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Netscape 6, PR 3 Released
A slew of people wrote in about the release of Netscape 6, PR 3
this morning -- Windows version, Linux 2.2, and Mac, assuming you speak English or Japanese. The word from Netscape is that French and German will be "soon." 'Course, I still think that apt-getting a certain Mozilla is all ya need, but hey.
This is yet another Netscape branded catastrophy. Remember Netscape 6 != Mozilla!!!
However, Mozilla has gotten better and better, I have been using it as my primary browser for nearly 4 months now, and Linux, Mac, Windows, and on OpenBSD.
IMHO, Konqueror has nothing on Mozilla (I was never fond of the particular style of most KDE applications anyway, so I may be biased). If you want to compare something to something, compare the latest nightly to it.
The most recent nightlys have been rock stable, they render fast, the UI problems have been cleaned up (Classic being the default theme, with Modern/2 availible and a lot better than Modern.)
Mozilla has infinite potential, and has been slowly realizing it.
I am forced to use IE at work but I use Netscape at home. Yes, Netscape has the slower load time but that's unfair to judge since MS makes IE load at startup.
I like features of Netscape over IE:
1) bookmarks are stored in one file instead of shortcuts so I only have 1 file to transfer back and from work to access all my bookmarks.
2) for web design I like Netscape because of you can right click and view images easier. You can only save the image in IE.
The only thing I like in IE over NS is the easier method to manage bookmarks. You can right clock on the bookmark menu at delete one or move it around. In NS you have to "edit bookmarks".
I have about 400 bookmarks saved in Netscape 4.75. This file takes up 167k of diskspace. On IE, the same bookmarks, as Internet Shortcuts consumes anywhere between 4k and 32k per shortcut depending on partition sizes. That means the same links eat up anywhere between 1.6 and 12.5 megabytes of disk space!
Not only that, IE has a severely retarded shortcut ordering scheme that frequently goes wrong after renaming or deleting an item, shortcut names can't contain certain characters such as ampersands & slashes, and IE has no equivalent of aliases or separators.
All in all, IE shortcuts are piss-poor substitute for a single bookmarks.html.
I remember when new versions of Netscape brought new features and made the WWW more interactive. Now we've got a better IM client, and a bunch of broken features.
AOL buying Netscape was the beginning of the end of Netscape. Now, it seems that AOL is trying to slowly creep into our PC's, and personally I don't want anything to do with it. The tech-world is caught up in other things right now, but all these things are layered on top of the WWW. After the general novelty wears off (3-4 more years?) I think we'll have a dozen or more good browsers to choose from. If we all _need_ to access the WWW, then eventually we'll see more programmers dedicate time to writing a stable, efficient browser.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Actually, it's completely logical, considering that English, Japanese, and German are, in that order, the three most common languages found on Web pages and among Net users. French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Spanish are in positions four through six, though their specific order depends on which of these numbers you use.
I don't particularly want to cast myself in the role of a Netscape defender, but it's rather knee-jerk conspiracy-theorist to imply this is evil money-grubbing corporate pandering when there is a simple, logical explanation that fits the facts equally well. Namely, that Netscape is devoting its resources to serving the largest markets (as defined by user base) first. Let's save the gratuitous Netscape-bashing for their truly dumb and craven decisions.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Much as I hate to say this in a story all about NS6 and Mozilla... but this tallies very well indeed with my experience.
/. where the rounded left edge of the green story headings is not placed correctly. Mysteriously, this bug seems to disappear after about an hour's use of mozilla. What's going on there then?
:( these are huge improvements over the moz we knew and loved of just a month or two ago, and the stated aim from now until M20 is to improve all these things, and these have started to bear fruit already.
The most recent nightly of moz I have (29/9/2000)is still slow, not anywhere near as slow as it once was - it is actually very usable, but it is still noticably slower than other browsers, especially in the UI. Click on a menu or any other XPCOM widget and you can feel the thing thinking about it before something happens. Those of you with fast machines may not notice this, but it's very noticable on my old PII. Page rendering is decently fast, but not anywhere near best-of-the-best.
There are still rendering bugs - there's a small but annoying one here on
Perhaps most worrying is the bloat. On launch, mozilla is already quite greedy, taking up around 18MB on my machine. However, an hour's solid web-surfing - in just one browser window - has this up to about 40MB, which is just insane. On my 64MB machine, this causes no end of swapping and thrash. I pity those poor souls trying to get mozilla working on machines with anything less.
Now, before you flame me to death (or, of course, mod me down into oblivion) for attacking mozilla, remember that (with the exception of bloat, which appears to be getting worse
However, there is a new kid on the block if you want a fast, solid, modern, compatible browser for *nix, and that's Konqueror. As it stands now, for pretty much every aspect of web-browsing I can think of, it's significantly better than moz is. It's blazingly fast (neck and neck with Opera IMHO), solidly standards-compliant (it claims HTML4/CSS2 compatibility, and I haven't seen anything which implies otherwise yet), has a small memory footprint, does Java, Javascript and SSL well... what more could you want?
Finally there is a browser for *nix that I want to use. It feels good.
Don't forget that windows
are quite different beasts, despite doing roughly
the same thing.
