Slashdot Mirror
Has Netscape's Browser Become Too Self-Serving?
bschoate wrote in with a good question about everyone's favorite browser: "I just installed Netscape 6 and it continues and expands the practice of providing numerous ways to use Netscape.com to promote Netscape, Inc. (or AOL for that matter). I've found at least 42 (hey- there's that magic number again) toolbar or menu options that will take you to netscape.com for everything from buying printer supplies to business Web hosting. That's not even counting any of the side bar stuff like "Find and Book Travel". And, all of those tie-ins are littered with banner ads. So even if you don't buy anything, you're still generating revenue for Netscape on some level. Frankly, I see it as a slap in the face to Mozilla, since all their volunteered hard work has created a product that will line Netscape's pockets. Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it." Harsh words, but the more I think about it, the more I believe he has a point. Do any of you feel the same way, and if so, how do you feel that the problem should be solved?
"Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Internet Explorer's only link back to microsoft.com is through the 'Windows Update' feature where there is nothing to buy. To me, it's quite a double-standard-- Microsoft would be immediately dragged to court if they had one button in IE that led to a service to buy or a banner ad.
What do /.ers think about this practice? Personally, I would cringe every time I used the Netscape browser to even do an in-the-address bar search (using the '? some-text-here' syntax), since the results come with a banner ad served up by 'ads.web.aol.com'.
I find this very troubling and very frustrating."
Yes but it only works as root. I know there is a way to install a wrapper that fixes this, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. The documentation just isn't there - which is fine, it's still a beta product, after all - but nevertheless, it doesn't work (yet).
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
took your advice... downloaded NS6. Walked away while it was downloading/installing. Came back to a netscape6 spash screen... it was frozen. It had downloaded, installed, attempted to launch and froze. Rebooted system, attempted to launch NS6... it crashed, DR. Watson message. Attempted to uninstall NS6 from control panel, got error message "an error occured while attempting to uninstall Netscape"... Went to directory where the downloaded installation files reside, ran uninstall program... no feedback on progress or completion. After a few minutes, rebooted system. Came back up, NS6 was gone, but all the crud that installed along with it remained.
Reinstalled for the purpose of Re-uninstalling... same thing happened...
I do not like NS6...
This guy's GOT to be a Microsoft C0ward.
* didn't log in
* bagging out Open Source (while pretending to be successful)
* spreading FUD
It all adds up...
-Shane
unfortunately, the SSL add-on is not available for mozilla on Macintosh,
at least not yet.
--
keete
Oh No! Netscape is making MONEY off of a product that, regardless of being open source, THEY OWN?
You mean they aren't distributing source and running threads and running servers and paying bills and implementing code for free? HOW DARE THEY!
You little pissy babies need to grow up. And when you do, you are going to realize that advances don't happen for free or just come out of mommy and daddy's pockets. Someone has to pay for this. And like banner ads are going to kill you. No one forces you to click on them. It's called BUISINESS...or for you krad kiddies that are complaining, BIDNESS.
Hey Slashdot! I'm really pissed. I hopped on the site today, saw TONS of submittals by users and then I looked up and saw you were running BANNER ADS on your site. I'm offended. You are making money off of your readers submissions. YOU CORPORATE BASTARDS!!! =)
Peep
A vote for Bush is a vote for Morons everywhere.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
I use ie 5.0 at work all day long and a number of differnet versions of Netscape 6.0, Mozilla M18, Mozilla nightly build (from last week) and Netscape 4.5 at home and I can say without any shadow of doubt in my mind that ie blows the rest away.
It may be true that the IE application is more robust, but the IE rendering engine lacks a lot of the W3C standards support that Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine boasts. Supporting W3C standards means that we won't all be forced to use Windows just to view ESPN.com.
So the solution is for somebody to take Gecko, and build a better application around it.
- Scott.
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Actually, we are already at HTML 4, CSS 2, DOM, XML. HTML was left a long time ago. If all these standards where up and working in every browser. Then web designers would be able to make better GUI interfaces for web-sites.
At the moment, alot of these new standards are just things that web-designers play around with at home in there spare time.
amen.
Wasnt one of Mozilla's main problems that they couldnt attract many "outside" developers...?
It wouldnt surprise me if thats the reason the Netscape engineers still are the majority of the mozilla developers.
No sig for the moment.
Okay, but Explorer is what most of the computer using public use, right? So despite it being 'wrong' it's become a 'standard', it's what people are used to. Unless someone somes up with something that's almost click-for-click compatible with explorer, less people are going to be attracted to using X due to the fact that they have to learn new habits, unfortunately, people are lazy like that (unless they've got no option).
For the record; right now I am using KDE and Mozilla, and most of the machines that I manage run a unix of some sort (most of them being Linux). I do (try to) manage 2 NT servers, but normally farm this off to some other mug, I am certainly NOT an M$ fan. Thank you.
In short: definitely.
It's amusing that there are at least 42 links back to Netscape, because if you own the Mac version of Nutscoop 6, that's 42 different pages that don't display correctly.
The browser does not work *at all*. Did anyone test this before releasing it ?
M.
I would rather use another company's product than MS, but the Netscape broswer is a blatant ad vehicle for Netscape and AOL, there is too much clutter everywhere, and it's slow.
If people say what they think it doesn't constitute "bandwagon-jumping". I'm not asaulting Netscape - the old versions of Communicater etc were good, but this latest release is a joke.
Who's going to go for downloading the "alternative" browser, ie: netscape 6, when most pc users are already running the (i hate to say it) far superior IE5?
For ease of use?
HELLO?!?
--------------- Delete Windows before you mail me
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. We could put little Mozilla all the way through college!
I am not a lawyer.
While, IE also gives you links to Hotmail and all its channels, there is a crucial fact that they are all files ("internet shortcuts") and are VERY EASILY REMOVABLE.
I can't say the same for Netscape. The shop button is built in and you cannot remove it without editing xresources, and there is no "security zones" (site-specific security levels) like IE has.
You can clean IE up with reletively fewer amount of tweaking than Netscape. It is the point.
Labelling useful options "Advanced" or make them nontrivial to change is just another way MS and AOL is controlling the rights of the end users.
In the next release I'll bet anything that Netscape will go the way RealPlayer has gone with respect to privacy, marketing, partnerships, and advertisements.
Were it not for some idiots who provide RealPlayer-only contents I have no idea why any sane person in the world would choose RealPlayer over Media Player.
More information can be found at www.annoyances.org.
I just downloaded and installed this last week and have found it to be quite unusable. While the buttons and scroll bars sure do look futuristic, the amount of times it just flat out crashes is completely unacceptable. I'll try this release, but I'm fearful I'll be stuck with 4.72 (which, incidentally, still crashes on me more than once per day which is normally unacceptable but is awesome compared to the once per 5 minutes with PR3). Aside from these specifics, I can't agree more with the author of this note about Netscape cheesily leveraging their browser to promote other areas of their business. First thing I do when I install Netscape is reset the Home button away from the popup window laden Netcenter and delete all Netscape default bookmarks and buttons. I know, many companies leverage popularity in one strong department to assist them in other areas (AOL, Microsoft), but I don't have to use agree with it. I won't such features from Netscape just like I won't use any MS products at home and won't use AOL. Power to the people, darthcornfed
What browser is the best open source soloution on Windows (can those two words exist in the same sentence???) that works? Ahhh the good old days of Netscape 1.0 on Trumpet Winsock with no IE on the radar screen *as he wipes a tear* those were the good old days!
Do you seriously think Netscape will deliberately introduce defects into their version of gecko?
This seems to be a common thing these days, and good it is too, I say.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Really...Netscape gives source to Netscape browser to Mozilla project. Mozilla builds/uses source and puts it under a license that allows it to be repackaged and distributed as such. Netscape has no product to sell to end users. How do we expect Netscape to keep running? iPlanet sales help, but I'm sure they need more revenue stream than that. How do you think sites like Slashdot stay profitable? It costs a lot of money to host and provide a service like this--even if it's based on free software.
Netscape provides benefit to the end users by making a pretty installer, and packaging it with nice add-ons. Just to make a strong business case, they need to have some way to provide some dollars for doing that.
While I don't really like having tons of icons put on my desktop, I don't have a problem with a few bookmarks heading back to Netscape.
I have removed the preformatted sections out of NS4.7's bookmarks. I didn't try to remove them directally, I just copied my old bookmarks file over the new one.
I use ie 5.0 at work all day long and a number of differnet versions of Netscape 6.0, Mozilla M18, Mozilla nightly build (from last week) and Netscape 4.5 at home and I can say without any shadow of doubt in my mind that ie blows the rest away. In fact it's not even close. As strange as it is to say this I really feel that MS has raised the standard for web browsers with ie. It's fast and it crashed on rare occasion (maybe once a week for me) while Netscape/Mozilla will go down once every couple hours under heavy browsing.
I'm a big open source fan and I have my own open source project so I am biased in a major way towards free software, but I have to doubt the sanity of anybody who can claim that the netscape/mozilla browser is better then ie. Just because we want it to win doesn't mean that it will. Just because we hate to see the giant monopolistic company produce a superior product doesn't stop them from doing so. IMHO the absolute worst thing the OSS community can do is bury it's angry head in the sand and pretend that no matter what we do it's better because we stand for the right cause.
And for those who are complaing about all the links to netscape etc., I suggest you call them up and demand a full refund for your product.
but a few minutes later i discovered it was part of the bookmark.htm file-- now it's sweet. i organize my bookmarks into catagories and each of what used to be toolbar buttons are now 5 different bookmark pulldowns for long term bookmarks: SearchEngines/TechSupportStuff/Headlines (/. & K5 etc) / daily (web comics:--) / work (sites i administer)...
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One of the new features that Netscape is boasting about is their more robust cookie management in NS 6. Well, its a good thing because you will need it. When I went to the Netscape site to download 6, I had to turn away 4 cookies from the main page, another 1 from a popup window, and 2 more during or immediately after the download process. Do they really need that many to track my visit?
The smartdownload feature is a bigger privacy hole, it sends back a list of every file you download to AOL.
:)
Opera is your friend, it doesn't do nonsense like that.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best (only?) way to make real money with a free product on the Internet is to sell advertising. Large conglomerates (Microsoft is a prime example) usually release free software in an attempt to gain market share. Of course in the case of IE, that really doesn't do them any good except for killing competition. Sounds like it's useful but I don't think it is because if they decided to charge for the next upgrade of IE there would probably be a lynching (or several hundred) in Redmund.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla
Well, AOL does fund mozilla, provide them with servers, tech support, etc. Oh, and they also pay most of the people working on the project...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm very disappointed to see overwhelmingly approving messages here
Guys, when did you write a line of C code for free?
When was the last time you spent a night debugging free software?
Besides, almost all the comments imply that you are running Windows.
It's very disappointing. It's not "News For Nerds" anymore.
The commercialization of the Internet has even caught that old vanguard Netscape. Sad, and shame.
Ermmm... They started the whole commercialization/breaking of the internet in the first place, remember?
Of course, a totally GUI powered system is unusable. Have you tried to configure a MS SQL server? Forget it! Stick to command line for stuff like that.
Thats not a solution that part of the buggy, slow, even less standards compliant than IE PROBLEM.
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
You could easily run it using VMWarez (or whatever it's called, that thing that's like WINE but isn't, you know the one I mean). And there is a native Solaris version of MSIE.
Problem: Netscape is nothing but a web browser that "caught up" to MSIE, with the added feature of being bombarded by "AOL Everywhere" dominance strategies. (AIM, AOL Mail support, etc...)
Solution: Uninstall Netscape!
The only way NS will succeed, is when AOL's agreement with MSIE expires,(Sometime next year, I believe...) and then they force it upon it's AOL members. I liked it, but once again, AOL ruins everything for the people that aren't lazy, and actually find out how to use the net without proprietary crap.
x86 is a totally fscked-up CISC instruction set from the 1970s, only hardware emulators (ie Pentium, Celeron, Athlon, Duron, etc) are any good at running it. x86 software emulation is useless, which is why people want open source - at least, then, they can compile it for a modern processor.
Does my bum look big in this?
weird license blurp
But if your browser isn't standards compliant, the sites you visit may not work.
I'm sorry if you can't see the logic in this, but I can. STANDARDS ARE IMPORTANT.
This is one of the two most important things about the browser (if not the 1st). The other being how the program runs; stability, GUI, speed, etc.
I'm not sure if you've done any web-design at all. Maybe you should if you havn't, to get an idea.
I know that I spend hours trying to get different browses to render my page properly. And I'm not the only one.
so once again, or everyones benefit.... STANDARDS ARE IMPORTANT.
I downloaded yesterday Netscape 6. It's pure bullshit.Sincerely, on Windows, MSIE is better than Netscape 6. So rather than use a big,bloated and slooooow browser, let's use a efficient and fast browser. If you're a graphic guy, then konqueror is the solution, and for console freaks, lynx is the king. Anyway netscape 4.76 is an option, but i'm really sure that version >4.76 of Netscape are the start of the death of Netscape. R.I.P
I personally tweak everything in windows but I'm not average user. If your sister fiddles with her windows settings good for her but for example my sister definately doesn't.
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
//till
http://blog.klimpong.de
47 day uptime?
Thought they fixed that up with win 98 se cause that's what I use for my dial in server (yes, I know, I'm lame, I'm lazy, you name it =P), and I had a 101 day uptime, till we had a power cut.
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> Every release since the AOL takeover has been
> progressivly worse.
There has only been one: Netscape 6.0, last week. Begone, troll!
I really couldn't care less.
:)
;).
Mozilla / Netscape is the same as emacs. "Eighty Megabytes and Constantly Swapping".
At the moment, I'm using netscape some of the time, and Konqueror a lot of the time. Konqueror is *the* new browser for Linux, in my humble opinion.
Also, Opera from Opera Software seems to become a *great* browser. I used the Beta a bit, and was really impressed. It had a couple of bugs, but I think those will be fixed for the next release. When that happens, I will either use Konq or Opera fulltime (as I guess Konq has progressed until then too
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
For months (years?) i've seen open source advocates say that all companies should open source because it can generate revenue. Open source is a valid business model. Now when a open source project (not a free software one) is trying to earn revenue, the pundits cry foul. You have to make up your mind! Is open source about free software, or is it about making the source available, with all the advantages of that, so that the quality of software is improved.
Listen to the dulplicity of the slashdot crowd. This is why the critics of cyber-libertarianism call it "cyber-selfish". You want something to be free (speech and beer) and then you cry bloody murder when the company that makes it packages the consumer version with stuff to make money for them. You block out the banner ads on the sites that are losing money hand over fist to provide you with a service that is worth something to you, when that advertising revenue is the only hope they have of turning a profit.
Much of the Mozilla development was done by full-time employees of Netscape Corporation, now a unit of AOL. As long as they don't block access to competitors (granted, we're still waiting for an open IM, but that's not so much browser-related) we have no right to complain about their self-promotion. They even make it possible for competitors to create sidebars and such things to add on to the browser their own doo-dads if they care to take the effort to develop them and can convince people to install them.
I applaud AOL for their self-promotion method. They have given us massive amounts of open-source code to do with what we please. They have done most of the work to produce Mozilla, and they have made a polished and specialized binary for the average user. Their binary adds features that the average user wants. The average user buys the 18 gig hard drive because the nice person on the phone tells them it's good. They don't care about code bloat. They don't understand memory footprints. They just know that they have a nice, fast computer, and that it can play their mp3s while browsing the web and talking to their friends on IM. AOL has given them what they want, and has given us what we want, too.
Thank you, AOL.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Netscape doesn't exist anymore.
Netscape is now merely a brand name owned by AOL.
AOL has a huge market cap and is a very profitable company.
-- topher71
that's what XUL is all about. you can tweak-n-change mozilla's (or ns6.0) user interface (almost) any way you want. of course it may require a bit of work from you, but the level of your control is uncomparable to other browsers. have you looked at aphrodite? visit http://mozdev.org/ and you'll see how it can be tweaked.
I kind of agree with you... I have been looking forward to a new release of Netscape and was extreamly disappointed when I installed version 6 yesterday.
The automatic proxy configration did not work at all.. I had to manualy enter all of the proxy settings (not a big deal, but kind of annoying since the "auto" option was there).
What is the problem with the startup time? Also, how much of the browser is written in Java?
One godo thing was the rendering speed, but none of the pages I visited "looked" correct. I tried adjusting the fonts and all but it did not do any good. I realize that some of the problems are the fault of the web page designers, but... oh well.
I uninstalled 6.0 and went back to 4.76.
I'm not exactly sure how developers view this potentially negative aspect of such a cooperative, but Netscape/Mozilla is quite unique in that .. sure, Netscape is a variation of Mozilla, but Mozilla is always there. If you don't like Netscape, something of the equivalent is Mozilla. Use that. Something not there that Netscape has? Either bid on the developers doing it or do it yourself. As for me, I have no complaints about Netscape, but any allegedly justifyable complaints are countered by the availability of Mozilla.
But there isn't. Rather, there is a more standards-compliant browser underneath. A slow, bloated buggy one with foreign widgets, but it's more standards compliant, man. Of course if nobody wants to use it because of all the other garbage, does it matter if it's more standards compliant?
IE is successful because it wins on the details. It's not as standards compliant. However, it has none of the shit that you have to wade throught to make Netscape 6 usable. It doesn't install MSN instant messanger. It doesn't install a "Install MSN" icon on your desktop. This of course isn't enough to win the browser wars. But it also has this going for it: It's faster, It uses less RAM, and it's standards compliant enough (TM).
In all the respects that matter to those of us who actually have to code serious HTML it's a worse browser than Netscape 6. But as almost every project based on idealism rather than pragmatism, Netscape misses out on the details. That's why it's Linux not HURD. And that's why it's IE not Netscape. Mozilla could be at best awesome and IE at best adequate. But IE is adequate, right now, and Netscape 6 is poor right now.
I'll end with my new favorite Linus quote (from linux-kernel,) which I now consider the primary reason Linux has done so well so far:
Well gee, these companies are lining their pockets on open source software too, right? And they all provide clear self promotion with logos and links galor. Guys, this is how the business world and the Open Source world will best interact. Business has to make money. Not only do they benefit from reduced R&D costs, but they also benefit from a more level playing field and from standards that help keep competitors from "adopting and extending". And in turn, the OSS benefits from donations, equipment loans, active development participation, and in the end - protection. I see it as a symbiotic relationship and take no offense at promotional garnishments...
