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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.
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.
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
user_pref("browser.chrome.disableMyShopping", true);
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.
Is this what you want?
Some Reasons To Try Out A Nightly Build
Gerv
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.
There are plenty of criticisms that are valid against netscape, and the shop button seems silly to me too, but your criticisms are a bit unjust. If your resolution makes things unreadable, why use it? it seems counterproductive.
.Xdefaults:
Be gald that the buttons can be disbaled. Since no one has posted how in this thread, here it is, straight from my
Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false
That's it.
To disable the search/my netscape, and add a Find button:
Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.numUserCommands: 1
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandName: findInObject
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.labelString: Find
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandIcon: Find
Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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"?
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.
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
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.