Windows dlls are not fully PIC (position
independent code) so they are smaller than an
equavalent unix one. OTOH a unix
be shared between processes, but a windows one
may not be able to unless it can map to the exact
same address in both processes!
Unix is better if you have many processes using
the same lib, and windows wins if there is only
one copy being used.
Stephen.
I was under the assumption ... one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code
Well, they sort of have and sort of haven't. For starters, Netscape 4 is about 12-15MB IIRC, and a Mozilla nightlies are about 8-10MB. The Mozilla tarballs contain at least two entirely seperate skins, and Netscape 4 doesn't even have one (it lets Motif do most of the drawing, while Mozilla Does It All Itself). So that's a chunk of stuff Mozilla includes and Netscape doesn't, so chop that off the Moz filesize.
Next, remember that Netscape 4 on all three platforms is ported from one platform to another - only the very core code stays the same and the rest (GUI, networking, and so forth) is provided by the platform. Mozilla is designed to be as portable as possible, and so abstracts away as much of the underlying OS as possible so almost all of Moz is cross-platform code. This is more functionality that you won't find in Netscape 4, so for comparison, chop another hunk off the Mozilla filesize.
After taking into account the (sizable) extra functionality that Mozilla has over Netscape, Mozilla *is* a lot smaller. But really, it's shifted the bulk of code, rather than removing it, so you can make up your own mind.
Personally, I don't mind - from what I've heard of Netscape's current situation, they've only resources to write their browser once, not three times, so it's a choice between extreme crossplatform-ness or Mozilla being Windows-only... I'm glad I've got Mozilla for Linux at all.
And your point is what? You can't write portable code and neither can NatWest? You need to look a bit deeper and see who is at fault. It might be Netscape: if so log a bug report. On the other hand there are a lot of crappy web sites 'designed for IE'. You need to work out which before you go shooting your mouth off.
Somehow I don't think this is the best thing Netscape should be doing.
Remember that Netscape is AOL and AOL is by nature evil. AOL needs to have a proprietary, closed browser, so they *have* to fork Mozilla. No way around that one. That's the bad news, the good news is that right now we have our own Mozilla, it's a damn good browser, and we can use it to hit AOL over the head with standards compliance. Don't freak out about this too much, because right now AOL's interests are running in parallel with ours, and they will until Microsoft is beaten. It's our job to take Mozilla, now GPL, and make it *better* than AOL's closed version. Damn, all we ever needed out of this deal is a replacement for Netscape that is open source and can handle all the current standards. We're actually getting a good deal more: we've got an 800 pound gorilla for a friend that is intent on busting up Microsoft's attempt to corner the web server market.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Ok ok...I can deal with most things, but when I saw the Mozilla "installer" (i.e., downloader) picking up a package called "AOL On Desktop"--aod.xpi, I promptly became suspicious. I deleted the file before the Netscape Installer could install that .xpi, but then the installer crashed. How beautiful. They give you no choice on whether you want that or not. Looks like Netscape is doing the Real(tm) thing for us.
(Sigh).
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Ok.... I'll admit it. I griped previously about the AOL on desktop thing...but what we really carea bout here is the browser.
Big selling point---the "Modern" skin looks much better. Its very smooth and doesn't clash with every other program I'm running. Many people will like it just because it looks good.
The stability is much improved, and its faster than Internet Explorer 5.5 in loading and in downloading web pages. One thing I noticed....I'm just sitting at Slashdot typing this right now, and Netscape 6 is using 34 MB of memory! That's a bit excessive, 2-3x what IE5 uses.
Overall...I think PR3 is a huge improvement over PR2...and could be the best Netscape release to date. I'm actually looking forward to the final release now...as long as they cut down on the memory usage.
I wonder how Mozilla M18 will compare to this.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
They have already branched. M18 will be released from the trunk (as opposed to the NS 6 branch) sometime later this week.
Gerv
With the creation of the mozilla-gtk widget many new mozilla-likes have sprouted up, but i think Skipstone may be one of the greatest of lightweight browsers. (Of course a full mozilla/netscape session is needed for SSL or other features)
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
If you're smart you'll have been running nightly builds instead of the last milestone, and none of the massive improvements will be a surprise. The 11th hour inclusion of Java on Linux is a pleasant surprise, I've been following bugzilla (53907) and was hoping they could make it. So - I can run a few applets now, but the ones I tried so far (melange chat, local library) either didn't completely work, or didn't work at all. Sigh. Back to 4.75 once again for functionality and pathetic style sheet renditions, or over to the wifes NT box for the IE java experience (the best I've seen). But this thing is on a roll now, and it's getting better and better and better.....
I was under the assumption that apart from making Netscape WORK, one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code base significantly (I heard down to the size of a floppy). Is this no longer the case? Or is there 14 megs of debugging pre-release info (even though I didn't install the quality feedback agent)?
This is not a troll or flame, I'm just wondering what happened to those ideals.
Actually.. the reason why the mozilla nightlies have ballooned in size is because they now include three themes (theme probably isn't the best word for them, because they change how it works too), which take ~2-3M compressed. It has not been a result of feature bloat, just more optional (or not! ;) extras.