Mike
Is that wrong?
________
> Netscape employs a number (the majority?) of the
:-). This has good and bad consequences...
> Mozilla people.
Yes, almost all of them in fact.
This is partly because just about every volunteer who gets deeply into the project and demonstrates competency is immediately offered a job at Netscape
you see there is another piece of logic that you are missing here. some people choose not to use IE precisely because of the difference of moral values behind the creation of the software. that is the user's choice. in fact, as consumers, the only means that an individual has to get his/her influence to be felt is through their use of their buying power. that is, not using a piece of MS software such as IE is a statement in and of itself, one which every individual has the right to make. now people will argue against me, but these are probably the same f00ls who believe that 'a vote for nader is a vote for bush', an idea which is grounded in the same false logic. the simple fact of the matter is that a vote for nader is a vote for nader. to believe anything else is to deny democracy--in the case of software, to suggest that an individual should only base their decisions on the utility of the software in effect purport to place utility as a higher ideal than moral values. the concept of doing something in order to make a moral point must never be belittled. in fact, it could very well be argued that an individual who uses buggy OSS is acting in a manner more noble than an individual who uses proprietary software simply because it works better. if everyone chose to use non-proprietary software, then real change would be effected because all of the companies which make proprietary software would shrivel and die. the end result would be a proliferation and improvment of OSS. this would have the effect of providing development resources to the OSS movement, at which point it could maintain its philosophy while improving the quality of the product.
in addition to windows update, has links to hotmail, msn, and msnbc. Those are links back to sites directly related to (owned by) ms. The rest of the built in links go to media sites like espn, fox, etc. These do not bother me at all and here is why. They are easily removeable from ie. You just organize your favorites and delete them. No big deal. Also, the ones they have are not that bad for a novice user. Hotmail is free email. Who (especially /.ers) would have a problem with free (as in beer) email service. Not I. Although I do prefer other email services to hotmail. Who cares about the ads? Isn't that how most (or all) free mail services get their money? msn is an isp/searchsite/newsite. Nothing wrong with that. (begin offtopic rant) It is amazing how quick people will crucify ms for things they do that other companies/people do, too. If anyone were to say that ms does not make any good sw, I would call them a liar. It is simply not true. If it weren't for ms, where would the personal computer world be today? I will tell you one thing. You would not be able to buy your cheap barebones system for a few hundred bucks to throw debian on to if pc's weren't so commonplace. MS is a big reason that they are so commonplace.
this is a left handed sig
We're still working out the details. keep an eye on n.p.m.license to monitor the progress. With a project of this size (with many files contributed under a number of different licenses) it takes a little time to make these kinds of changes.
-Asa
One of the features I most love about mozilla is that you can right click on an ad banner and block all images from the originating server. Thus I can go through and block the ads from annoying places like doubleclick, but leave ads if they don't actively annoy me. Of course since ad banners make the net go 'round, AOL can't very well have a netscape that provides the ability to block banners.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Well, in netscapes own FAQ, they mention a release that was considered netscape 5, and used as the base code for netscape 6. They admitted that netscape 6 was a clone of 5 with a few changes. Go into help>about mozilla, and you can find the EXACT SAME release name. Coincidence? I think not.
I am !amused.
netscape needs the $?
I need a browser without email and news. I have perfectly good mail programs and news readers already (exmh and trn, if you're interested). I just wish Galeon was ready. I can't even try out their development releases without upgrading virtually everything else on my system...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I understand this. But this does not make it entirely modular as I think of modular. Maybe I have a bad definition. Loading and unloading functionality is what I think needs done. i.e. When I close the goofy My Side-whatever that should take up less mem. The current design seems to resemble MS OS design. When you turn something off on a MS OS...you just can't see it any more. It does not necessarily release any resources. When a turn a panel off (now a panel isn't modular...but this such system would work) from my current X session or I remove a module from my Linux kernel. It actually releases the resources. Wouldn't this help?
But where does that $2000 come from, at the end of the day. Follow the money, and expose the hypocrisy that is Open Source/Free Software.
...yea that would make sense. if i say esr will you have an automated response?
you could almost make a haiku out of that. i don't know whether youre just aiming for responses, maybe your some sort of software
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla?
Paying for the hosting of an extremely high volume web and ftp site isn't putting money back into the community?
BTW, if you don't like Netscape 6, use Mozilla or Galeon. Neither of those would exist if Netscape hadn't seen a way to continue to make money; they would have just disposed of the source code and payed those people to do something else instead of cleaning it up.
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The charge of Netscape revenue not going back to mozilla.org is more than a little ridiculous. Netscape/AOL pockets have been the primary funding for mozilla.org for some time now, in terms of both equipment and manpower. I don't see any reason why mozilla.org ought to resent the ads in Netscape. Users, OTOH, will likely find plenty of reasons to resent the gratuitous nature of Netscape's commercialization. And they should. It's insulting. It's Netscape saying, "We think our users are such mindless tools that we can deliver them a browser overflowing with ads that they could otherwise get for free."
There's absolutely nothing wrong with leveraging open code for commercial ends. The problem is that Netsape/AOL have bungled it badly. What value do their commercial additions add to the product? Is the additional software and advertising actually useful to many users? Is it useful enough to those users that they'll endure the ads rather than turn to ad-free alternatives?
A fine balance must be struck between annoying ads and the useful features that justify them. Not only has Netscape failed to achieve this balance, it has failed badly--partly due to gratuitous ads, and partly due to not-quite-finished software.
The result will be that users will turn to competing products--including, in all likelihood, the mozilla.org distribution of the browser. That wasn't supposed to *be* a competing product--Netscape was supposed to be able to add enough value that Mozilla would only be of interest to developers.
IE 5.0 performed fine...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Maybe the mozilla guys could keep us geeks happy with a ad-free version of mozilla. Probably would be a better browser too. -Mark
I'm sorry if it sounds harsh, but no one told you in the first place that all of the open source hard work would be used in the "right" way. If you help me build my house, I thank you for the help, but that does not mean you get to live in it. The same thing goes for Mozilla. Netscape/AOL thanks you for your help but that does not mean you get to decide how the end product is used. The only benefit you get is in knowing how the guts work and the right to say you helped to build it.
What did you think was going to happen?
BTW: On a side note, the rating of this post will say a lot about the maturity of the moderators.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I use Mozilla M18, and I love it, but Netscape has SSL. Mozilla does not. I use several sites that require me to log in via SSL, so unfortunately I'm forced to use Netscape.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Looking over the comments you've posted (from your user info page), you're obviously involved in the Mozilla development. Now I'm a bit frustrated with the slow progress on the relicensing, but it's understandable.
Now I know everyone working on Mozilla/Netscape has probably been frustrated with lots of criticism over features vs memory/bloat and standards compliance vs delivery dates. I know that is gets difficult when it comes from "all directions" with conflicting opinions, where the only common theme is everyone is upset. Please try to understand the viewpoint of anyone waiting and trying to make plans to integrate mozilla code into a GPL'd project.
Without access to the newsgroup, the relicense process appears to be at a standstill.
The FAQ says "Yes, as more questions are asked, updates will be made to this page", but there been no update in three months. The answers are vauge and provide no real information that anyone planning to work with the code together with other GPL'd code could use to plan their future activities. There is no estimate of when the contributors will be contacted, how long they have to reply, or any other time oriented info. In fact, there isn't even an indication of when these things may be known and added to the page. There is no indication of what parts of the project the staff of mozilla.org can speak for, and say with certainty that they will be dual licensed.
I know there's a limited number of hours in a day, and a limited number of people to work on any project. You need to work on the most important things first. I can agree that standards compliance and bug fixing has been a well chosen high priority.
The flip side of the coin is that, judging from the Mozilla Relicensing FAQ it would appear that the dual licensing to GPL has completely fallen off the radar. In fact, there may be someone working dilligently on it, but anyone considering using mozilla in a GPL'd setting can't know that from a FAQ with vauge answers, claiming it will be updated, but has in fact not been updated in three months.
Now maybe I'm the only one who doesn't get n.p.m.license, but I doubt it. If there really is work being done on the relicense AND if the mozilla team really is interested in people using the code in GPL'd projects, it'd probably be worth the 15-20 minutes to update the FAQ page, linked right from the main mozilla.org, so that folks working on GPL'd projects could plan accordingly. Judging from what I can actually see (the FAQ), the only plans I could realistically make ammount to "it looks like they've completely forgotten about it (so I'll have to look at XmHTML, XDE, etc, instead of waiting just a little longer)".
Ok, enough complaining and whining.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I own my desk.
I like ch0c0lat3s!!
Therefore my desk likes ch0c0lat3s!!
I use my desk to sit my monitor.
My desk owns 4 corners.
Therefore, my desk uses its 4 corners to sit my monitor.
Mozilla is not like Netscape 6. Anyone that says it is obviously do not follow it very closely. Very few things, none that I can think of but I'm sure some are there, take you to nasty Netscape/AOL banners and it is much more stable, speedy, and full of features. A lot of the developers of Mozilla do of course work for Netscape but many also do not and as time goes on more people get involved around the edges and even now and then deep into the core.
I guess my only point is to not tie Mozilla in with the Netscape crowd. The first is made by many fine engineers and the later by many fine engineers forced to add stupid crap by stupid managers. At this point even if Netscape stopped supporting Mozilla it'd doubtlessly stay alive. Some of the Netscape engineers would still work on it in their own time and other companies would be bound to try to take over. I'd most like to see a Linus like leader emerge from the non-commercial ranks but that has yet to be seen. All we can do is watch and see.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I cringe at what I'm about to say, but...
MS has utterly won the browser wars.
Netscape is dead. Mozilla is a non-starting disaster. Opera never got off the ground. There
are no browsers still being actively developed other than IE which are worth the download. None.
Don't get me wrong--at home I use Netscape 4.7x,
and wouldn't give it up for anything. I HATE supporting Microsoft, but since Netscape made the jump to mozilla, the browser market narrowed to one option, and only one.
Too bad, but that's the way it is.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
As we all must agree, the browser war ended with IE on top. Acquisition of Netscape by AOL was another nail in the coffin. I remember the days of the real Netscape when it was actually worth something. For the linux platform I use netscape, but for Windoze I can't help but use IE. It seems an opportune time for another player to enter the market. Even if this new player faulters and is lost along the way, at least it would stir things up and create competition in the market. Am I the only one that feels this way? Maybe the Mozilla team should move away from anything even slightly tied to Netscape and start from scratch.
Well, I was about to post about how Netscape sucks these days and agree with the pro-Mozilla folks who want a compact, reliable browser from Netscape. But as I clicked submit, IE crashed.
I'll hold my tongue. ^_^
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What is it all coming to! Will we ever escape commercialism in this world as we know it.....never! But ya if MS's ass is in court for similar "business practices" this one should have the book thrown at it........best we can do is not use it! I say some dude like mark@analogx or ivan@astalavista etc could easily come up with a lean browser that would suit all of us.....free of course and link to free things, no selling!
> I do belive Netscape is doomed (which is sad).
Netscape is only doomed if AOL stops funding them.
But AOL managment must know that such an act would dramatically increase Microsoft's control of the Web. Netscape/Mozilla is also crucial to any effort to build Internet access devices that don't require a tax to be paid to Microsoft. AOL is very interested in that.
So piss off you fucken tosser.
Nice.
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
Netscape is all of these but not even semi-stable.
I don't see how you can even form a coherent argument with regards to the branding issues of this product when it doesn't even work.
The point is that Netscape did not design or develop this browser, Mozilla did. Mozilla is supposed to be an independent group but it is top heavy with AOL employees. Mozilla is Netscape/AOL's way of getting YOU to work for them for free and now you can view all the ads too!
When you use Netscape you are getting the product you prefer at the tradeoff price of ads. Sure they sell it at Staples(TM), but how many people are going to shell out $40+ bucks for a web browser when you can use IE or a downloaded copy for free. They know this and are capitalizing on it. Personally speaking I don't use any of the crap they offer.. I turn off the "My Sidebar", don't use Messenger (to avoid the ad in my preview pane) and I redefine my homepage on the first startup of Netscape. What this leaves me with is a nicely bloated web browser just like the rest.
Back to why they do it.. profit.. its quite simple.. they aren't gonna make a dime off netscape if they don't shove their corporate identity in your face. I honestly don't blame them. Your average internet user likes these things... the average Slashdot reader doesn't. Thats about 1 or 2 million of us.. and about 40 Million plus of them.. you do the math.
Sofar I'm impressed with NS 6.0, now all I want to do is wait until the big webdesigners tell me whats wrong with how it renders pages so I can fix mine accordingly.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
> Personally, I want to see a MacOS X/ Aqua theme.
Dave Hyatt wrote one as a testbed for the theme engine. I think it was never released for fear of Apple's lawyers.
This is quite probably the dumbest complaint I have seen. Part of writing open source code is that others can sell your work and make/lose money doing so. That is a *fundamental* right of Open Source software. The fact is, netscape inc. has funded a large part of the development, and given it back to the community. Don't like the way it works? Download mozilla and hack on it some so it is how you like it. But don't bitch to slashdot, that's about the most lazy, irresponsible, and pointless reaction of all.
Erik
You sure we haven't assimilated you yet ;-)
I could agree on this point except for one small question: AOL doesn't need the money. Be that as it may, I say if it bugs you round up a few people and fork Mozilla. Even better, start downloading Galeon or something similar and contribute.
/Brian
the 4.7x bunch just absolutely will not let you take the preformated sections out of your bookmark file.
I'm using 4.75 for Windows, and clearing the preset bookmarks isn't exactly brain (or registry) surgery: Click on "Bookmarks", then "Edit Bookmarks": this brings up the Netscape bookmark editor. Next, left click the first thing that bothers you. Use Ctrl/Shift selecting to get the rest of the stuff that bothers you. Now, hit the "delete" key. The end.
"What's Related" can be disabled in preferences, leaving you only the "Netscape" button on the Toolbar. I can cope.
yeah look at all the assholes who use Linux and Napster. They are a bunch of whiny tossers who don't want to pay for anything.
In the RMS sense of this, it's wrong, but most people don't fully agree with his philosophy so that wrong can be ruled out. Plus, if you really want to stay on top of things, the Netscape release is simply a commercial version of web browser that you can grab for free minus commercials at that well known site
So what's the fuss? You don't have to use NS6, you can simply use mozilla. Plus that claim that IE doesn't pat itself on the back and feed itself by providing links to other sites for doe is bullshit, try a default install of IE sometime. It has the nerve of asking you if you want a free hotmail account before you can load it, plus making it nigh impossible to delete the Links section out of the favorites menu bar. At least netscape allowed me to completely wipe my bookmarks with relative ease [i hate any bookmarks, especially ones that aren't mine].
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Although I agree that I Netscape has a disproportionate number of links to their own banner ads, I'm guessing that IE has a few more than just one.
It's things like this which make me look towards the next generation of browsers-- I love iCab's ability to ignore images based on what path they have (eg, any path with '/ads/' in it, or on a machine named 'ads') or the image size (1x1 pixels, or the standard banner sizes).
How they handle cookies is nice, too, as you're allowed to reject or accept domains as a whole, while still prompting for all others.
For those people who don't have a Mac, you probably have one or two hold out friends with one, so have them grab a copy, and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.icab.de/
[oh...and it's under 2megs, too....although they're still working on CSS support]
All I see from Netscape is a much needed update for a buggy product; it's not a significant break through, even if it was a complete code re-write..
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
By taking part in the Mozilla project I would hope that developers realized that their work would be used by others to generate revenue. It was kinda the point. And those who want to avoid Netscape's consumerism can, as pointed out, use Mozilla directly
I enjoyed at least one of Netscape's revenue generating features: When I indicated I was under 13 so that I would not have to fill out the registration forms, I was taken directly to netscape's Kid Zone. At least they are paying attention to what they're doing.
Many companies make money by giving support for their open-source products. This is the most preferable way of making money with open-source software I think. No more stupid advertisements bar(s) everyone hates...
On the Unix network at Michigan State University's computer science department, you can't rid the preformatted bookmarks from Netscape. Every time you delete them, the folder gets tagged back onto the end of your bookmarks next time you start the program.
Not that I'm not sure if all Unix versions have this 'feature' or even if there are multiple Unix versions. :)
However, the windows version I'm using right now does not have that problem whatsoever.
-JimTheta---
My stupid web site
Well, if you want a convenient package with Java, SSL support, and plenty of useful common plugins, Netscape provides a lot. I'm on Solaris, so I don't have a choice right now, but if Netscape 6 is more convenient to use than Mozilla, I'll use Netscape.
Walt
> it still doesn't conform to the standard.
Which standard? NS6.0 is more compliant with REAL standards than almost any competing browser.
They give out the code for free and just might wnat to make some cash off of what is basically netscape corp...
It's ironic how on this site it seems that every other day is a 'free software is good for business day' and the other days are 'free software is being abused by big business' days.
now there's not an answer for everything, but you find another web browser that does what mozilla does and comes with the source.
of course there isn't one, because everyone always had netscape to rely on, therefore not wanting to reinvent the wheel.
Mozilla has a built in HTML editor, I belive.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm saddened by seeing that Netscape-bashing has become so popular. Netscape is not just getting a free ride from the hard work of the Mozilla contributors. Speaking as a Mozilla contributor, I have to say that it's Netscape engineers who do about 70-90% of the work (my estimate). This means that Mozilla would have taken more like 15 years to get to where it is right now if it were not for the time and money invested by Netscape
Having tried Netscape 6.0 on Linux, I have to say that it is noticeably faster than the current Mozilla nightlies and somewhat more stable. Yes, there are several known bugs, but overall it is an excellent product.
You ask whether Netscape has gone too far? I ask you whether you have gone so far in your hubris that somehow an open-source project to which you have not contributed (and yes, in this case that means Netscape) owes you something. Netscape is offering its Netcenter service to the people using its browser. No one is forcing you to use these menu options or buttons. All the buttons that go to netcenter can be turned off in the preferences! A desktop icon can be deleted. From what I recall of the last time I installed Windows software, creating a courtesy desktop shortcut to the software or to resources related to that software was a common practice....
As for those Slashdor readers who have contributed to Mozilla, I would like to hear your views on the matter. I believe that the Mozilla community has a much better opinion of Netscape than the Slashdot community at large.
First couple of goals: stability, no memory leaks, and 100% W3C standards compliance.
