Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the good-luck-actually-downloading-it dept.
kvandivo writes: "It's now official. Netscape
is now shipping 6 (at least for windows, linux, and mac..)"
It'll probably be just a bit before anyone will actually be able
to download it from any of the official servers.
The nightly builds from mozilla.org are already leaps and bounds ahead of the buggy product that Netscape is pushing onto the world. (2 frozen screens and reboots in the first 10 minutes of using 6.0, everything fine on the Nov 12th Nightly.)
Oh yeah, and a free clue to the Netscape rebadgers: I'm already online, so WHY THE F**K WOULD I WANT AN AOL ICON ON MY DESKTOP?
Win32 is speedy, but..
by
PacketMaster
·
· Score: 5
I got the full version early this morning from Netscape w/o any download lag at all. But I'm sure that's different now.
Things Different:
1) Load time is VERY fast.
2) Page rendering is on par with IE5.5
3) Most sites display correctly
Things the Same:
1) BIG FREAKING MEMORY LEAK!!I'm running Net6 on Windows 2000. Ever page I load increases Netscape's memory footprint by approximately 1.5 Mb. I let Yahoo's random page URL keep loading files and I ramped the memory usage up to about 85 Mb before I quit. Closing Netscape and reloading drop the footprint back to 4 Mb, which on first inspection is nice. However it quickly ramps up fast. Even entering data in this form box is increasing the ram count about 4K every 20 characters or so. Netscape 6 definitely should not have been released yet. This is sad and pathetic for the once innovative and powerful Netscape.
I've been an IE user for a while now mainly because Netscape has been losing the feature war. While I'm certainly not a Microsoft fan, I like Netscape and I like standards conformance (which Netscape has typically been better at), I use a browser a lot and I want to use what makes me feel most comfortable and lets me work the best.
With all that in mind, I was excited to see that N6 was out because I've liked the Mozilla and preview release builds, except that they were buggy and seemingly incomplete.
I like a lot of things in Netscape 6. The Gecko engine is great. It renders pages pretty fast, which is good. The "Modern" skin is pretty cool. Is it a good idea... well, that's another issue, but it's cool. There are a lot of features that I like in IE that weren't in Netscape 4.6.whenever-I-stopped-really-using-it like some of the sidebar stuff and the toolbar. (Yes, I know the toolbar has been in 4.7 or so for a long time, but it took them a long time to get it there!)
Here's the bottom line of my impressions with N6: it's all in the little things!!!
There are two things that are ticking me off enough to possibly send me back to IE. First, arranging the bookmarks. This should be easy: I have imported "toolbar favorites" from IE, I want them to be in my N6 toolbar. I'm a pretty smart guy and I have no idea how to do this. Drag-an-drop isn't supported, so I can't move them. Cut and paste are supported (even though "cut" is enabled in the edit menu. There's a menu command "Set as Personal Toolbar Menu"... which apparently does nothing! I know it's stupid, but these are the things that make me choose IE, not the engine. (Well, I shouldn't say that. If the engine was unacceptable it would influence me. But, being a typical web user, most engines I find are "acceptable", so it's not typically a factor.)
Second big annoyance, I now have five icons on my desktop (I'm using Win2000): Netscape (I wanted this one), "Free AOL Unlimited INternet" (fine, AOL owns Netscape... I'll bear it), "Net2Phone" (quit installing this!), "RealPlayer Basic" (I already had it), "Take5" (See previous, I hate this thing).
Goal for Netscape: Don't tick off you customers by installing worthless things. It may convince some people, but I think it angers more.
Another goal: Do less, do it well. I frankly, don't care about skins. If I did, I would use WindowBlinds. But I do care about being able to set up my "toolbar favorites".
I'm going to continue trying N6, because I like Mozilla and believe it can turn out good products, but I really hope the quality improves.
--
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
Actually, needing "another month" to fix the most glaring bugs is not "true for every project". What is true for every project is the appearance that another month would be enough to fix all the bugs. Brooks (of the Mythical Man Month) called this the 90% problem. In reality, it takes approximately as long in calendar months (not programmer months) to do the last 10% of a project as it does to do the first 90%. When you take into account that the "fantasy factor" (the multiple of the actual versus predicted time to finish a project) is probably 2x or 3x, it can take a really long time to do the last 10%. I'm willing to bet it will take six months or more to get a dot release of Netscape 6 out the door with most of the outstanding defects fixed.
Get it from ZDNet's download center, and since it's just the basic install file, use the UK's servers for your download. It went pretty fast for me.
First impressions: Yeah, all the bugs aren't fixed, which kind of sucks, cause there's a pretty nasty JS one that I posted about two weeks ago that hasn't been fixed in the nightlies and severely hampers some Intranet work I do. It also still renders Slashdot's spacer images in the titles of articles with a greenish line around them, so they look like little green squares.
If you've been using Mozilla for the past six months, you won't notice anything new, other than the fact that it takes up twice as much memory, loads a bunch of AOL shortcuts (I'm using the Win32 version) on your desktop and will allow you to integrate RealPlayer 8, Flash, etc. with your download.