XPCOM is completely independant from Windows' COM. the reason for the file size difference is the compilers. Part of this is that Microsoft simply makes a better compiler on Windows than gcc is on Linux. The other part is that gcc and ld do not properly truly unused strip symbols from binaries when a link is done.
.so will be 30-60% larger than the windows .dll.
try it - take a large set of XP code, and build a dll on each platform. the linux
Somehow I don't think this is the best thing Netscape should be doing. I recall a lot of people complaining that NSpr2 was 'too early' -- not ready enough for any kind of release -- even though it was released concurrently with Mozilla M17. Remember, this version is being dropped even though M18 hasn't come out yet.
As a 'business' decision I couldn't really care less about Netscape as a company. Politically though, NS6 is the browser to watch for for a lot of people, not Mozilla, and a lot of people are mistaking NS6prx with 'the new Netscape'. And they're getting scared off. As a webdesigner, I do not want to use MSIE but it's slowly getting so I have to use it more and more often - both professionally and personaly.
jedrek
-- polish ccs mirror
Sorry, I'm not on drugs, and definately not lying to anyone here...
As I said - I downloaded it and tested it here - I got at work 2 machines (K7 650 and K7 700 with 128MB RAM on each)
I have tried both browsers. Mozilla is slower on rendering long pages (try slashdot page with 300 comments, or huge tables with 30,000 entries) and see what I mean...
It also doesn't understands well Javascripts on some pages I tried.
I'm not trying to say Fuck Netscape! what I'm trying to say that *this* version of netscape sucks in terms of speed and compatibility. A co-worker here tried the latest night built mozilla (from yesterday) and all the bugs and speed issues I mentioned are gone!
Maybe I didn't make myself clear - but I've been tired of trying Netscape PR1, PR2, PR3 and get lousy results! Once I've tried Konqueror, I really liked it (although it got its small number of bugs), and I'm planning to use it as my sole browser.
I'm not trying to start Desktop Enviroment war here - lots of people at my work like Gnome and Window maker - but they also like Konqueror and they run it without any problems on their machines with their favorite window manager!
Hetz (Heunique)
Using PR3 now.
Very pretty.
Quite small to download and install.
Skinnable.
Slightly better DOM and Javascript rendering than 4.72.
All of which is good.
But, most importantly, it's _STILL_ not as quick as IE. Pages seem to take twice as long (not as long as in 4.7 or in any of the Mozilla builds though) to load in PR3 than in IE5.
Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft STILL have the better browser.
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
-- js.
If you want to try Mozilla - go ahead..
Don't try this version of Netscape on Linux. I just tried it few hours ago..
Lots of rendering bugs, slow (very slow!), a very slow java implementation, problems with Javascripts...
I just compared Konqueror from CVS against it - Heck, it seems to me that Konqueror is twice faster, more compatible, IBM's java runs on it perfectly well, rendering is fast and Javascript is almost always working... (2 scripts didn't work from the 30 web sites I checked), and I really like the damn fast resizing rendering which they added yesterday.
Also the SSL works perfectly now - I logged in to sourceforge with SSL, checked other web sites with SSL (Amazon, fat brain)..
Sorry Netscape, it was nice.. but I'm switching to Konqueror...
Hetz (Heunique)
Netscape 6 is a full-featured yet lean browser that bucks the trend in software bloat. Netscape 6 was developed from the ground up to be as small as possible while still providing a rich feature set.
It's always amazing how differently geeks and marketing people see things.
ebw
You are currently using:
Netscape Communicator 5.0
English language, 5.0 (X11; en-US, Weak or Unknown Encryption
-- Oh Well
This is definatly the best version, even better then the nightly Mozilla binaries for Win32. Fast, clean interface and quick install. The Windows Installer was actually nice and didn't require a reboot or anything. It also imported my mozilla cache/cookies and everything just fine. I hope these 2 browsers don't split up very much when they developers break the tree. It works great, using it to post this message. Very nice interface, love the new scrollbars and the integration with the netscape websites and instant messanger is a nice feature. I don't understand how that is going backwards. Anyhow, i recommend it. Works with my oracle system as well, and it appears the security manager works now with all my https sites. congrats netscape, nice looking product! This should have been PR1 :)
Just to a 'chmod -R a+rwx .' in the netscape directory.
This is a problem that nightly Mozilla builds had quite a while.
if you want the complete tarball monster instead of the stupid little 62+k installer...
2 /sea/
ftp://ftp2. net scape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6_PR3/unix/linux2
-'fester
On the Windows platform, Mozilla's still quite small. It's only on Mac and Linux that it gets huge.
I think this has to do with XPCOM. For some reason, when the Mozilla team decided to do a cross-platform component-based architecture, they made it in such a way that it conveniently wraps around Windows' COM stuff. That means they don't have to include it on Windows, which trims out quite a lot of stuff.
Hey, how else could you explain why the Windows Mozilla downloads are a full third smaller than the Mac or Linux ones?
----------
I had to delete my .mozilla directory, otherwise the thing core dumps. Also, the installer does not seem to work through a proxy, but the entire download is available from their ftp site.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.