I know. Galeon is doing this. Partially. I say let's ignore AOL's "updates" and just write our own code.
You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one.
I am not a lawyer.
Incidentally I have the search in Netscape 6 set to google right now.
/. headlines sidebar.
Kind of interesting how CNN.com gets a prominent sidebar place -- AOL TW merger at work Here?
Now if someone would only make a
--
... when the browser crashes every few minutes? I don't even have time to really enjoy these 42 ways of investigating Netscape. I thought that before they went to beta, they needed to get the mean time before failure to over an hour? I crash for no reason every 5 - 10 minutes! This is the most unstable version of Netscape that I've tried. Perhaps it still isn't SMP friendly?
IE, at least on Windows, and in the versions I've tested on Linux, is just faster, more stable, more flexible in terms of add-ons it will accept without problems... better.
There's no such thing as IE for Linux.
--
But... wouldn't that make it pro-cruft? :)
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
don't forget that aol was in serious need of a better browser. no matter which solution they decided on, they had to do something or they would have lost serious marketshare when other competition came along. it was purely a business decision. nobody should feel grateful to aol for supporting mozilla. thats the same kind of crap that companies try to use to make people feel guilty about quitting even though the company just got bought 5 years ago and laid off 3000 people. as a consumer, you should only be glad netscape is supporting mozilla because you think it is a better product. as a coder, you could be glad because it is one different option for people to work. or you could not care if you didn't ever plan to work under that arrangement. but no coder is obligated to 'be glad' netscape/aol 'supports' mozilla.
Yes, I imagine that Netscape is managing to generate some revenue as a result of this. But does anyone think for even a minute that this makes up for the two years of development time that was paid for directly out of their pocket? Would there even BE a mozilla of any value without all the paid time of netscape programmers?
Open source is cool and all, but you are pretty deluded if you think that most of the mozilla code was written by volunteers. Most of it was paid for, fair and square, by netscape.
-dentin
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
I am somewhat... surprised by this comment. Only now you worry about the economic free-rider problem? Why? Because a corporation is going to economically benefit from the unpaid code contributions of individuals, instead of the other way around?
To a greater or lesser degree, depending upon the license, all open-source and free software projects "suffer" from the economic free-rider "problem." People get to benefit from the work of others without being required, by either property law or contract, to pay for it (though it is hoped they will be good members of the community and contribute something back). That is the point. At the end of the day, open-source and free software are about sharing and cooperation.
To at least some extent, the world of open-source and free software is a world of, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I am not saying that to red-bait, or to imply that because it is communist in the classical sense, it is bad. I happen to think it is wonderfully idealistic, cooperative and social. I think it generally brings out the best in people. However, I also think is important to understand that in any such system there are going to be people who take a "free ride" (not, for the reasons stated below, that I think Netscape has done so), and not contribute back what you believe they ought to have.
If you don't like the way people are responding to and compensating you for your labor, there is a simple solution. Negotiate a contract before you perform the labor, so at least people know what they are expected and required to pay (be it in money, compensatory labor, or even praise) ahead of time. If you don't like the way people are responding to and compensating you for the software you code, the solution is equally simple. Use a proprietary license, rely on copyright law, and license it to them.
To complain about the behavior in this context appears to be particularly hypocritical and myopic. As I understand it, Netscape contributed the initial code base (as much as many may want to complain about it, it was the starting point), as well as a large number of full-time professional coders. Further, everyone knew from the beginning that Netscape was free to fold whatever they wanted from Mozilla into its proprietary Netscape browser. And under these circumstances we complain that Netscape benefits from the unpaid work of others? Please.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
What about the Opera browser (www.opera.com)? Given that the OS is free, I would not mind paying for a really good web browser for Linux. In fact, I would probably be willing to pay up to $80 for a really great Linux web browser at the same quality level as IE for example. Maybe we should give Opera a bit more publicity to let them know there could actually be a market if they get their Linux port up to speed. Netscape 6 has way too many problems, including SSL problems, *massive* JavaScript/DHTML insufficiencies, slowness, etc. It might come along, but it would be nice to see some alternatives including possible commercial ones.
Isn't all of Netscape6's GUI in XML? So if you don't like the fact that say searching for stock quotes takes you to Netscape.com, then change it to take you to Yahoo's quotes or whoever you want... You can do this for all the menu/button/toolbars that bother you.. That's what makes their GUI so cool...
Oh and if someone does do this, make the XML files available for all...
11oh8.
That's a very good question. I can't even get the darned software to load up on my system. It installs fine. Go to run it and then BSOD. From what I've heard though, seems to me like it's just another corporate giant going after a somewhat captive audience. Sure, the intelligent people know how to get around it and don't buy into their "bargains," but Johnny Q. Public is a sitting duck for the ads.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
1. Duh.. it should look like Mozilla.. what do you think mozilla is for, to provide a codebase for IE?
2. you can disable my sidebar by view->My Sidebar
3. a ton of licks to your panels? Whats that?
Where the hell do you think netscape6 comes from? Divine intervention?
Maybe you should look into certain things before casting judgment.
Using some applications is like going to a porn site. Thousands of windows popping up with ads for the software itself, the companies other products and services, etc. Like the Quicktime "update now/later" box that pops up every time you want to watch a friggin quicktime movie. Give me a break, when you go to buy a hammer at the hardware store it's not plastered with ads for other tools you can buy from Joe's tool shop. Ads that you can't get rid of, like they are engraved into the wood of the handle or something. It's a tool, you just want to use it. If I want another one, I'll go get it myself. This crap annoys me no end.
Remember those talking cameras? What if they had started saying "You know, our Pentax 1200-zero-XG takes much better than I do, why don't you throw me in the garbage and go buy it?" We'd be living in the movie Blade Runner, that's what.
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
Much less obnoxious than Netscape 6. AOL's marketroid's really did a number on that puppy. Too bad for Netscape, because I really wanted to see their share go up in next month's UserAgent logs. Too bad for me, because I really wanted to use it (Mozilla Mac still has too many showstoppers).
go to the ftp, and find the Netscape6 directory for your platform. Find the xpi/ directory and download all the crap in there. Then, all you have to do is open up the files in the borwser and they will install themselves. That's all there is to it, theres an AIM component as well as a java package and many more. The directory for my browser would be: /pub/netscape6/english/6.0/unix/linux22/xpi, but of course, YMMV depending on platform.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
The whole point of open source was that people would contribute in their own time with no desire for compensation. That is open source. It's clear from the license and from every statement made by Netscape that Mozilla was going to the foundation for their commercial product and that it was open source. And every single person here knew that from the start.
So what the hell are you all complaining about? You plead with companies to release their products under an open source license and tell them that they can still make money off of it and benefit from bug fixes and a "million eyes", and then you do a 180 and bitch and complain when the companies actually DO try and make money?!? What the hell is that? Then you have the gall complain about double standards for Netscape and Microsoft? If I were you, I'd seriously re-evaluate my position and my arguments. You're on pretty shaky ground.
There's a word that describes this situation... 'Hypocrites' comes to mind.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Close, but no cigar. Opera doesn't quite fully support CSS. We use CSS heavily on our site (name witheld to prevent the /. effect) and Opera many times chooses the wrong bg colors. Netscape 6 doesn't come close to supporting standards (as has been cited by WASP). We're forced to go with IE as it renders everything on our site perfectly. The only problem is in convincing some of our dealers to drop the holy war issue.
TTYL,
Jim
Jim
Remember to take out the trash if you want to send email to me.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
the developers of open source zope get paid over $2000 an hour to consult on web page design. so you can both get paid 'plenty' and populate the ranks of the 'movements'. or you could work on open source software for your own purpose and not be subject to somebodys whims. if you're going to troll at least log in.
If it's morals you're after then everyone had better stop using Netscape, as they're obviously only in this game to generate revenue from ads and bookmarks. Morals are good to stick with, but if it means there is no browser on the market that I can use apart from Lynx, then screw em! Let's face it, IE5.5 blows Netscape out of the water. Therefore I use it. Simple.
Look, in regards to standards compliance, NO company
is going to be 100% compliant unless they are saints. The fact that Netscape 6 is trying to be is a good thing. You don't see IE striving for that now do you? In fact, Microsoft is more interested in creating proprietary tags than it is being standards compliant.
In the past, IE has been more leniant on bad HTML as well. Is this a good thing? Is this because it is going easy on the bad HTML coders out there? Personally I think it is because it has to display the crappy code FrontPage spews out. Does this make it better than Netscape?
I write code by hand, and I test it in Netscape because if it works in Netscape, it will work in IE (for the most part). If you write good code, pages format just fine in both browsers, in the same speed, in most cases. (using image width and height tags, well formed, etc..)
As for the real point of the article, using Mozilla code to tout Netscape, I do agree that the AOL/Netscape/Sun/Time Warner (soon to be) mega-corporation
has the potential to be as power abusive as M$, if it isnt already. Just as M$ wanted to bundle IE with their OS, Netscape wants to blanket your screen with Netscape symbols. It's not that great, but it's not life threatening.
If you are upset that they are using Mozilla code to do so, it's
probably something you need to get over. The code is free, and I'm sure M$ is using the code as well in some fashion.
In this world, weigh the pro's and con's and pick your poison, or stick to open source software.
Why not just connect to mozilla's news server? If you use slrn, add a line with server ``news.mozilla.org'' ``newsrc-mozilla'' to your .slrnrc file (so your regular newsrc file doesn't get overwritten), and run slrn -h news.mozilla.org -create to create the newsrc file.
In Netscape 6, select Tasks, Composer.
If for some reason, this crashes (I haven't tried
it in 6 yet), you can always use Composer from
Netscape 4.7.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Notice how much bandwidth is out there? Or how many ISPs? How how cheap parts and service have gotten?
This is *directly* linked to the so-called "commercialization" of the internet.
Everything costs money, because our society is based on money. If the coders don't get fiscal benefit from working on N6 / Mozilla, then it's "recreation", and they literally have more important things to do.
And if they want to get some money by their choice of default bookmarks and homepage... then so what? Better that than scrounging for a grant, or having no full-time workers, or charing for the browser, or having a continual pop-up banner ad.
Mozilla is a bit of a resource hog in it's own right, due to the more modern archetecture, not beacuse of the adds and bloat that AOL added. Its much more fundemental
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
OKay, how many times have you, as a programmer, coded an algorithm a certain easier way because "memory and disk space are cheap"? Everytime I write code, I'm not always thinking of making it the most effiecient algorithm in existance. Sure, I try to be efficient as possible, but sometimes I just write something the easiest way, and efficiency be damned. All it takes is a algorithms like this and "poof" bloatware.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I reported a bug to Netscape back in 4.00 (a way back when) about a missing ; in a stylesheet being able to crash the browser.
By 4.6 (the last version I bothered to put on my computer), the bug was still there. Thats what, a year?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Plus you're looking at a commercial product. Quit being so surprised. Can you imagine Microsoft releasing a browser that was not inextricably linked to microsoft.com.
sheesh. It's like getting riled up when Taco Bell gets ahold of a Disney film's marketing rights and laminates all their chalupa's with the logo of the movie. You eat em anyway, dontcha?
---------- You are not the contents of your sig.:-p
Fine, then use whatever works best for you.
This is not a good topic to discuss when there are at least four other browsers available in the same (or higher) league as this new failure from Netscape. Don't like the ads? I've got a secret patch that Netscape doesn't want you to know about -
It's called "uninstall".
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
A little more detail:
The goal of the project is to create a small footprint web browser that uses the gecko core. So tada! I think thats what you are looking for!
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Mozilla are based upon Netscape, their choice to start a project. Now they want to say that because Netscape is using some of their code they cannot make money without Mozilla getting some? IF we were even gonna kick up a fight about this, it'd end companies releasing their software open source. If they cannot open-source they're software and utilise the benefits, whilst making a profit they have no reason at all to open-source in the first place. Every company is out to make money, that doesn't mean they are bad, just that they need money to survive.
Actually I uninstalled Netscape from my life when the version I was using prompted me weekly to install AIM.
I actually looked around on the web to see how to stop it from doing this and the only articles were pretty sketchy with lots of references to registry settings and deleting files by hand.
Not that I can't do that, but if they are targetting users that put up with shit like that, I'd rather not be associated with that group of users any more.
Yes, the bookmarks file is a text file. And yes, I edit it by hand. And no, if Netscape doesn't like what I did it 'fixes' the 'error' for me.
Example: try replacing one of your bookmark descriptions with an <img="file://foo.jpg"> reference to make a graphical index file (REALLY handy if you want to use your bookmarks for your home page.) This used to work, but since (iirc) 4.74 the freaking tags get replaced by ampersand codes. Thanks loads, Netscape.
And if you 'accidentally' delete the "Personal Toolbar Folder" or the "New and Cool" stuff in it, including "What's New," they get thoughtfully replaced despite your best efforts, thus chewing up half a screenful of valuable homepage space for absolutely no value.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Netscape is a brand in the AOL family.
AOL controls all decisions from the top down. It's not like Netscape is still it's same old self, nice and independent within AOL. AOL management moved in and they run _everything_.
The idea is make Netscape appeal to the people who don't use AOL, but keep the users in the family. These users are techie weenies who don't want to be coddled by the AOL client.
So rather than the old 'What's Cool' stuff that went all over the web. They need to keep the users on their web site (because that's how they make money).
Personally, I like Netscape 6, but it's not stable enough for me just yet. It's just like _any_ major product release; stay away from the first version!
-- topher71
> Users expect a certain minimum set of features. That set is larger now than it was 2 years ago.
I guess what I was really getting at is best addressed by another response I have to the orignal post.
> > > Why can't we get people on Slashdot to talk about the REAL developer issues surrounding Mozilla instead
Why can't we get developers of Mozilla to talk about the real user issues surrounding Mozilla?
Or is Mozilla supposed to end up like Amaya - a useful testbed for standards compliance, but something which is never used by anyone?
(Yes, that's a gross overstatement, but there's a kernel of truth to it.)
You're right that users expect a certain minimum feature set. What I'm arguing is that the features the Netscape developers haven't considered their user base.
Who's served by Mozilla and NS6?
- Advertisers in NS6.
- Developers through the debugging code.
- Developers through all the discussions on standards-compliance.
- People who think XML is cool, not because of what it can do, but because it's XML.
Who's not served by Mozilla or NS6?Two years ago, it was possible for Netscape to say "We've written a better browser, and you web developers better code your web sites so our browser can render it".
Today, the balance of power has swung - rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly) - back to the web developers. Web developers don't care that NS6 is standards-compliant. And end users don't care either - the typical end user cares only that www.cnn.com renders. If it renders in IE and not NS, NS's market share will continue to diminish.
Ask yourself this: Does Joe Luzer want a standards-compliant browser (whatever that may mean :), or does he want something that they can use - today, not after the Glorious People's Revolution and All Web Pages are rewritten to conform with the spec - in place of IE?
You should have a look at iCab, a nice, small and very popular browser for MacOS.
... and you can use it on a Mac LC (68020 at 16Mhz, with 10 Mb ram) which is considerably slower than a 486/50.
iCab is a 1Mb download, is extremely standard compliant, and can run with less that 5 Mb of ram.
See it at iCab Home Page.
don't forget mozilla wouldn't exist without netscape, so don't go there.
there are starting to be some acceptable options, Konqueror and Opera aren't bad, but I'd guess 70% of my computing (maybe more? yikes) is probably related to web surfing, and I doubt I'm alone.
Sure, there are the insane people who insist you can see everything you need from lynx, but for the rest of us, Linux would be far less useful if Netscape didn't exist for it, and as much as we HATE to admit it, we'd be better off if the one browser which has bulldozed it's way to a userbase of what, 90% now, was available for us in linux.
We need Netscape, and we need it to be good.
________
Then you'll be pleased to know that Netscape 6.0 is the most standards-compliant browser on the planet, with the possible exception of IE5.5 Mac.
You have a choice of either getting links to M$N or Netscapes's site if you use IE or Netscape. Both companies exploit this opportunity. It's up to you do decide which is worse. Or you could skip it all and use another browser like Opera. It all boils down to personal preference.
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
remember that developers did not start the mozilla project to make money, they are doing it to prove that an open source project can work, and Netscapes commercialization of it is proof that it worked. bravo to Netscape for making money using a great open source project.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
I agree 100%. I don't mind <<that>> much about the ads, links or other bubble-gum stuff. I just wish that they would release a decent product.
Hey, I'm not even talking about enhancements.. just fix the glaring problems.
Kurt
It's a bummer that Netscape gave in to peer pressure from all the other greedy, bloodsucking monopolies out there (well, THE greedy, bloodsucking monopoly) so I guess using Netscape will remain being what it always has been: the Lesser of Two Evils.
Netscape != Mozilla. Use the open source browser, not netscapes.
Just use Mozilla
Say it again, Mozillaaaaah!
Makes you feel good.
Fair game if Netscape can make money off of Mozilla, they put enough money into it and they help an open source project.
We say its cool when Apple uses BSD, how much do they give back, and does it really matter anyhow.
Im just glad to have mozilla
(Snowball's chance in hell of this being the pirst fost but anyway, i claim "Pirst Fost" with Score >1 )
IE is also available on Unix, which I'm sure some bright sparks could compile on Linux if they want.
Easy, you said it yourself. Use Internet explorer. Who cares who made it, as long as it works? And like you stated, no funny banners, no crap.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
When was the last time good principles made a company any sort of money?
YOU CANT SELL THE DAMN PRODUCT, YOU CANT ADVERTISE THE IDIOTS WHO SUPPORT ITS DEVELOPMENT - HOW THE FUCK IS ANYONE SUPPOSED TO MAKE ANY MONEY, YOU OPEN SORES IDIOTS?? OH, WAIT, I REMEMBER, FROM SUPPORT.
- Netscape support hotline, how may I help you?
- Hi. Where's the back button?
- Same place as IE's back button. That will 10 cents, please.
- The check is in the mail. <click>
I took the time to grab mozilla from the cvs tree, and spent almost an hour compiling the code (du -hs revealed 218megs of it after ./configure and half of make), but it runs very nicely now. Premade binaries do tend to be slower and more crash prone, so if possible, compile stuff yourself. It's annoying, but it works =) (unlike the rest of my system)
I am !amused.
