, and pick the Linux 2.2 / 128-bit Communicator 4.72 link. It works.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
You can get it her e
:). All new games support Windows 2000 properly (at least all the ones I've tried. Most old games don't work cause they try to detect the OS and say NONONO if you are running NT. You can use appcompat.exe on the windows 2000 support CD to trick the apps tho :).
Ofcourse most of the games on that list are quite old
Microsoft use one of those windows->unix porting tools to get IE working on Solaris.
I'm 50% sure that once the kit is ported to support Linux Microsoft will release IE for linux.
Ofcourse everyone here would take the oppotunity to run around saying NT sucks, not even microsoft is sure of NT. Microsoft will release MS Linux!!! and other crap.
Javascript is useful for lots of stuff. Like check out the link in the middle of this page. You don't even have to click through, yet it will take you to the next page. Think of the ramifications for ad forwarding. Oh wait, that was (d). You're right; javascript is useless.
If you're running Windows (which I wouldn't recommend), then you can run Proxomitron which is a stupidly named yet sublimely wonderful non-caching proxy server (like the Junkbusters one) that you can run on your own client side which will let you strip out all the annoying javascript crap you hate (in addition to filtering out ad banners). You'd actually be able to go to Geocities websites without that stupid branded logo in the corner, that is, if there is anything at Geocities worth seeing. The friend whose computer I set it up on has had only good things to say about it.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
You didn't actually forget to say "filters", but you forgot to say it in bold and say it repeatedly: Filters Filters Filters. Filters are the single biggest reason to use iCab over Netscape.
For those of you who don't already know, iCab has (built in) many of the features that normally require a non-caching local proxy like Junkbusters to achieve, and even then iCab usually does better. Image filtering by host (up yours, doubleclick.net), path name, file name, dimensions (ever notice how most ads are 468x59 or 468x60?), etc. Control over which cookies to accept and keep, which to discard, all done without the annoyance of "Don't you want to accept this cookie? If you want me to stop asking, you'll have to turn all cookies off or accept them all regardless."
Technically iCab isn't even a standalone, since it will let you send email. It sure is lightweight, though.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The problem is not in "some other area", the problem is in how Mozilla deals with "some other area". My system is almost a stock RH6.1 full install; there's no reason it shouldn't work. And rather than work my tail off trying to *make* it work on my system (which has nothing wrong with it otherwise), I will simply continue to use Netscape, in the knowlege that Mozilla is Alpha-software.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't use M13 unless you're happy with what works and what doesn't. If you really want to use Mozilla, get daily builds. On my Linux box I have cronned a small script that cd's to my cvs/mozilla directory and runs gmake. I may have 56k, but that's what's so cool about cron... builds automated to occur at 4AM - sweet.
:). The promising bit is Mozilla uses *Linux* as the reference platform so we can be sure the bugs will be fixed. I hope the Win version is stable enough that it's widely adopted there.
I can't get Mozilla to build on Win32 using just Cygnus as an environment. The Mozilla pages assume you know a lot more about build debugging than I do, or maybe it really does require MC VC++? Oh well.
It's real nice to try Mozilla every day and see what's new, like the new "Sherlock-like" Search bar -- WAY COOL.
I can get about 20 minutes uptime in Mozilla vs. 30 mins in Netscape on Linux and Netscape/W32 an hour. I can extend my Linux uptime of Netscape by typing by Slashdot replies in Gnotepad and using cut and paste
The road is not that long though. We'll have a good Mozilla before the summer. Too bad no PC vendors will bundle it, and Apple probably won't either because of the UI design "violations" (I'll bet MS has Apple under contract to not 'support' Mozilla with code contributions, like they have supported Apache. This is pure speculation however).