Second Impressions: Why oh why do they need to do these damn small install files that go out on the 'Net and get everything? What I really want is a web interface that will let me pick my components and then send me an installer package custom made for my selections. It can't be that hard.
Slashdot Mirror
The nightly builds from mozilla.org are already leaps and bounds ahead of the buggy product that Netscape is pushing onto the world. (2 frozen screens and reboots in the first 10 minutes of using 6.0, everything fine on the Nov 12th Nightly.)
Oh yeah, and a free clue to the Netscape rebadgers: I'm already online, so WHY THE F**K WOULD I WANT AN AOL ICON ON MY DESKTOP?
I got the full version early this morning from Netscape w/o any download lag at all. But I'm sure that's different now.
Things Different:
1) Load time is VERY fast.
2) Page rendering is on par with IE5.5
3) Most sites display correctly
Things the Same:
1) BIG FREAKING MEMORY LEAK!!I'm running Net6 on Windows 2000. Ever page I load increases Netscape's memory footprint by approximately 1.5 Mb. I let Yahoo's random page URL keep loading files and I ramped the memory usage up to about 85 Mb before I quit. Closing Netscape and reloading drop the footprint back to 4 Mb, which on first inspection is nice. However it quickly ramps up fast. Even entering data in this form box is increasing the ram count about 4K every 20 characters or so. Netscape 6 definitely should not have been released yet. This is sad and pathetic for the once innovative and powerful Netscape.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
With all that in mind, I was excited to see that N6 was out because I've liked the Mozilla and preview release builds, except that they were buggy and seemingly incomplete.
I like a lot of things in Netscape 6. The Gecko engine is great. It renders pages pretty fast, which is good. The "Modern" skin is pretty cool. Is it a good idea... well, that's another issue, but it's cool. There are a lot of features that I like in IE that weren't in Netscape 4.6.whenever-I-stopped-really-using-it like some of the sidebar stuff and the toolbar. (Yes, I know the toolbar has been in 4.7 or so for a long time, but it took them a long time to get it there!)
Here's the bottom line of my impressions with N6: it's all in the little things!!!
There are two things that are ticking me off enough to possibly send me back to IE. First, arranging the bookmarks. This should be easy: I have imported "toolbar favorites" from IE, I want them to be in my N6 toolbar. I'm a pretty smart guy and I have no idea how to do this. Drag-an-drop isn't supported, so I can't move them. Cut and paste are supported (even though "cut" is enabled in the edit menu. There's a menu command "Set as Personal Toolbar Menu"... which apparently does nothing! I know it's stupid, but these are the things that make me choose IE, not the engine. (Well, I shouldn't say that. If the engine was unacceptable it would influence me. But, being a typical web user, most engines I find are "acceptable", so it's not typically a factor.)
Second big annoyance, I now have five icons on my desktop (I'm using Win2000): Netscape (I wanted this one), "Free AOL Unlimited INternet" (fine, AOL owns Netscape... I'll bear it), "Net2Phone" (quit installing this!), "RealPlayer Basic" (I already had it), "Take5" (See previous, I hate this thing).
Goal for Netscape: Don't tick off you customers by installing worthless things. It may convince some people, but I think it angers more.
Another goal: Do less, do it well. I frankly, don't care about skins. If I did, I would use WindowBlinds. But I do care about being able to set up my "toolbar favorites".
I'm going to continue trying N6, because I like Mozilla and believe it can turn out good products, but I really hope the quality improves.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
Actually, needing "another month" to fix the most glaring bugs is not "true for every project". What is true for every project is the appearance that another month would be enough to fix all the bugs. Brooks (of the Mythical Man Month) called this the 90% problem. In reality, it takes approximately as long in calendar months (not programmer months) to do the last 10% of a project as it does to do the first 90%. When you take into account that the "fantasy factor" (the multiple of the actual versus predicted time to finish a project) is probably 2x or 3x, it can take a really long time to do the last 10%. I'm willing to bet it will take six months or more to get a dot release of Netscape 6 out the door with most of the outstanding defects fixed.
Walt
Get it from ZDNet's download center, and since it's just the basic install file, use the UK's servers for your download. It went pretty fast for me.
First impressions:
Yeah, all the bugs aren't fixed, which kind of sucks, cause there's a pretty nasty JS one that I posted about two weeks ago that hasn't been fixed in the nightlies and severely hampers some Intranet work I do. It also still renders Slashdot's spacer images in the titles of articles with a greenish line around them, so they look like little green squares.
If you've been using Mozilla for the past six months, you won't notice anything new, other than the fact that it takes up twice as much memory, loads a bunch of AOL shortcuts (I'm using the Win32 version) on your desktop and will allow you to integrate RealPlayer 8, Flash, etc. with your download.
Second Impressions:
Why oh why do they need to do these damn small install files that go out on the 'Net and get everything? What I really want is a web interface that will let me pick my components and then send me an installer package custom made for my selections. It can't be that hard.
the uninstaller is one of the quickest and cleanest I've seen. el_doop