-- H. Wilker
Specifically the zip has a replacement (Windows 9x, dunno if it works for NT or 2K) DLL (Only one in this zip but I have DLL's for many other versions.) for Netscape 4.76 DOMESTIC. Here's a bit from the readme that lists some of the changes I hacked in:
I have turned off the Netscape 4.7 "Shopping" button. I hated that thing. luckily I only had to look at it once. :)
The search button goes to google.com!
The "My Netscape" button goes to slashdot.org/index.pl!
The mail window's bottom frame no longer loads Netscape ADs. Instead it loads this.
FYI In the current version I have hacked the "about:" page which isn't quite kosher for showing credit were credit is due for the Netscape corporate legal stuff... but oh well it's a hack.
http://steem.com/all-hack-netscape.zip - Contains all DLL's that I have hacked (basically starting with 4.51 when I first saw the "Shopping" button.)
---
Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
I don't really care that Netscape is making advertising money off of Mozilla's work. I consider that fair payment for their opensourcing the code in the first place. What bugs me is that they are wasting development effort on irrelevant stuff. It's not the ads themselves that bother me - it's the fact that we are getting ads *instead* of product enhancements.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Look, there wouldn't even *be* a mozilla organization if it weren't for Netscape--they pay the bulk of the programmers. Don't forget that the mozilla code base went open source because the open source community (ESR, to be exact) convinced them that open source is in *netscape's* best interest. If Netscape can't get a return on their investment, you can kiss goodbye any hope of convincing other proprietary software vendors to open up their source code. And if you are really that offended, what's stopping you from using the mozilla code to create your own browser? This is open source, so scratch your own itch. Whether you use Netscape 6, Mozilla 1, or roll your own, Netscape deserves your thanks, not petty complaints.
--> this sig is a waste of your bandwidth --
i'm just wondering, have you asked those volunteers if they found this a slap in their face? why should they? i don't think that anybody of them have such attitude: "i've put my hard work in the product so don't you dare making money off it"
All the more reason for Microsoft to get on with a port of IE to Linux. As much as MS seem to be evil incarnate and the Anti-GNU (Compare Anti-Christ). Their Browsers still seem to be more stable, and trouble free (even under Windoze). Netscape froze my box twice last week, not simply a segfault, but total lockup.
A little off topic: No matter what people say, the user interface of MS software is one of the best thought up, the back end, of course does leave a bit to be desired. I personally am waiting for MS Window Manager. With this in front and Linux as the engine, you couldn't go wrong.
Okay, the IE versus Navigator 4.x vs Mozilla discussion is woefully weak on specifics.
Here's my take:
1) Standards Compliance
IE for Windows has better standards compliance than Nav 4.x, but nowhere near as good as Mozilla. IE for Mac is almost as good as that of Mozilla, from what I've read (but no way am I gonna use a Mac just for that!) IE 6 is just around the corner, apparently - let's hope it ups their standards. "We've upped our standards, so up yours!" and all that...
2) Speed
IE seems to connect & download pages faster, and displays very fast (and incrementally reflows, too, even on browser resizing). Nav 4.x connects fast, downloads okay, and displays fairly fast, but has no incremental reflow - very annoying. Mozilla connects, displays, and reflows faster than anything (at least, as of the last night's nightly build). Fastest of all - K-Meleon (Galeon for Windows, basically). Any native framework around the Gecko rendering engine is likely to be faster than anything else. You may pay the price in other features, though (K-Meleon is currently _extremely_ barebones, though that will change soon, I hope.)
3) Stability
IE on Win98SE - not the greatest, on a par (for me, on four completely different machines) with Nav 4.x - only problem is, when it crashes, it often forces you to reboot, or just locks up the whole machine, which Nav 4.x doesn't do. Mozilla - as of last night's daily build, it's 'okay' - the main problem is the Manage Bookmarks feature, which is SLOW SLOW SLOW, and buggy as hell. It doesn't correctly import older Nav 4.x bookmarks (my bookmarks file is rather huge), and moving them around you can lose things entirely, and it's just amazingly slow. It causes the browser to slow down on loadup with a large bookmarks file, too. Very irritating. Hopefully this will change - stability & speedups are currently in the works. Numerous reports of major memory leaks in Mozilla - obviously this browser is still in heavy development though.
4) Interface
IE - pretty standard Windows - easy to figure out if that's what you've been using. Horribly crippled interface for managing bookmarks. Just Horrible. And I hate how they're stored, too (each URL as an individual file, though that's a personal preference).
Nav 4.x - mostly standard for Windows - has some quirks. Very good bookmark management - allows much better bookmark access than any of the others, including Mozilla.
Mozilla - needs to take a look at managing bookmarks & accessing bookmarks in Nav 4.x and implement it. Needs 10-50x speed improvement (not exaggerating) in bookmark management. Something seriously wrong there. In the interface arena, Mozilla will have major advantages for heavy customization, and customization more easily accomplished than for IE, but with the possibility of loading down the browser with a lot of junk - but that's the user's choice! Lean and mean theme or heavy on the eye candy - it's up to you. Choice is Good(tm). I prefer a native widget set framework around the Gecko engine, so I like Galeon for Linux, and I think the K-Meleon project for Windows will do quite well in the future. I've heard that there may be a similar project for the MacOS, but I don't know. Considering the reported quality of IE for the Mac, I'm not sure how necessary that is, unless someone wants a native Mac OS X type browser.
5) Platform Independence
IE - total joke. "Multiple platforms" from MS means Win2K, WinME & Win98 at best. Nav 4.x - excellent. Mozilla - also excellent.
6) Features
IE - very very good, especially considering it's target market. Very good feature set if you're not concerned with security by default (yes, Microsoft, I mean you). On an Intranet basis, IE and it's ActiveX controls can do some fantastic things. On the Internet at large, freaking scary. It's got good regular browser features except for the horribly-crippled bookmark management & access, which should be an easy fix (you'd think).
Nav 4.x - pretty good, better cookie & cache management than IE (though I think there may be an update for additional cookie features for IE - not sure). Very good bookmark management (on a par with Spry Mosaic of old...). Incremental reflow - none, which is very very bad.
Mozilla - very very good, easily on a par with IE for Internet usage - better bookmark management, though still quite buggy in that department. Better cookie management, also has better image loading management (ability to only load images from the same domain as the website - which is not present in the Navigator 6). Very extensible, albeit in a different way than IE.
So that's my take on the situation. Each browser has it's good and bad points - like anything else, it's a matter of how things work on YOUR systems (some people find IE more stable than Nav 4.x, some less so - depends on your machine). Many interface issues are a matter of personal preference. Some people don't need the extensive bookmark handling that I demand. Some people want better security. Some people don't run Windows as their primary platform (or at all). Keep in mind many of IE's loading speed advantages are being it loads many DLLs at bootup - Nav & Mozilla aren't allowed to do that. Also note that using a native widget framework around the Gecko renderer can help approach that loading speed (you folks really should check out the K-Meleon project).
Okay, that's enough for now...
I've got a *SMALL* site, but I'm willing to go all-netscape if I can. I don't know HTML, so someone point me in a good, cheap/open source HTML editor so I can dump frontpage, and find me a "Netscape Now!" button.
e-mail, please.
The original contents of this comment were clear copyright violation. They were cut & pasted from this site. This text has been removed at the request of the copyright holder.
Look at the percentage of code that has been provided by Netscape employees, not even including any of the original code-base stuff--just since they open sourced it.
Given that, I have no problem if they do exactly what anyone else is free to do.
-db
People are upset that Netscape is doing things that make money for it's company. Netscape was started to make money - it has never been an altruistic company that decided to give away its browser for free. It's always been free for non-commericial use - but until Microsoft made IE free, you still had to pay for Netscape for commercial applications. Well, then they're upset that they're using Mozilla's codebase - Mozilla was started by Netscape. Netscape can do what they damn well please with the code - anyone who volunteered for the project knew what they were getting in to. In short - Netscape is doing things to make money because, well, that's what companies do. Yes, they have commerical applications (FastTrack web server, etc), but...well, a company is supposed to make money. Nobody bitches about RedHat (well, okay, they *do*, but...) making money off the Linux kernel, but it boils down to the same thing... Just my two cents...
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
What does nutscrape provide that Mozilla doesn't? Couldn't you just continue to use Mozilla on it's own? It's got email and browsing and news. What more do you need? And with the mozilla engine available, I'm guessing we'll be seeing a LOT of packaged programs to choose from, not just from AOL.
Haven't the inclination yet to try netscape 6, so we'll just see what Mozilla matures to...
Jason
Not mine. Takes tooooooo long to load and problems I said "well maybe it will be fixed by final release" are still there. Go check out www.warehouse.com in IE then NS4 then NS6.
I'll stick to IE on my windows and mac thanks.
For linux ns4 for now.
Well, NS6 gave me more AOL junk, but it has a bunch of stuff that I couldn't get for mozilla.
Rather than fix up NS6, try this on for size:
Copy the contents of the PLUGINS folder from Netscape 6 into the BIN/PLUGINS folder of Mozilla (except for npnul32.dll) to increase plugin compatability for Mozilla.
This was the final step for me; now I use Mozilla for all browser activities. - oh, and this is for Windows, so I don't know how it will work on Linux or Mac.
oh, and don't overwrite anything, and do include the CVS subdirectory. enjoy!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Netscape has been going downhill since 3.0, they started playing the 'be like IE' game and lost most of what made their browser great. Can't they just stick with something to get me where I want to go?
I'm stubbornly sticking with 3.0 until someone comes up with a small-footprint 6.0.
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
shit i've had enough hearing you bastards bash netscape for no apparent reason. alright we all know that netscape isn't exactly the company to trust when it comes to standards. but this is just silly, critizing this product for having a few intergrated links to netscape is just sad now. look people they haven't done anything wrong or unexpected, they haven't violated to GPL, they haven't broken standards by introducing their own shit.
everyone expected netscape to put in a few netscape or aol addons to mozilla when they release the product. these people have to generate revenues somehow you know? i don't see anything wrong with that. it's not like they have a popup ad that's always on top and closing it would render the program unusable. there's no market for selling browsers anymore thanks to microsoft. having a few links and making you sign up to a webmail service isn't exactly that much of a pain. yes they're trying to make everyone use the same service it's AOL for god sakes. but it's not like they force you to run AIM or shove cnet news up your ass.
it seems like most people here are just bashing it just because it's from netscape. when i installed the release yesterday i had the same feeling, i thought they released it a month too early and they could of waited till all the standard bugs were fixed. but i've been using it as my primary browser since yesterday and it's changed my mind. yes this leave a memory leak even after closing (im in windows). yes it takes longer for it to load at first. but it's very usable! i think it's good enough to be a commercial release, waiting another month isn't gonna fix anything. they've resolved all the speed issues and it's very frigging fast.
yes the nightly builds are more updated but it's the friggin development branch! you think a lot of companies are gonna randomly pick a mozilla nightly build and run a business around it?
i personally will keep running netscape 6 cause i like it. at the same time i'll keep experimenting with the mozilla nightly builds just because they're cool. im pretty friggin impressed by opera too. you can run what ever the hell you want. just don't insult the work of other people just because there's a department called marketing and one called management that decided to add some input to keep the company from going bankrupt.
More important to me than using is being able to get my work done with the least amount of hassle. This is why my work machine, and my primary home machine (where I do far too much work) run Microsoft.
I think Netscape does count on, to a certain extent, having a core group of users who install the buggy code the produce simply to flaunt being anti-Microsoft. They then move to exploit that group by providing links to their products, selling ad space that can be targetted to that demographic, and other things that keep lining their pockets.
I am considering switching to Linux on the home machine now that I can do almost everything I need in Star Office, but since my new DSL Line is going to use a USB bridge I may hold off for a bit (until I get off my lazy couch and get a router, a few NICs and install them). Chances are that I'll run it for a while, find some annoying thing that I have to do routinely is easier to deal with in Win, and revert.
If I considered myself more of a system administrator or developer I might view this differently. My work environment wouldn't then be Windows desktops with clients written for Windows (or pure HTML clients). As a matter of fact, I wish someone would port DDD and a few other utilities to MS.
- I settled down long enough to write this and have now collected far too much dust. Damn Dust.
a.) Look at the Favorite menu that comes with MSIE. It's littered with MS and MSNBC links as well as some others (MSN, hotmail, etc). Plus, you don't think the other links create any revenue for MS?
b.) Home, Search, and Animated Logo buttons all go to sites owned by MS.
c.) The tools menu also includes links to MSN, Net2Phone, and Related links.. MS sites. Help menu choices go to MS.
d.) Add in channels and there are even more MS links.
Can a posted article be flamebait? If yes, this is the perfect example. Comparing the number of commercial links in Netscape to IE is pure FUD. With IE you have already made the sacrifice to the commerical gods when you payed through the nose for windows and the eternal upgrade treadmill. Granted there are versions of IE for other platforms but they just create the impression that anything but Microsoft is "second best".Netscape was grasping for staws when theirrevenue streamwent up in smokeafter a certain unnamed monopoly started giving away a "worthy competitor" to their main product. Do I hate the ads? Hell yeah but that doesn't mean I am going to start comparing apples to oranges. The day that Microsoft releases the code for IE is the day I'll eat this post along with the snowball slushies I am snacking on in hell. The Mozilla developer'shard work did not create Netscape 6, it created Mozilla. Sure AOL/Netscape slapped on some ads and changed the appearance around a bit but that does not distract one iota from what Mozilla has acheived. In fact, in my mind it simply strengthens the accomplishment. Mozilla's bugs get fixed faster, you can do more with it, and the cool vibrancy that once belonged to Netscape has been unleashed to developers over the net and we can play with the code. I am glad Netscape stuck it out even if they do stupid things with the code they are provided. If you are given two choices pick the third; Mozilla. If you don't like that then just use Netscape 6 & junkbuster. If you don't like that stop whining and make you own version.
~~ What's stopping you?
I, too, am sick of the increasing number of junk buttons and junk features that have been creaping into Netscape. I don't use them. I want them eradicated. They provide negative value to me.
s/When/Until/g
The problem with "Until" is that we're still waiting. For three fscking years.
And every one of those years has given IE more market share and marginalized Nutscrape.
I'll believe it when I see it.
And I'm someone who also prefers NS3 over NS4. It renders stuff twice as fast as NS4. And what I've seen out of Mozilla hasn't been encouraging in that regard either.
P.S. I preferred NS3 to NS4 because
NS3's its toolbar is narrower - no "My Netscape", no "Search" button - and why did "Security" have to be a menu button? My NS4 session has to take up over half the screen just to let me click "Stop"
Turning image-autoload on/off, enabling/disabling Java and Javashit are several mouse-clicks and moseovers faster in NS3 than NS4.
Until I see an offering from Nutscrape/Mozilla that makes it easier for me to turn off the spam than NS3, I'll remain skeptical.
I parse this as "We spent all this time doing the skinning and XML-fu so that you could turn off the chrome"
I got a idea. The user base never wanted a "development platform", they wanted a web browser.
How 'bout just writin' a web browser and not puttin' the chrome in there in the first place.
The only advantage I see to NS6 over NS4 is that it's easier to turn off the extra crap in NS6. Maybe if they'd spent more time writing a web browser and less time writing an extensible chrome display platform, they'd have ended up with a better browser.
The reason people are "bashing Mozilla" isn't because they're ungrateful, it's been three years and it still sucks harder than NS3.
(Or to put it another way - for those of us who just want a friggin' web browser that sucked less than NS3, what do we have to be thankful for?)
When was the last time an end user cared about standards-compliance, especially when standards-compliance means that many of the web pages they use on a daily basis will no longer render correctly?
Cliff wrote:
>I've found at least 42 (hey- there's that magic number again) toolbar or menu options that will take you to netscape.com
Note that you cannot find any reference to "support" on any netscape.com web page.
It's got so many features that outclass the old netscape... reliability isn't one of them.
Initially, it started using ~/.netscape/*, then, between some rapid crashes, it quit using that in favor of ~/.mozilla/* (i.e. I lost all my bookmarks and preferences, and have no idea how to set it back again).
Chris
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
I never click any of those damn things anyway. As for the ?keyword search...i didn't know anyone did that. If i want to search i type in http://www.google.com/ There's alot of crap in 4.x that will bring you to netscape's site, but i never use any of it.
Last time I tried to change my home page I ended up voteing for Pat Buchanan.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
What do you think all the developers that Netscape pays to work on Mozilla is. It is a total payback. If you don't like the Netscape branded browser then run Mozilla, but it is kinda hypocritical to say that Netscape doesn't give back anything to Mozilla, when the vast majority of the Mozilla developers in fact work for Netscape.
I make no argument concerning the fair treatment of Mozilla developers; I don't know enough about that to comment. But I did want to throw the above into the mix!
-Omar
If the point is that releasing mozilla as open source is only "lining Netscape's pocket", what's your point. The point to me is that they released the damn thing. I mean, isn't the idea of open source that anyone can use it for anything they want to? Who cares if they just point back to their own crappy travel services. The source is out there--if you don't like it, write your own!
Furthermore, open source software is used across the board for profitable operations. What about Apache? This is a true community project, that is used left and right for commercial purposes (ahem...Slashdot?). Should we bitch and complain that Apache is being used by nefarious corporate entities with the sole purpose of making a buck?
My other computer is your Windows box
It's a first release of a new codebase, give it time to mature a little.
You Like Science?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
besides the fact that the installer is one of those downloaders, is the fact that you get to watch flashing advertisements while you download. They're kind of small unfortunately.
at first I picked custom install (I don't need Instant Messenger, Gaim works fine for me, I don't want Mail and News, maybe it will keep the god damn ~/Mail folder out of my ~/). So it downloads it all and installs it. /usr/local/netscape/netscape and I get some strange errors (in fact I am lacking some ./Cool library directory). Ok fine, install the whole damn thing, I have bandwith to waste...
./Cool directory (what a name really!)
* ************
* ************
:: /usr/local/netscape/components/nsSample.js :: anonymous :: line 72" data: no]
* ************
.02
Installs it, got the
Here are the errors...
***********************************************
*** Registering sample JS components
***********************************************
* Call to xpconnect wrapped JSObject produced this error: *
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIComponentManager.registerComponentWithType]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame
***********************************************
gotta love that. I would have prefered the damn tar.gz file.
Just my worthless
So you run IE on Linux? yea, and pigs fly...
BTW: Mozilla in linux is VERY stable, and it isn't even beta...
You know what are you talking about? The M$ JVM SUCKS! and they haven't improved it in years... SUN JVM is really good, not very fast but A LOT more updated. And if you want a fast JVM use the one from IBM
Did you ever wrote a Java program for the M$ JVM?? please shut up!
Again you don't know what are you talking about, Mozilla supports JavaScript 1.5 and is working in the new ECMA standard and JavaScript 2.0, please visit http://www.mozilla.org/js/ and inform yourself...
Really good at not implementing the standards you mean? The IE support of XSL-T XML Schema, DOM(Levels 1 and 2) and CSS(1 and 2) is broken and I wonder if they plan to fix it... IE even didn't support completely HTML 4.01
Yea, AOL and Netscape marketing sucks BUT the majority of the Netscape developers working in Mozilla are Gods, not only great developers, but very nice people. And yes, I hate PDT(if you want to see how much I dislike them read bug #3935)!
For you information not only volunteers(as me) work in Mozilla, in mozilla work people from: AOL, Netscape, SUN, QNX, IBM, RedHat, Intel, Be...
And may be volunteers don't have the big bucks of M$, but many of them are Gods(Robert O'Callahan, Blake, Jag, Pike... and all the others: YOU ROCK!), and they put a big effort working in Mozilla, you should be thankful!
I'm tired to answer to your stupid affirmations...
It's a shame you got moderated up, seems that now SlashDot readers use Win+IE, loves M$ and closed source... AND THEY BELIEVE IE WORKS ON IE!!
Please don't continue insulting my intelligence...
Best regards
Uriel
- - - - - -
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I have tried to use several of the official AOL Netscape 6 Betas but keep going back to Netscape 4.72. Netscape 6 is not only unstable, but littered with the AOL crap described in the article.
I can only hope that when Mozilla stabilizes, it will provide all of the benefits (yeah, I'm out on a limb here) and none of the AOL hooks of Netscape.
Waiting patiently,
--brian
as others have said, its just a text file...edit it.
to take it another step..read this
That will get rid of all the crap on the tool bar. Also edit the Netscape.ad file (forget where it is), to make a ton of changes to the way netscape looks, and feels.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Discounting politcal, free, whatever, are there any technical/user interface reasons that I would ever want to use Netscape instead of Mozilla? Is there anything that Netscape provides (that I would want) that Mozilla doesn't have?
- I like pudding.
Users on Windoze boxen who want something that renders their most commonly-referenced web pages anywhere near as fast as IE.
Having used recent Mozilla nightlies under Win95 a couple times recently (girlfriend still lives in Windows), I can tell you that Mozilla is almost, if not just as, fast as IE at page rendering.
Basically, anyone without an Athlon at 1.2 GHz and 256M of RAM.
I'm running a PII-266, 96 MB of RAM. Your point?
Seriously, I haven't run into many pages where the standards compliance of Mozilla has prevented me from viewing a badly-written page. Joe Luzer should have few to no problems using Mozilla (can't speak for Netscape 6, since Moz is a bit farther ahead) to view their favorite pages.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
but isn't part of the point of open source that we can develop better software instead of bloatware?
Do you actually code?
You want full (compliant) implementations with all sorts of things like style sheets, javascript, the latest html standard, and at the same time you want the brower to run like hot shit off a greased shovel. Hate to break it to you, but with the amounts that those things have evolved its a hell of a lot more than the NS3 team ever had to even think about. Even if you go feature for feature with NS3 (lets say javascript support) I garuantee you the current implementations are going to be slower (and larger), because the standards have grown to encompas more things. You have to put in new hooks and rewrite your code to support more stuff. Its not bloatware. Users expect a certain minimum set of features. That set is larger now than it was 2 years ago. The software has to grow to accomodate it, it has to do more work to implement them. Now add in some debugging code and hell no wonder its slower than 4.76 (at least on my P200 MMX) but it doesn't crash half as much.
--locust.
Heres that details the changes you may have to make to netscape 6 compatible.
I know, I know Mozilla. However the point is still relevant.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Just try to kick IE's ass... that's all that needs to be focused on.
Strive for standards.
Become a small and efficient browser that works on all platforms
Try to think of *one way* to make money for the company -- do the AOL no-homepage thing, or sell it for $10 a crack.
and then I don't think anything could stop it from being the best / most profitale browser.
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Folks, the time has come, or rather it has passed. Netscape lost the war, freed its source, and now exploits the hard labor of worldwide coders for its own benefit. Our predecessors couldn't stop plutocrats from gaining unwanted capital, but we can: don't use Netscape! Don't wanna use IE? Mozilla's still pretty good in its most recent incarnations, and Opera works well with only minor plugin compatiblity problems :) RISE UP!
"As long as we sanction the bum on the plush/
The other will always be there/
But rid ourselves of the bum on the plush/
And the other will disappear!
So do yourselves a wonderful favor/
Get rid of the wasted crush/
Don't worry about the bum on the rods/
Get rid of the bum on the plush."
-- The Two Bums, J. Hill
"Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
Move to the country/Build you a home"
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Tons of AOL/Netscape money goes back to Mozilla. They employ dozens of programmers and peripheral support people, they provide the network which hosts the Mozilla project, and they provide the build farm upon which Mozilla is built.
Face it. This is over the top. The commercialization of the Internet has even caught that old vanguard Netscape. Sad, and shame.
No, it's more like complaining about Ford installing a GPS unit on the dash the continuously tells you (probably using that same annoying voice that Nissan used in the '80s "Your Door Is A Jar. Your Door Is A Jar.") how to get to the nearest Ford dealer, Ford gas station, Ford grocery store, Ford drive thru liquor mart, Ford jewelry store, Ford poodle groomer, Ford laundramat, Ford opera house, Ford shopping mall, Ford amusement park, Ford pizza shack, Ford egg roll stand, Ford shoe shine, Ford savings bank, Ford video rental, Ford electronics supercenter, Ford home improvement mart and so forth. In addition to this there would be a large glowing button next to the brake pedal (Stop) that would cause your truck to drive itself immediately to the nearest Ford dealer (Shop).
Fortunately, Ford does not do this. On my Ford truck there is a smallish blue logo on the grill and tailgate and a small embossed logo on the airbag cover. These are the only really obvious logos on the truck. There are probably a few more like on the inspection sticker on the drivers door jam, but I don't notice them. This compares pretty well with IE. On the version of IE I use at work (5.5) there's an IE logo in the title bar and the animated one in the upper right corner of the window. There are probably also such logos in the about box and help files, but I never look at those so I don't remember.
I do notice however that in NS 4.73 the Stop button is right next to the Shop button which bugs the hell out of me since I like text buttons better than icons. Oh well, I'm using Konqueror now and liking it.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it.
Knucklehead. Who exactly do you think is paying for mozilla.org and the salaries of most of the programmers?
"And just why shouldn't it run fine on a 486/50? NS3 did."
Because that isn't the niche that they're aiming for, and you have to code differently to run on lower-end platforms. If you've written firmware code and then compared it to Mozilla and other high-end code, you'd understand. There are a bunch of things that you can add to make the code MUCH more easily extendable and managable, but those items have their processing and memory costs. The overhead costs involved with that type of coding becomes extremely minimal with today's (and the last 4 year's computers), and it makes development MUCH faster.
Back when NS3 was released (tries to think back), I think that 486's would have been the upper-end machines. Now Pentium III 900 MHZ's are the upper end machines, and it runs nice and fast on my Pentium II 233 at home (which I bought 4 years ago). Take a look at Mozilla Classic code in bonsai if you have the time. You'll quickly see why they decided to throw it all out, it was from a different era, where programming decisions were different.
As for "bloat", the only "bloat" that is arguably by design in mozilla is XPFE (that unique user-interface). If you want to run on a lower-end computer, try Gaelon and Kmellon, and all of the other projects that take the rendering engine and slap a native UI on it. For the rest of the population, the XPFE adds so much flexability to the User Interface (enough to make Mozilla a full development platform!) that it is well worth it. There is still a lot of unintentional (read: buggy) bloat in Mozilla, and a lot of that has to do with the caching code running improperly. If we get that under control, we could probably take another 4 or 5 Megs off the footprint. But you have to realize that rendering features cost memory.
Most of the people who complain about Mozilla being "bloaty" really don't WANT a full featured, "has EVERYTHING" kind of browser that Mozilla is designed to be. (And I'm talking about Java/Javascript/XHTML/CSS2/3 features, not the stupid troll about "We don't want a mail reader/irc client/composer" when everyone who has been paying any attention realizes that you don't have to download those things if you don't want them!). That's fine for them, they can go and get a stripped down browser somewhere else. But that's NOT what Mozilla is designed to be, and it shouldn't have to apologize for not fitting into lynx's size and CPU use footprint.
486's are fine for being a firewall locked into a closet or for doing basic text editing/word processing with TeX. In fact, I bought a 486 laptop (that looks like it could be dropped from a 20 story building and still survive) to do just that (for $40 NZ). But as a desktop computer to do web surfing these days? Give me a break! I think the average 486 is 6 or 7 years old now. If you're THAT behind the curve, there's not much that application developers can do to work with you, except to say "Insist on using an old computer? Then you should use old software."
I completely understand this. A lot of my projects have been doing the performance tuning stuff...which is the opposite. However, IMHO when making a user-centered project you should not make it this bloated. And, if you do, it should be more modular by design. That way, parts of it can truly be unloaded from memory. I believe there was some discussion of making Mozilla more modular at one point..although its been a long while since I followed its production.
Sure I feel that Netscape is being greedy, but it's not like they are going to come to a revelation and realize they're mistakes. If they're greedy from the start, it only gets worse. I'm curious...how much money did Netscape pay for Mozilla technology? Might they still be paying Mozilla for the code....monthly?
IMHO I do not care if they self-promote themselves a bit. They need to pay the bills. Understood.
However, when they begin to make the product more bloated in order to suit their needs..I have a problem with that. Netscape 6 used like 3 times as much memory as 4.7 one my machine. Did they make a deal with RAM manufacturers or summin? Is that one of those other built in money makers? Self-advertising to help with expenses is ok for me...(to a point..as long as you can get rid of most of it) But making the product more of a resource hog...yuck!
I dunno if they fixed this in 4.75, but in 4.73, Netscape thoughtfully places the "Personal Toolbar Folder" bookmark entry back, no matter how many times I try and delete it (or edit the bookmark file). Highly annoying.
A cursory look at IE reveals the following links to microsoft:
1)The default home page is www.msn.com
2)ALL of the predefined links go to microsoft.com/redir.dll?
3) The search button and results go to search.msn.com
4) The only webmail service that works with Outlook express is Hotmail.
5) Adding a secure certificate takes you to MS partners.
6) By default everytime you boot up IE it goes to www.microsoft.com/ie/ to check for a new version (NOT MATTER WHAT YOUR HOMEPAGE IS).
7) The copyright link takes you to http://www.microsoft.com/misc/cpyright.htm
8) Windows update.
9) Online support takes you to http://support.microsoft.com/directory/
and many others
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
> AND THEY BELIEVE IE WORKS ON IE!!
;)
Ops.. on Linux I mean... I was too angry
Best regards
Uriel
- - - - - -
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I've switched from IE to Mozilla 18 now... and I'm pretty happy... I even find that side bar useful now too. Arranging the bookmarks is easier to do in Mozilla than IE as well. My only citicism is that IE still loads faster, though this may be because it is bastardized into the win32 shell too. I can't help wondering if the load time would have been faster if they'd concentrated on the browser itself... Because, in spite of all the add-ons useful features, I still don't use their email or news clients and for web editing, I generally prefer text. Still... forget Netscape... use the Mozilla builds.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Of course, Netscape is too self-serving! Hey, this is an American company, which tried to self-persuade itself and to persuade its investors that it could make money by enforcing people to come, even accidentally, on their web sites. All this in a country where most newspapers are unreadable because 90% of their content is commercials, or where most movies and TV shows are impossible to watch for the exact same reasons, and where hospitals and lawyers advertise on the street and on TV. So what did you expect, exactly?
...and Galeon can include what *they* like and you and I can include what *we* like.
Mozilla is the base, the corner stone to be built on. Netscape is free to build as they choose and they have chosen to integrate features of their site into the browser. Good for them. I hope it works for them(very little else has).
If you don't like Netscape don't use it. Use Mozilla or Galeon or roll your own, it's your choice...that's the power of the source.
Me, I use Mozilla. The nightly builds are faster and more stable than Netscape and I have no interest in the Netscape links either.
As someone who has used IE on unix... touting that its available for Solaris (etc...) is about the same as saying McDonalds has a great new fish sandwhich. Yah its prolly fish, and it may be okay, but great? IE for unix, simply, sucks. Try it.
I'm not saying nutscrape is any better, but at least it exists on all the forms of unix that I run into everyday.
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--- I do not moderate.
Better?? I've had IE crash when trying to load a web page with one static picture on it, much less a Flash animation.
Frankly, I don't like either. But I am using Netscape 4.7 currently and there's no problems with that version. Yet.
What is it with the IT software industry anyways? Let's promote a new version even before we've worked all the bugs out of the old version, stop supporting the old version so the End Users have to get the new version, and repeat until rich? Is that all there is to it?
Am I surprised by Netscape/AOL/whoever doing this? No. But I would be pleasantly surprised if one company would release a new browser or OS that wasn't buggy as Hell(tm).
Just my 2 shekels.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
i think the question better asked here is "does netscape suck?"
but this is really a rhetorical question because everyone knows the answer is "yes"
goes for mozilla too
www.godhatesnetscape.com
IE AND KONQ 4 EVER BOOYES
I agree with you totally. In previous verisons of Netscape (Netscape Gold 3, I believe), there was one place you could link to the website. Now, there's a button and other various locations throughout the browser. Being an Internet Explorer user at the moment, IE only sends you over directly to Microsoft's site when you go to Windows Update. Now, I'm not sure what the IE default homepage is. I wiped mine out first thing, but I think it was msn.com. The only really way to avoid the Netscape and IE stuff is to go to Opera. But then again, they might be the same exact way. One way to find out.. try it.
.. that garf were removable. Haven't tried the 6.0 flavor yet, but the 4.7x bunch just absolutely will not let you take the preformated sections out of your bookmark file.
There are a few other reasons why I'm probably going to stick with Mozilla at home, but when the admins at work give us a choice I'll probably take it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"bschoate": you're a fscking luser!
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Instead of complaining about it, we should be glad that Netscape is still heavily supporting Mozilla development. So in fact, some of those dollars do go back into Mozilla.
No, IE's success is that it (at least the 5.x series) is that it's a better browser. It's faster, stabler, and has a superior user interface. Anyone who's been using a Netscape 4.x version and thinks they're getting a "better" browser purely because it meets their political ideals is deluded at best.
slashdot: these are some serious questions about the integrity of Netscape and there relationship with Mozilla. we asked the mozilla rep, Pimpbot2000 for his thoughts on the matter.
Pimpbot2000: WHERES MY MONEY! I"M GONNA CUT YOU BITCH!
-- Hail Eris
Hey, Netscape has the right to try and make a nickel. If you don't like the browser, don't use it. Simple.
There's nothing wrong with Netscape's JavaScript. It just supports a broken DOM model and so is cumbersome to use (often using 4-5 levels of indirection to do the simplest things like getting the value of a form field). My understanding is this is being fixed, and pretty soon you won't need two versions of JS on your pages.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I have Netscape 6 installed, and so far I have not been forced to go to any Netscape sites. In fact, I find their options to be quite unintrusive. As a counterpoint, I think a lot of people (namely your parents, who can barely move a mouse) will be happy to have so many pages to go to as a starting point, without having to wander aimlessly around search engines to find what they want. For those who think IE is a saint in this matter, do I need to point out how many times various MSN sites are put in front of you? A website that doesn't come up goes to an MSN search box. The first time you bring up the browser it tries to make MSN your default home page. In the tools menu are links to Net2Phone and MSN messenger, and the favorites folder comes packed with various pages Microsoft would like you to visit to line their pockets. IE bundles their media player, their MSN client, their email program, and various "integration" features together. Why don't we all grow up a little, realize that Netscape (and Microsoft) are trying to make a profit (as you would in their position), and stop looking for the conspiracy monsters under your beds. If you don't like the links to the Netscape site, don't click on them. I'm sure the browser will continue to work regardless.
GNOME and KDE are both non-profit organizations, whether they're registered that way or not.
The purpose of KDE or GNOME is NOT to make money. In fact, they don't make money. They don't sell you anything. I challenge you to find even a shred of text that mentions anything remotely close to money.
Maybe it is that they solicit donations. But the links on the GNOME desktop are links to documentation, bug lists, and the main GNOME page. These are useful links to most people; they contain information about using GNOME, information on bugs, new releases of GNOME, and a listing of software created to run in GNOME. The links aren't there to make money, or to bring in donations. They are useful links.
You can tell when a link is there to make money, and when it's supposed to be useful... Last I checked, the default Netscape/IE start pages are commercial pieces of crap that offer more information you need, in a format designed to appeal to anybody but you, that serve no conceivable purpose in the electronic universe.
GNOME pages satisfy none of these conditions.
Regarding KDE, the last time I compiled v2.0, it only placed one link to a KDE site on my desktop, which is a link to the main page. Like the GNOME site, this page contains bug and release info, and documentation.
My problem with Netscape is not that they've cheesed up a fair browser to make a quick buck, but that they've turned out what is obviously untested code. The browser can't even display SSL pages without crashing. If you look in the about dialog, NS6 is really just Mozilla M18 with AOL Instant Messenger, and a splash screen on startup. Coming from a reputable company like Netscape, you would expect a well-tested browser that wasn't thrown together so hastily. At least they could have but some time into the widgets, to make them display faster--while not as bad as M12 and the like, these still work a lot slower than the old Motif ones did. They should use Qt, GTK, or stick with Motif.
Technically, I guess Netscape lost their respectablility when AOL took the reigns. In a software company that appeals to the masses, there is a tendency to produce shit for products. Still, there is no guarantee that Netscape would not have gone south without AOL... But this didn't help any.
Do you see the difference between Microsoft and AOL? Microsoft, at least up until pre-Whistler, put actual time into interface development, made their products look suitable for business use. AOL, however, stuffs bullshit down your throat to keep people happy who can barely power on their PC. Microsoft probably started out trying to do great things, and then became popular and so got sidetracked. AOL, however, started out hoping to grab the masses.
In my opinion, that makes Microsoft more venerable than AOL as a corporation.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
Would you care to explain what features other webmail services supply that would allow Outlook Express to provide access to them? Outlook Express isn't an HTML screen-scraper, you know.
--
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
As my friend "John Whorfin" always says...
HAR!
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
A recent survey of my (pretty popular) web site showed 78% IE-derived browsers and 18% Mozilla-derived. I wonder what percentage of the Mozilla users were actually from AOL. There's not much incentive for a Windows user (95% of our users) these days to actually go out and download a second bloated browser suite onto their system.
As I surf web sites, more are putting features into the browser that are best viewed on Windows boxes. The old standard for HTML-rich sites used to be "Our web page is best viewed with a Netscape or Microsoft browser". Now people mainly develop for IE first and work in compatability for Mozilla, AOL and/or WebTV (still a significant percentage, but dwindling into unimportance).
AOL bought Netscape, so AOL will keep it alive until it make more sense to put something else on their direct-mail CDs. Long live Mozilla.
What's up with Neoplanet? They used to be a cool alternative to Mozilla when it didn't crash my Windows PC.
-- EZ
This was always the case with Netscrape!
Mosaic was paid for by tax-payers (for the most part). That source code started Netscrape, and 2 other companies.
So why be pissed off now? You should have been mad 4 years ago. Stop supporting AOL.
BTW: 42 links back to Netscrape? Damn!!!
//iacovou
I don't see what all the fuss was about... I figured it was pretty obvious that Netscape would continue to profit while Mozilla would develop. Hasn't that been the way from the beginning? Netscape's still the business side of it... and as pets.com and priceline.com can tell ya, you need money to run a business.
...it's called Opera.
--
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Find free books.
I would say it categorically *does*, considering that Netscape/AOL still pays the salaries of many of the major mozilla developers. So again, the slashdot tempest-in-a-teacup reaction.
/ISP deployment)
Not that I support this banner-mania at all. I think it's pretty ridiculous that *this* is the value-add Netscape is providing in their rebundling of Mozilla. There are plenty of other features they could have been supporting that would address the core markets for a browser:
- Customizability for corporate / ISP deployment
- Fine-grained security features (again, for corporate
- Bundling templates for Composer, to assist with the beginning web-developer
- An actual useful set of default bookmarks, not just a set of links to Netscape. Maybe even several "bookmark" packs that you can pick at install ("Do you want to buy stuff off the web?" "Do you need to do academic research?", etc.)
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Today I downloaded Netscape 6. While using it on my G4 cube, I noticed that the disk was accessing without my doing anything with the machine. I turned on my MacTCP Watcher and noticed something funny. When I access my home page with Netscape 4.76, I get this in the OT connection list: TCP Listening echo 0.0.0.0:Any TCP Established 1726 208.136.89.164:http This makes sense to me (a networking novice) as I know my website's (which consists of a single gif image) webserver is at the above ip. However, when I connect to the exact same website with Netscape 6, I get this list of connections: TCP Listening echo 0.0.0.0:Any TCP Established 49264 152.163.243.184:5190 TCP Established 49267 205.188.7.104:5190 TCP Established 49268 205.188.4.48:5190 TCP Established 49269 152.163.241.148:5190 None of these ips live at my isp or my web host. Needless to say, there's something going on here, and I've decided to refrain from using Netscape 6 until I have an answer. I'm hoping one of the gurus can figure this out for me. Thank you. 33nine3
they already made money off of IE users when they bought winblows. and they made a lot more than netscape will by someone visiting their site. netscape has to make money somehow. if you don't like it, use mozilla.
IE also gives you linkes to HOtmail and such...and the MSN radio station and such...i think that Netscape might have more, but IE has more altogether...think of when you install windows...you get all sorts of things that give you oppurtunities to get more MS junk. I personally prefer IE, and Netscape definitely has many things that go back to netscape...i also hate all the windows that ask me if i want to make it my default browser/messanger/everything.... If I wanted that to be my default, i would set it to that myself. I hate when every new audio/email/browser askes me that. argh..it drives me nuts..and RealPlayer won't stop when i say no..it asks me everytime!
The anti-salmon
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Find free books.
And just why shouldn't it run fine on a 486/50? NS3 did.
OK, so we're both exaggerating with that 486/50 crack, but isn't part of the point of open source that we can develop better software instead of bloatware?
I can understand "haha, u luzer, gotta upgr8d!" coming from Micros~1, who has a vested interest in making sure we all get on the upgrade treadmill with each revision of the OS and office suite - the corporate purchaser then purchases more Dells and Compaqs, and MSFT gets to sell more OS licenses.
But from the open source camp, I find that attitide to be disgusting.
Personally, I gave up on Netscape itself a long time ago. I'm using Mozilla when I can but still end up falling back on IE 5 pretty often.
From the beginning of the Mozilla project, I've just seen Netscape as a "Real Browser Plus AOL advertizing" product, and can't for the life of me think of a single reason to even consider using full-blown Netscape instead of Mozilla.
The Netscape browser exists for the single purpose of selling something. If you just want a (relatively) clean, simple browser use Mozilla.
Of course the Netscape browser is full of ads and flashy eye candy, that's the whole point of not just calling Mozilla Netscape.
This article is not very different from complaining about a Ford logo on a Ford truck. Of COURSE Netscape's browser is full of links, it exists for advertizing purposes. IE doesn't have that extra fluff because IE isn't there to sell a browser, but claim market scare for Microsoft. IE isn't a product on it's own, it's a grab for market share.
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Ford doesn't put a logo on its trucks to advertise Ford to the owner of the truck. The Netscape situation is more like the following:
Ceiling of truck covered with unremovable maps directing you to all the Ford owned places you can drive to, but nothing else
Truck asks you if you would like it to be your 'default vehicle' and changes all your car keys to only work in this truck
Low Gas light reminding you to buy some more Ford gas
Big sign behind the spare tire slot reminding you to buy another Ford tire
Actually, I believe they also link to MSN by default as your home page, check Internet Explorer updates by default, and "search" (ever hit ctrl-e instead of ctrl-w) is Microsoft or MSN by default. However, they are not as blatant as Netscape, and that says a whole lot.
Have you read my journal today?
I'm using IE5, and I've got a "Links" toolbar that will graciously connect me to MSN, Windows Media, The M$ Home page, etc. Guess where the "Search" button takes you...it sure ain't Google.
Also, I haven't tried Netscape 6 yet, but I'm constantly annoyed by attempts from other companies (Yahoo, Real, and others...even Netscape) to add their own links and toolbars to IE when I install software on my PC.
So, it may be handled a little differently and may not be quite as obvious, but it still happens.
BTW, I totally agree that at least some of the revenue generated from this practice should go to the Mozilla project. I know it's not legally required (IANAL), but morally, I think it's the right thing to do. (Well, OK. Morally, the right thing to do would be to quit trying to steer people back to the Netscape site any time they click one of the 10,000 new "feature" buttons in their shiny new browser.)
Oh well, at least it isn't another 4.x release.
-------------------------------
change the browser search presets here:
http://www.google.com/options/defaults.html
If there is demand for a different project based of the Mozilla code that doesn't spam you every step of the way to go to Netscape.com, someone will compile it. Noone forced you to use Netscape, and if Netscape dies, oh well, Mozilla will live and someone else will take up the project.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Same could be same for any commercial company that uses open source software. Redhat has linux, HelixCode has Gnome. TT has KDE (Look at GPL of KDE if you don't believe). To make a long story short, that is the food chain.
The reality of it, 90% of mozilla engineers paychecks come from netscape/aol. They are not forced to be there.
The fact that AOL lets players like Galeon and Eazel use GTKMozEmbed for applications is great. That is where the real value of Moz lies. Also, the platform capabilities of mozilla have not even begun to be touched yet.
Only they really know the magnitude of what they created.
;-) It will only get better, faster and more optimized. (As will IE/Opera/Konqu./etc). For me and you as the end user, thats great! Choices , remember.
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For example if you don't want AIM, edit all-packages.rdf and remove all references to aim.jar in it. AIM goes away.
If you don't want certain buttons, open the appropriate JAR file and change the XUL (e.g. communicatorOverlay.xul). The button goes away.
It's hardly rocket science but it demonstrates beautifully the power of chrome over conventional applications.
I have this thing I use daily called "Mozilla", but as far as Netscape goes... ;-)
Seriously, Netscape is spending much too much time on the gewgaws, and not enough tracking the codebase. Mozilla is faster and more stable than Netscape 6, and that really Just Shouldn't Be Able To Happen.
Regards,
Regards,
-scott
I want full W3c compliance with XML, DHTML, CSS and the other standards.
To put it plainly, I no longer trust N$ or M$ not to "change their minds" and screw us all into the ground for a lousy buck and a quarter, or worse, for the sheer joy of it.
The creeping feature creature and technology lockout means that I am eliminating the bells and whistles, moving decision making up to the server (thank heaven's for php and PostgreSQL,) and aiming for the lowest common denominator as a delivery/client platform.
They can take their geegaws and stick 'em where the sun don't shine.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
First off, MSIE does actually have another link back to M$... MSN is the default home page... big deal...
/.ers, but MSIE is better than Netscape, and Netscape's money-grubbing is doing nothing about this. While the Mozilla crew has done a great job with Mozilla, on Windows, at least, it lags behind MSIE. IE renders faster, and, horrors, is more stable. (This seems to be true on Linux, too... My Linux Netscape dumps core about every 5 minutes, whereas IE only does it about every 15 minutes...)
Now, this will come as heresy to
Plug-ins in IE are - just by empirical observation here folks - more stable, too. Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, etc. all cause various problems on my Netscape installs, more so than under IE. Microsoft's JVM is better, as is their implementation of ECMA/JavaScript (embarrasingly for both Sun and Netscape, really). After being lambasted for being nothing but a marketing organization, Microsoft has put a lot of time and money into making the last couple versions of IE really good...
Netscape seems to have decided to take just the opposite approach and become nothing more than a marketing arm of AOL... all the good work is being done for by the Mozilla folks, and as volunteers they're having a hard time keeping up with the big bucks of M$. AOL seems to not give a damn about putting any money into the project to give the engineering effort a fighting chance against the stuff M$ is doing.
IE, at least on Windows, and in the versions I've tested on Linux, is just faster, more stable, more flexible in terms of add-ons it will accept without problems... better.
I'd like to see Mozilla kick their ass, but to do that, I think N$/AOhelL needs to do more than just sponge off their efforts and build links to annoying adverts...
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Here are some of my complaints so far...
1) Netscape's 6.0 installer is very unstable, and has a hard time coping with download problems because of stalls, etc. In fact, it took me a good four tries to get it to actually finish the install. Why can't we just have a tarball or something?
2) Netscape 6 itself breaks a number of standards supported in Mozilla, and is far too oriented to meet AOL's money-grubbing desires. Pardon me, but the browser should be for the user, not JUST the company. Companies have to make money, but I get tired of every single button or menu I click taking me to the horribly-slow Netscape site.
3) Netscape 6 is very unstable, yet the Mozilla code it is based off of runs much more smoothly. Looks like all those commercial tie-ins are causing Netscape to sink under its own commercial weight.
I had high hopes for Netscape. But it just doesn't cut it. I use the Opera for Linux port now, which, even though it is still in the alpha stage technically, can run circles around anything Netscape or Mozilla puts out. Sure there's no Java or plug-in support yet (neither of which I'm desperately needing), and it occasionally crashes, but at least it doesn't have all those weird glitches and standards issues that Netscape has.
On the Linux side, I think it's time we all start looking for or working on something better. I think the BrowseX browser looks particularly promising. It's open source, very capable already, and with some more development, could give the closed commercial browsers run for their money. But whatever happens, I honestly don't think Netscape will ever get much better. AOL simply has its priorities wrong, and has done a disservice to everyone by not coming through on a viable alternative browser.
-----
Anything that can go wr
I'd recommend giving The Internet Junkbuster a try, for filtering out banners. It does wonders on my 33.6kbps modem at home.
Funny story: Today i was browsing the web in Mozilla with that purply color theme on my laptop and some girl came up to me and said "Hey you got the new Netscape, so did I!" Since she wasn't that good looking I wanted to slap her so fucking hard. Before i could even raise the back of my hand she then said "how did you change the N to an M? I promtly told her that it's not Netscape but the Open source browser that netscape is based on (I know it's more complicated than that but on her laptop the background was of the backstreet boys(or Nsinc) so i decided not to explain it all to her...that and i didn't want to have to look at her face)
Unfortunately, they're the only reason sites like Slashdot can stay in business. Or would you prefer to pay for each website you visit?
I thought that latest Mozilla nightlys are more standards compliant than NS6. ;)
:)
Specially after the checkin of your new nsViewManager
Best regards
Uriel
P.S.: You are one of my Gods
- - - - - -
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I dunno if you would call it platform independant but IE is on x86, WinCE machines, PowerPC, and DEC Alpha, and you can use it in Wine on any platform ;P
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Actually, if you've been downloading the newest versions of Netscape for, oh, the last 4 subversions on Windows, you'd know that they've been encroaching steadily. Each version since 4.71 or so has put a damn link to AOL on my desktop and it silently installs AIM now.
I haven't used netscape for browsing for over two years. I do check pages on it though, before I finalize them.
All corporations are money grubbing bastards...if you think otherwise, you're a fool.
I read somewhere that Netscape's 'What's Related' feature was a potential privacy violation, so I've always disabled it immediately upon installing the browser. But NS6 won't let you turn off this 'feature', except on a per-domain basis. So long, Netscape. I may finally grit my teeth and *buy* Opera.
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
It works, but on my Linux box Mozilla's secure pages leave a bunch of little "psm" processes hanging around doing nothing but sucking up all my CPU until I kill the browser.
So they use code that volunteers wrote and turned it into a self-promoting product. Why is this problem? I would first say that the fact that Netscape employees wrote most of the code gives them the moral right to do so. But even if they didn't, anyone is free to do such a thing. I could create a custom version of Mozilla (let's call it FizgigBrowser 6.1, since I have to be ahead) and have every button on there be a link to my homepage. Why is this so wrong? Netscape has graciously given everyone the right to do whatever they please with the code they pay to have written; are they somehow in the wrong for taking advantage of the reciprocal offer of other developers?
"Does any of this money generated by the browser go back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it?"
Um, how about the fact that they've been paying people to work on Mozilla for 32 months and haven't actually gotten any revenue from it yet. Don't you think they've paid their dues several times over by now? (not that there actually _are_ any dues)
I have a tiny bit of code that made it into most of the Linux distributions. Red Hat's desktop has lots of links to Red Hat sites. Should I feel cheated?
You'd think that after web users have been exposed to ad banners on web sites, Eudora, Cute FTP, and any number of other "free" software packages, they'd be used to the notion that good software doesn't come free -- unless you're Microsoft, and you can afford it. Netscape tries to make money from their web site. This is how they get people there.
Besides, the links are all part of the skin. It's only a matter of time before Skinz.org fills up with Netscape skins that lack all the self-promotion. If you're halfway clever, you can even start hacking the code and doing it yourself.
Simple. I know that personally, I would love to know what other browsers (other than lynx) there are out there that will do everything I need (banking, Java, encryption, POP/IMAP mail) and want (load quickly, be up-to-date, have no stupid default bookmarks, display images properly all the time, not suck, not be from Mirco$oft) it to do. This sounds like a problem for Open Source!
Seriously, are there any ALL platform browsers out there that are up to snuff? I (sadly) run NT 4.0 at home, and don't want to have to chuck everything I have out and switch over to *nix just to get away from the Netscape/IE bitchslapfest.
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla? I kinda doubt it.
Most of the development on Mozilla was done by full-time employees of Netscape, working on Netscape's time. So yes, a lot of the money generated by the browser goes back to Mozilla.
I use Netscape (I'm checking out Mozilla right now, but can't find info on how to transfer all my address book info, bookmarks, etc. from Netscape) and have never used the browser itself to do a search. I just go to Google. The rest of the functionality I ignore if I can't change. Besides, if you use the Search function in Mozilla's side panel you wind up at Netscape too.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I agree, It seems the browser is no longer a way to view other peoples websites but a way to get you to visit the browser creators havily ad ridden portal.
Opra Good! Netscape and Microsoft Bad!
The search bar has to go somewhere, so it goes to MSN. (I wonder if you can change it? I've never looked.)
Yes, I think you can. I noticed one day that the URL for the search button is stored in the registry. So, if you hack that URL (usual disclaimers about registry hacking apply here), then you should go to a different search engine. Can't remember if I tried it - I never use IE for surfing the web, I use NS 4.x on both Linux and Windows. I never notice any serious problems with it - I am using it right now. But then I don't go to sites that use the latest gimmicks.
I am anarch of all I survey.
hmm, they are AOL. do you expect them to do good business? off from the point, i haven't yet downloaded it - or actually i tried the online-installer but it didn't work. it crashed in 2/9 download point. i think i'll wait until next release(so they get to wash out few more bugs) before upgrading my netscape 4.7x. (just a side note: other browsers include: mozilla (build id: 2000110308), lynx and amaya 4)
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Actually, the assertion that IE has only one route back to MS is false.
All of the links in 'Favourites' that come with the stock browser pay MS to be there (favourable product placement).
Also, IE's default Home Page is msn.com, which in no small way accounts for msn's increasing hit-counts and importance to advertisers!
~wmaheriv
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
What? A business wants to make money? What a shocker! What's next? A website that wants to get hits? Or maybe a stand-up comedian who wants to get laughs?
The nerve of Netscape! Trying to make money and sustain their business! For shame!
--
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Let me make a few observations here:
Mozilla is open source. If you would like to make a banner ad filled browser based off of mozilla, and you think people would use it, go ahead and do it.
Netscape is one of the biggest contributors to Mozilla. Every developer that they pay to work on the project costs them money. If nothing else, v6.1 will have more features and more banner ads, but a lot of the features will be funded by netscape (and mozilla will get them by default as well).
Don't forget that if you don't like banner ads and other cruft that netscape put in 6.0, go ahead and use one of the (very stable) recent nightly builds.
Open source/free software is about options, choices, and flexibility. If you aren't happy with netscapes one incarnation of what they did with mozilla, you can make your own.
Stop whining and do something about it.
-Chris
Slap together a perl script to blow up all instances of "www.netscape.com" in the source.
Here's one fact: AOL (Netscape's parent company) uses IE as the standard browser for its on-line service. If Netscape's manufacturer can't depend on it, why should we?
Seriously, I've been using it for several days under NT4, & it's faster & more stable, as far as I can tell. I've been using netscape browsers for several years, so I certainly know better than to expect flawlessness out of them, I've just always wanted them to crash in ways that don't lock up the os, or even just the ui, like 4.75 was always doing.
/. asks about whether a functionality/program is available in Free Software, the answer is "of course, try this one, it's version .07, but it'll be great when it's done. " But, when it comes to Mozilla or Netscape, all everyone does is bitch because they're not perfect?
This one hasn't eaten shit at all yet, so I already like it. & plus it's got a few nifty features, like the facilities for searching/organizing bookmarks, & the java console (although, what the average user's going to do with stuff like the 'collect garbage' option is kinda beyond me.)
Whatever. I guess it's all about the politics of it. I don't use IE 'cos it flat out gives me the creeps- all that 'my this, my that' crap is beyong annoying, & the security issues with it are best solved by just plain never using it, imho. Far as I can tell, I'm not missing that much- any website that'll only render at all in IE I suppose i can do without.
What I don't get, is why every time someone on
-- 'intellectual property' is oxymoronic
Or when you want to interact with plugins, but you have to do so differently on different browsers.
Don't you hate the fact that IE on PC and mac work differently to each other and so do Netscape on PC MAC IRIX and Linux.
I'm sick of having to develop everything 4 times to cater for every different stupid version.
We need standards and we need them now.
I should think that the hard part of making a site should be things like connecting to a database and doing backend processes, not simple HTML which has been around since last century.
It's not jsut Netscapes fault, but my biggest problem is that everything I make works fine in IE always, but in Netscape there are a lot of extra crap that one has to go through.
Now I know, being the crowd you are, you will criticize me as being a bad coder, well to you who is thinking that, I don't care, as I know I am a good coder and the problem doesn't come from my part.
STANDARDS STANDARDS STANDARDS YOU BASTARDS
No it's not a cliche. The cliche goes "If you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the precipitate."
And now what they do with their commercial browser is a slap in the face to Mozilla? I think not. The ads are annoying, yes. But rather than being stuck with a crashing ad-filled browser, we also have a slightly less featureful ad-free alternative. Sounds good to me.
If NS6 is too buggy and too filled with ads, it just won't gain market share (and will probably continue to lose it). We should complain about bad marketing strategy for the commercial product instead.
>
> Yes he does. He just don't know it. Mozilla is the chance to make real web apps, to turn the web into a platform.
The market is littered with the corpses of companies that said "yes, Joe Luzer wants what we're building, he just doesn't know it yet."
> Rendering cnn.com correctly may be of some use today, but the fight is not for a browser, but for a web platform.
Honestly, I hope you're right. But I think you're wrong.
Until it does what Joe Luzer wants, not what you think he should want, it'll continue to lose marketshare to IE :-(
Netscape has provided the bulk if not all of the servers to the Mozilla.org the bandwidth, and 95% of the engineers, including QA, and PDT. I'm not sure what else they could give back to an open source project. If it really bothers you that much just use mozilla and copy the plugins to your mozilla plugins directory, or install a banner filter proxy. It's easy. In IE 5.5 you get links and other assorted crap to MSN so it's all the same.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
How can MS JVM be better?
No, Netscape JVM is far better. JRE 1.3 is years beyond MS JVM which is frozen in time.
Now, Netscape JVM installation and linking is bad. That's a different story. The JVM itself is extraordinarily better.
by default the search bar in IE goes to MSN Search, the Radio Toolbar has a prominent link to the Microsoft Radio Guide, etc. The default bookmarks are also full of MS stuff.
The problem is that Netscape has taken it over the top with Netscape 6. In IE, it makes sense. The search bar has to go somewhere, so it goes to MSN. (I wonder if you can change it? I've never looked.) The whole program isn't riddled with "buy me" crap, and you don't have to sign up for Netcenter, MSN, or anything else to use it.
Its a matter of scope. Logically, one would expect links back to the browser creator somewhere, Netscape just took it way too far and hurt the overall usability of the browser because of all the crap.
Thankfully, there is the Mozilla releases, which are better then any Netscape release anyway.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I was a loyal Netscape user until about a month ago, when I switched to IE because I thought it was a superior product. I d/led Netscape 6 last night and found it to be much better than 4.7, in my opinion even better than IE 5.5. You should at least give it a try, everything loads much faster and it has a better looking interface, too.
Regarding ie's ties back to microsoft... I belive that the default bookmarks are tied through, ie: the "travel" default shortcut is a link to microsoft.com/evil_counting_program?redirect=trave l.com
or something along those lines.
Netscape's are more blatent than ie's, but they are there...
No one is forcing anyone to use the browser, and people are free to modify it to eliminate whatever portions they find objectionable. No one is forcing you to go the Netscape.com against your will. They want to be a portal and get this project to generate revenue. I don't see a problem with it.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Quite honestly, what is the purpose of Netscape releasing a browser at all if they can't turn a profit on it?
1) They don't have an operating system that needs internet functionality out-of-the-box (like Microsoft has to).
2) They're giving it away for free (Unlike Opera)
Despite the efforts of tons of Mozilla developers, Netscape still pays for a lot of people to work on the code too, and they probably deserve some return on that, even if it's extremely annoying.
Personally, I've only clicked on the "Shopping" button by accident in the 4.x generation, and never personally thought "Shopping, yeah! Shopping is what I will do now, thank sweet lord jesus for this Shopping button, how else would I have purchased goods on the internet?"
But apparently some people actually do that, otherwise why would it be there? Because the only way Netscape actually makes money at all is by sending people to their portal site in various ways.
When mozilla appears in a fully materialized and non-beta state, I am sure someone will kindly remove every reference to Netscape's annoying web-services and their paid-for bookmarks.
Personally I this analogy you are making to daytime talk-show hosts is a bit of a stretch, but since you've done it: Sure, Oprah is great, but give Rosie her due; she's a fine host and quite charming, too.
I guess what you're getting at here is that Mozilla is like Oprah; mostly substance, very little fluff. NS 6, on the other hand, more like Rosie; a core of some substance, but often overshadowed by the frills which seem trivial to the hardcore Slashdot whiner.
Or were you refering to "Opera"?
I'd like to be able to respond to the claims of Netscape 6 being chock-full of adverts; unfortunately, the Macintosh version of NS 6 is so full of bugs that I've been trying to download a Roach Motel to clean it out.
I wouldn't consider the installer shitting well over 300 empty files onto my desktop and then crashing much of an advertisement.
--
reverendrich.com
Actually one day it will change... the day we stop being greedy egocentric little bitches.
I hope you enjoy being an active participant in making this world the shithole it is. We are all prostitutes. What was your price?
I know its cliche, but if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
AOL likes money.
Therefore Netscape likes money.
AOL uses Netscape for profit driving.
Netscape owns Mozilla.
Therefore, Netscape uses Mozilla for profit driving.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
>Stability
>In two years of usage, I think Opera has crashed
>on me twice
Did you use in at all within that 2 years?
I have tested >3 different Opera versions over time, and every time it's been less than a day on my computer because
1. It can't show simple pages correctly
2. It crashes at least 3 times within that day, sometimes within first 2 hours.
For sure Netscape and IE are both becoming to "self serving" If you want to try a new browser that I wrote. goto download.com and search for NetCruiser
so you don't like netscape's stuff? you are a cutting edge, tech-saavy person. you know about mozilla. use it. so whats the big problem?
stephen byrne
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
IE or Konqueror. In windows I use IE, in Linux I've started using Konqueror. I may go back to IE in linux (before i get reply-flamed, visit www.winehq.com to be enlightened) - if I find the time to set it up again, however Konqueror is fast and displays every page I've shown it so far very well. It might not have the plugin support of the others but for general use it is more than adequate. And to those argueing that NS (any version) is in any way shape or form better than IE, don't bother. You most likely haven't used IE because it's an M$ product, or you're simply too blind and ignorant to accept the truth. IE 5.5 is the superior web browser right now. I am a web and java developer myself and trust me, Netscape/Mozilla is no better from that standpoint - in fact it's even worse. IE conforms to more standards, is better documented for developers, and doesn't screw with my code as most "other" browsers do (except konqueror - so far =). I understand there are people that disagree with me - this is their right. In future posts I will simply refer to these sort of people as "wrong". happy browsing... Brandon
Can't you hurry up and die Jason? Mozilla and Netscape contributors alike are sick of your bitching on slashdot, mozillazine, in bugs, in newsgroups, and in IRC. Take your whining elsewhere please. Mr. N
I use it daily, on a 486/75 laptop and an Athlon 750 desktop.
As previously mentioned, stability has more to do with your setup and what else you were doing than the particular application.
The two times Opera crashed on me was on the 486 when I was running HiVE (an arcade emulator)and surfing concurrently.
...IE isn't as intergrated as its supposed to be. WINE can run it ... badly but its getting better.
You're an idiot. He meant how many lines did you audit to determine that there is no 'malware code' in it. You're such an ass.
You have the code which Netscape GAVE you. Feel free to build a version without the adds. Fork the tree, whatever.
Nobody is forcing you to use the browser. If thine web browser offends thee, pluck it out (uninstall it).
I hate to praise microsoft but I think that the latest version of IE has one of the most elegant interfaces that I have used. It is not just software- it's a friggin work of art. It also seems to be written well- almost never crashes. Netscape on the other hand frustrates me because it seems a little unstable, on the same (windows) platform. Netscape for Linux just plain pisses me off. It is highly unstable and I usually end my sessions by invoking kill -9 pid when netscape self destructs. Admit it- MS did a good job on Exp5 and is beating the crap out of the competition. is microsoft a greedy corporate monolith? Sure. But they sure write good code when they need to.
ie 4.0: help, Microsoft on the Web, Microsoft home page && Internet Start Page
s .asp), Best of The Web (http://search.msn.com/), Search the Web (http://lg.home.microsoft.com/search/lobby/searchs etup.htm)
Yet those are the only links that are blatant advertisements. The other links to online information are the free stuff (downloads),
get faster internet access (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/getisdn/),
Send feedback (http://register.microsoft.com/contactus/contactu
The thing that offends me about Netscape (4.7something) is that when I go to POP my email, it holds my email hostage while it laboriously downloads this stupid "news and features" web page in my email window, chock full of time-wasting graphics and other such bloated cruft.
I don't normally use Netscape for email (I use mutt in a Unix shell, which is the way email ought to be) but every now and then I get some html or images that I actually do want to see, so I bounce it to a POP account I use for nothing else but looking at those few emails with Netscape.
And it always infuriates me, to the point where I'm about this close (fingers two microns apart) from looping all netscape.com IPs back to localhost. I don't mind ads, as long as they don't hold the content I'm after hostage while they download, like this Netscape/AOL crap does.
I've looked at Mozilla a bit, but last time I looked (a few weeks ago) it crashed. A lot. More than Netscape 4.72. Maybe it's time to give it another look.
(Internet Exploiter, of course, is Right Out.)
I wish there was a full-featured alternative to Netscape for Linux. I dual-boot Windows 2000 and Redhat 7.0 on my 400mHz Pentium II with 320MB RAM and ADSL. I've duplicated all my IE 5.5 Favorites as Netscape bookmarks. When I run through all these URLs, it's obvious that Netscape 6 and Mozilla M18 lag far behind IE 5.5 in performance. It's truly a sad state of affairs. I wish I had the choice of running IE on Linux.
The PC, with a fresh install of WinME, I'm writing this one crashes at least three times a day. Oh yeah, it's only 1 months old and only has one third party application on it, Half-Life. Two, the largest uptime you can get with Windows is 47 days (yes, even up all the time without a use, it crashes).
Burn Hollywood Burn
"you get what you pay for."
Umm... is it just me, or is it really bad when open source people start saying that? Sounds like something from Microsoft...
Those bastards! That commercial entity is acting like a, um, let's see...commercial entity, maybe?
Could I see a raise of hands of those that are happy that Netscape is still fighting Microsoft _at all_? How about a show of hands from those that are happy that Mozilla exists? Thanks. I thought there were some non-braindead among us still.
I'll bet it encourages other companies considering open sourcing things when they see us:
1) Scream for the code.
2) Receive the code.
3) Bitch about the code.
4) Bitch about the license.
5) Bitch about the company that gave the code.
6) Goto 3.
--
Liberty uber alles.
Not to be a pain, but I doubt we'd be half as close to having a browser as good as Mozilla and even NS6 has turned out to be. They're paying for it and, until we can make AOL non-profit or a subsidiary of the government (socialize the browser! :) I don't see why they wouldn't want to try to make a buck or two off of it.
And, like everyone else is saying, there's always Mozilla. Or just build your own browser off of Gecko...
hehe that's open source, other can make money off your work. if you have a problem with that, you just had to release it non-OS
Yeah, I like all the places to put those neat bookmarks to go to the right pages, but I don't like where they go...I want to customize it for my settings... Like those tools, tech, interact buttons on the task bar at the bottem. Some stuff has changed since the preview releases so some of the customization documents out there don't have the right stuff...I downloaded and used themes but I could not find them to copy and change one thing that I wanted to..
Like the MySidebar... Of course I detested it at first, but with the Orbit skin it didn't take up so much room and I got rid of the cheesy tabs. Then I put in segfault and slashdot and some other news sites. It works okay except for the fact that when I click on a slashdot headline to check out the story it puts it in a frame underneath a netscape banner. How I had sites that do that.... I really want to have the site that I'm actually browsing be on the address bar so I can bookmark it, copy it, or at least be able to return to it easily.
Does any of the money generated by the browser get back to Mozilla?
Uhmm.. Who do you think pays the salaries of most of the Mozilla programmers?
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Do not anger the worm.
As long as Netscape is paying developers to work on Mozilla, who cares what they do with their browser.
It's totally obvious that the Netscape browser "experience" is an complete waste of time.
Try using Konqueror, Mozilla, Galeon, or Opera. Heck, nobody's forcing you to use NS6. Just keep using 4.77 and turn off Java.
With so many other decent choices why even has this discussion.
Frankly, I see it as a slap in the face to Mozilla, since all their volunteered hard work has created a product that will line Netscape's pockets.
Well, isn't this the basic problem when the open source concept meets corporate projects? How many people will work on something "for the fun of it" when someone upstream is getting the money? And didn't they know this beforehand? Not specifically maybe via adverts, but they had to know Netscape would try to make money somehow on it, wouldn't they? So they can keep the phones working and stuff?
How would they go about compensating their volunteers anyway? A code review of every submission with a $$ estimate? A bonus for especially good stuff?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Frankly, I see it as a slap in the face to Mozilla, since all their volunteered hard work has created a product that will line Netscape's pockets
As I type this, contributing to the discussion, there is a banner ad wailing and blinking away on the top of this page. every time this comment is read, replied to, or moderated, someone will see a similar ad.
I voluntarily contribute my thoughts to slashdot discussions. the end result (what users see) is content formatted with HTML, some of which I have written. is it wrong for andover/va linux/(whoever it is now) to make money on that banner ad, and not give any to me, since I created part of the page on which the banner appears?
Volunteering means you're not doing whatever you're doing for the money. I don't remember Netscape, AOL, or anyone else saying anything about paying anyone other than employees.
$.02
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
You basically have the following choices:
1. Download IE. You just helped MSFT up their browser counts, killing off all other choices. Plus, they get revenue from you, and can keep killing open source.
2. Download Netscape 6. You now help pay for the work on Mozilla by ad impressions. They're not working for free, those AOL/Netscape engineers, even if you are. And someone has to pay for marketing and distribution. You can disable some of the automatic links, of course.
3. Keep using Netscape 4.72 or 4.74 or whatever. You still count as a Netscape browser, so you don't help MSFT, but you're not helping standards compliance or open source, so you might as well write a check to MSFT, since you've sold out.
4. Use Opera. Man, you are so cool!
5. Use Mozilla. Man, you are so cool!
6. Use Lynx. Man, you are so retro!
7. Write your own browser. Man, you are so cool!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
So netscape is a buggy advertisement desquised as a browser. So what. It stinks anyways. I was sad when I ended up throwing away netscape for IE, but I got over it. If I am going to use a browser created by an evil money grubbing company, I might as well use the one that works.
I've yet to try mozilla. I like the thinking behind it, but when your setting up machines for business use, you don't have the freedom to use beta software. Espcially when, on a well maintained machine, IE is pretty stable.
(Ironically, the only time IE crashes on my home machine with regularity is when I visit the hotmail website).
The Internet is generally stupid
cant they just make a nice little patch to take all the junk out for us? or do something for that matter.
a stupid, slow interface weighed down even more by ads and dumb useless buttons.
I've been looking foreward to a at least moderatly acceptable version of Netscape for a long time. I work for a small ISP and lots of people don't like to use M$'s browser.. but I have no choice but to recomend IE. NS v4 is slow, buggy and bloated. NS v6 (I downloaded and tested it) is even slower and more bloated. (I won't comment on the bug issue here...)
The only improvement is the mail client since they finially started to support multiple email accounts. (Gee, only took 5 years to fix that! Maybe NS won't suck in, oh, 10 years or so!)
I guess the question I have is if the NS folks really tried.. I mean with usability studies and focus groups... to create a really lousy product. Oh well, MS wins again.
What's the difference between an orange?
The only thing that kind of ticked me off about Netscape 6.0 was all the other stuff they install w/ the 6.0 install. I hate how they install Real Player 8.0, Take 5, Net2Phone, and put that stupid AOL 6.0 icon on the desktop. Now that's what pissed me off about Netscape 6. But most of those (with the possible exception of the AOL 6.0 icon) could probably have been prevented by doing a custom install. All in all, though, I don't think Netscape 6.0 is any worse than IE when it comes to serving its own interests.
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Quoting (weaknesses in open sourcing netscape's browser) Post parity development
Mozilla is already at close to parity with IE4/5. Consequently, there no strong example to chase to help implicitly coordinate the development team.
Netscape has assigned some of their top developers towards the full time task of managing the Mozilla codebase and it will be interesting to see how this helps (if at all) the ability of Mozilla to push on new ground. Netscape's commercial interests shrink the effect of Noosphere contributions.
Linus Torvalds' management of the Linux codebase is arguably directed towards the goal of creating the best Linux. Netscape, by contrast, expressly reserves the right to make code management decisions on the basis of Netscape's commercial / business interests. Instead of creating an important product, the developer's code is being subjugated to Netscape's stock price.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main problem with MSIE was that Microsoft were embedding it in a very popular OS, and making it very difficult for average people not to use it.
Netscape isn't doing that. They're offering their product, giving people an option to install it. Netscape's running an optional service oriented business and providing it for free, like a lot of stuff on the net, and it's no surprise that they've made the presentation very commercialised.
Put simply, people (and companies) are more likely to be using Netscape because they chose to than because anyone thrust it in their face as if there was no alternative.
===
A couple of years back, when Netscape (ahem) released the code to their browser....they also did something else that didn't exactly make the headlines---they supplied programmers to help develop it. This was in their best interest because at the time Netscape intended to use such enhancements in their next browser.
Mozilla is not the 'development' version of netscape, not hardly. Netscape has given a lot of time, effort, code, and money to Mozilla, and that they want to get some back by putting links to their websit all over their browser is fine with me....I use Mozilla.
I think it is in our best interests to have strong backers to Open Source and Free Software projects. Netscape gives that strong backing to Mozilla, and for that I am grateful. Rather than flogging Netscape for their actions, perhaps let them know your feelings, tell them that you intend on using the Mozilla browser until they do as you wish, (dont hold your breath) and ask politely for others to do the same.
Lets not forget another undeniable fact of life: Corporations sometimes (often) do stupid things, primarily because they don't think they are stupid.
You do have a point there. I'm using ie on win2000 and when ie goes down I just click "End Task" and then restart it. I've never used Win98 so I can't comment on how ie affects it when it goes down. I can say then when I was using NT4 I used to have to reboot sometimes after an explorer crash in order to get it to work again, but under win2000 I have never had tha problem.
Ok, so AOL is sinking LOTS of money into coming up with a browser (as someone on the project stated 70-90% of the work on Mozilla is done by Netscape engineers). So, why would AOL do this? Are they going to make money selling the browser? Some, but only a small amount (I expect to see a Netscape 6 shrinkwrap package if only as an advertizing element). But, no, what AOL wants is an AOL browser that is not beholden to Microsoft. They want to be able to add support for the extensions that AOL is interested in, and add the sorts of AOL promotion features that AOL feels they need.
None of this should come as a shock, and what's more, none of this is terribly off-putting. If you don't like Netscape, you can use Mozilla. If you don't because you appreciate things like the real-player plugin or any of the other Netscape-only features, you go with Netscape and pay the price. Your choice. Isn't that what open source/free software is supposed to be all about? The choice to fix bugs or make your own version or take out a feature you don't like? Hell, make your own Mozilla-based product, or choose a different one.
I'm posting this from Netscape 6, and I have to say that I will work quite hard to find a way to get rid of "My Netscape" and "Net2Phone" from the shortcut bar, but otherwise it's exactly the browser I want.
/sbin/ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -D 205.188.140.249 80 -W eth0
/sbin/ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -D 152.163.180.25 80 -W eth0
/sbin/ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -D 152.163.180.57 80 -W eth0
/sbin/ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -D 205.188.140.185 80 -W eth0
Why are both browsers overfeaturing their browsers?
Can't they see people aren't waiting anymore for browsers who are using 30MB of memory! (Yes, Netscape 6 uses about 30MB)
Isn't it better to build a browser which is fast, small and simple to use but still capable of all the HTML and CSS standards?
I think you have to come with better ideas than expanding and enhance your previous browser these days.
Daxy's Networking Blog
. . . are weenies.
I never see anything at 'ads.web.aol.com'. Actully, I never see anything off quite alot of ad servers. I use my hosts file, and point them all at 127.0.0.1.
It sounds like a slow and boring job, adding hundreds of ad server domains to your hosts, but fear not! Here is a pre-made hosts sfile that stops HUNDREDS of ad servers. It doesn't stop every ad on you'll see, but it damn well helps.
I haven't looked back, I recommend you check it out too.
(and if you find any ad servers that aren't on it's list, e-mail them!)
If I had a fast connection, they wouldn't bother me. But with a slow connection, they have a tendancy to bug me after a while. I'm not a zealot about it, but I understand "Banner-phobia".
Louis Wu
"One of life's hard lessons is that life's hard lessons are hard to learn."
A kneejerk aversion to a company making money is just that, a kneejerk aversion.
"Is Netscape bashing going to replace Microsoft bashing?"
I think it's really pathetic how most people don't take 2 seconds to really investigate anything, but would rather follow whatever bashing trend floats by them. There is a whole sub-cultural phenom. on "popular" bashing of products. Let's look at some examples:
Microsoft, the movie Titanic, Episode 1, Religion, Netscape, any other large corporation...
It's "fashionable" to bash those and many others...you're "hip" and "with it" if you can repeat the same 2 or 3 worn-out phrases that make you seem "in the know"
Pathetic.
[/rant]
sorry, but this is just plain stupid. i hate the "jump-on-the-bandwagon-bashers" because they make so much fucking noise and have so little to say...
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I think this is open source working exactly the way it is supposed to. If Netscape wants to put money into branding and promoting their particular build of Mozilla, and they feel that consumers will want to endure the endless cross-promotions because of the perceived Netscape brand value, then more power to them.
Other companies and organizations are free to distribute their own builds of the product, and most Slashdotters prefer the current builds directly off of the Mozilla website.
There is nothing unethical about Netscape distributing what they feel is the right balance of current features and revenue-generating opportunities in their build. Have they struck the right balance? Consumers and the marketplace will make that decision.
Comparisons to closed-source IE border on ludicrous.
Corby
Give Me A Break.
Mozilla/Netscape is written primarily by paid staff, AOL has a fiduciary responsibilty to generate income, ad infinitum.
This submission is a bullsh*t troll if i've ever seen one.
Here's a story submission for you: "Whines now posted as articles on slashdot!" Film at 11. Why dont we have a *genuinely* usefull discussion such as when software should be released (fully standards compliant or 95% feature rich, what?).
Hrmph. :-/
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
Well, I had some of the same reactions. Yesterday I installed NS6. I didn't like the profiles. I didn't like the way it didn't quite install correctly. I didn't like the countless references back to NS, AOL, and the time wasted in general when you accidently clicked on something you didn't mean to click on. The fact that it locked up(the app, not the machine) didn't help either.
.02 dollars.
My frustration comes from not having a feature-rich, yet fast, simple, and non-intrusive web browser. I'd tried all the IE's, Netscapes... Lynx, Opera...
But yesterday night I installed KDE(I've been biased toward Gnome for the last year), and I was quite impressed with the Browser and with KDE in general! In fact, it's the closest thing to the browser I've been looking for! Cosmetically, it doesn't look like a rocket ship. It is rather plain. What do we get for it looking plain? It loads quickly . It reacts. It's reads HTML well, from what I've seen. Isn't that what we've been looking for? Here's a screenshot from the KDE screenshots pages.
I've tried mozilla and found it to be inspiring, yet disturbingly buggy. Nobody ever said it wasn't buggy, but it was my light at the end of the tunnel, and still can be. But right now it takes between 60 and 120 Megs of memory while running. How much debug code is in there?? It is debug code.... right?
Well, we do have options. Some of them are GOOD options, depending on whether we're running KDE. It won't surprise me if at some point someone puts out a distribution of Mozilla that is stripped down, quicker, and to the point when it finally hits stable.
In any case, there's my
rhadc
1. The netscape browser is for the unwashed masses, who are used to such commercialism. Do expect anything else from AOL? You are welcome to use the mozilla browser, which is better anyway. 2. Netscape has taken the mozilla browser and customized it into their own branded version. You can do something similiar if you like. Neither changes the fact that there's a free, customizable mozilla for everyone. 3. Most of the people who work on mozilla are paid netscape employees anyway, despite their effort to recruit helpers for a large-scale volunteer effort. It just never happened.
-------
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Ooh, big disagreement there. I am using Homesite to create pages and check the code, and N6 is doing some pretty funky things. I have been surfing with it since I installed it, and many pages look strange in it, and it crashes alot, it's slower, and images load unreliably. I say that because the images will load, and with a refresh some will, some won't, and with another refresh the results will change. This was released WAY too soon, IMO. I will keep this to check browser compatibility, but frankly, I am not sure I will use it. Of course, on my Linux machine, I will probably have to use it. Despite my general opinion of Micro$oft, their browser is good, perhaps it's because it is the one thing they give away freely ;-)
I used N6 all day yesterday and I'm using M18 all day today. So far the only difference is M18 loads faster...and with the theme I installed in N6 (I deleted N6 after installing M18), even the form data transfered over and neither overwrote N4.76. If anything the Mozilla project benifits from Netscape because everyone knows Netscape's name yet not many non-geek-like-people know Mozilla. I've been using Netscape since 1.22 and I toyed around with Mozilla for a few milestones. M18 seems like a winner to me. Although there is a few sites that remain broken (hotmail for some reason) it's definately grown to acceptable. The biggest complaint I have with IE versions after 3 is that they tend to include hidden "extras" that just make for a lousy UI. As far as a double standard and MS not spamming, look at the "channel bar" that installs with Win98.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
That may be true, and that'll pretty much keep me (and probably most folks here) from using the new version(s) of Netscape. But guess what? It's open source! There's an anti-cruft version, and it's called Mozilla. There's even an anti-anti-cruft version, called Galleon.
If Netscape makes money off the mass market through their banner ads, and that money goes towards funding a great open source project like Mozilla, then what are you complaining about? It looks like everyone gets what they want.
Get them in a back-to-back comparison, and I'm sure you'll see IE outperform Netscape.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
to be terse and dispense with verbiage, i say YES it is far too self-serving. solution? don't use the damned thing, friends don't let friends use bloatware iCab? yeah, it facilitated this post
Just put an entry for messenger.netscape.com in your hosts or localhosts file pointing to your local web server. Put up a blank page everytime netscape hits it.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Just put an entry for messenger.netscape.com in your hosts or localhosts file pointing to your local web server. Put up a blank page everytime netscape hits it.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Does anyone here get this newsgroup and/or have any real info about when the world can expect to see a GPL'd mozilla source distribution.
I'd really like to play around with the code, but not until it's GPL'd.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I have two points I'd like to make.
Banner ads, shopping links, etc, etc. These are aimed at the user. This is really cool (tm) for the average joe blow that wants to buy something. As for the banner ads, maybe he's one of those people that just has a deep-seeded loathing of banner advertising. Really, I don't mind them. It's a good way to make money without actually *doing* anything and I understand that. They aren't overly intrusive, they just kinda chill at the top or the bottom.
Second, this guy really has no right to be pissed off at Netscape unless he's a member of the Mozilla project. You don't *pay* for Netscape, it's free (as in beer) software. I think the saying is "you get what you pay for."
Free (as in speech) software carries with it the ability for such conglomerates to come along and use it for pretty much whatever they want to. You can't be mad at them for doing this, because they are explicitly *allowed* to by the software creators.
I would be suprised if Netscape/AOL/Time Warning/Mirabilis/Nullsoft/Winamp/whatever *didn't* do something like this, but I'm not suprised that they did, nor do I think it's wrong, nor do I blame them for doing so.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
I just upgraded to Netscape 6 last night, and am very unhappy with it.
First, it looks exactly like Mozilla 18,
And I hate the freaking sidebar!
There is no way to disable it, and I hate it!
Also, It added in a ton of liks to my panels it didn;t ask permision too.
So I got mad, but decided to try out a theme for it, well, it just didn;t look like netscape!
So I went back to 4.76, and am happy with it.
Also, Netscape 6 took forever to load, whereas 4.xx loads in seconds, 6 takes about 30seconds on
a pentium2 400mhz.
BTW, Why are Mozilla and Netscape looking almost like each other, I thought the point of Mozilla was to seperate from netscape!
This is coming from a very Windows specific POV, but bear with me...
Netscape kind of started the trend by setting its homepage to home.netscape.com, and hardcoding those "What's Cool?" buttons into the interface. Of course, "what's cool" never was very...
RealPlayer took it to the next level and started the "application as a portal" trend, back when "portals" were the thing, and it has gotten to the point where almost every button or menu item is a link to some Real.com content, an advertisement for some other website, or a nag to upgrade to the "Plus" version. It will litter shortcuts and file associations for itself and other seemingly unrelated apps into corners of Windows that even it developers haven't seen.
I guess they never figured out that people would be more apt to pay for the no nag "plus" version if it was just the RealPlayer, but offered compelling improvements in usability or featureset. They also never stopped releasing new versions that obsoleted the old ones every nine months -- in ~6 years, there have been 8 versions. If you upgraded Plus at each version level starting at 2.0, you would have spent at least $210. In the same timeframe, and for less money, you could upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98.
I'll use the free beer version, but only if I have to. It's hell.
(end comment) */ }
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Netscape 3 is not /. compatible! That black border surrounding the white foreground is also the foreground in NS3 ... you can't read the articles.
NS3 an old standby of mine as well, given as it doesn't hog any of my system (unlike later versions and any IE version).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
One of my girlfriends says that anybody who gives software away for free is a wannabee monopolist, because they will just introduce charges later when the competition is squashed. Is this true in the case of AOL? Or other software vendors? I'm not sure if I believe her, should I?
She used to work for SuSE's London headquarters, so I suppose she should know about these things.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
1. Netscape employs a number (the majority?) of the Mozilla people. Without them i doubt Mozilla would have made it near as far as they are now. So yes, Mozilla developers are putting food on the table because of Netscape's profits.
2. It was Netscape's choice to free the code. They didnt have to. We all should still be gratefull to Netscape, and since no one is forcing you to use their release, you can ignore anything bad they do to their browser.
3. I do belive Netscape is doomed (which is sad). But Mozilla is here to stay. There is no reason to waiste your time with netscape (unless you still have to use Netscape 4.x because you run OpenBSD, dammit). While Netscape is still alive, they are going to do anything and everything that they can to make money. Its simple survival instinct. They cannot sell the browser, so they make money off content. If you look up at the top of this page, you'll see an advertisement. We all hate it, (including Rob Malda, i'm sure) but Money is needed.
4. Mozilla is OpenSource. Anyone can do anything with it (for the most part). I wish i could find the exact quote from Theo de Raadt about OpenBSD... but Theo once said something similar to we work on OpenBSD for ourselves, not for anyone else. Thats the attitude all Free Software developers should have. Mozilla will continue because people care about Mozilla, it doesnt matter what netscape does.
Yeah... i think i'm done...
Another vote for Opera here, or at least the 3.62 version.
.... Click on the third, and all the funky backgrounds and fonts go away, and you can look at the page in your own nice comfortable defaults instead of 4-point Barfbag Condensed dark blue on black, or whatever else some clueless Web designer wants you to use.
:-)
Look at the "progress bar". In the left side, there are three little icons. The first simply tells you if you're using a secure connection. Click on the second one, and all the images go away. Ads? I don't see any ads
Yeah, you can do this in IE and Netscape -- if you can figure out where in the menu heirarchy they hid them. They do *not* make it easy.
Opera isn't perfect -- in particular, the V4's do not "turn off" font coloring properly. You have your default font, but it still may be light yellow, or whatever.
Also, Opera does crash on me occasionally, when I hit a particularly vile example of HTML design. Certain bad Javascript constructs seem to force a browser crash.
Adding buttons to the main menu bar to turn images, backgrounds, etc on and off shouldn't be too hard for the Galeon/K-Meleon/Mozilla stuff. I might do it myself. (0.5
--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
For contrast, I submit iCab, a German browser (unfortunately Mac-only at this point), which implements (correctly, I might add) the HTML 4.0 standards, supports all those fancy features you describe (barring javascript, which is coming, and CSS, which is a bit underimplemented right now), weighs in at a whopping 3 megs on disk, and absolutely flies.
How do they do it? Well, iCab is the work of a single programmer (Alexander Clauss), and as such, has not grown to the point yet where (as most of us have experienced) time spent in communication between the parts of the project exceeds actual coding time.
Also, their design aim is different. IE and NS both plan on making money by driving revenue back to their parent companies. This forces IE to hawk Micro$oft products, and NS to serve up AOL ads. In contrast, iCab will be asking a very reasonable ($30, I think) price for the software, completely eliminating the need to embed advertising in the application. In fact, there are filtering features in the browser to filter out annoying banner ads, based on size or originating URL - one of my favorite features.
If only we could convince them to either release the source or accept a co-author to port it to Linux...
Never, every say "No matter what people say".
Especially when you're using it to prefix a sentence that is demonstrably *wrong*.
http://www.iarchitect.com/find95.htm
http://www.iarchitect.com/explore.htm
http://www.iarchitect.com/file95.htm
Basically, Microsoft has been demonstrably doing bad HCI since Windows 95 first appeared. Don't be fooled into thinking that because you know the Windows 95 Explorer shell, it's in any way *good*.
--
Peter
I don't seem to recall that saying a project is Open Source automatically means that it is completely developed by a bunch of loosely grouped people that develop it during their spare time. Yes, a lot of the major developers of Mozilla work at Netscape. A lot of people working on major Open Source projects do work at companies, and code these projects as their day jobs. This is the idealogy at its best, in my opinion, where we have companies not only willing to flow with the Open Source philosophy but work on it in-house.
If I wanted to make my own commercially-oriented branch of KDE and insert advertisements in it, I could as long as I did so in a fashion that adheres to the GPL. In my opinion, the fact that Netscape funds developers gives them more of a right to do this, but it's irrelevant.
Broken. Runs Linux and BeOS fine (with exception that for some reason sound doesn't work). Using all WHQL drivers (certified my MS for WinME). No Windows just can't multi-task very well. Sure I could have stability if I only ran one application at a time....
On the other hand, my Mac has been running 24/7 since I installed OS X-PB on it (well over a month ago). It gets used directly at least 4-5 hours a day and indirectly via natd, routing to my PC, 24/7.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I downloaded and installed Netscape 6 tonight on a WindowsNT box. Every site that I visit that has a SUBMIT button, when I hit submit, takes me to the Netscape page as if I had done a search on cgi-bin. Is this a bug or a feature ;-)
Excuse me? I was bitching at Slashdot for most of their stereotypical bitching at Mozilla. :P
:P
Guess that goes to show that when you expect bitching, you're able to find it everywhere.
Gotta agree to a point. The only prob I have with I.E. is that when it crashes, Win98 Crashes. When I'm surfing I'm using Netscape.
I.E. 5 is faster than Netscape, but I'll take reliability any day. As far as Netscape, AOL references are concerned; They have a right to make money. They give away their browser. What's there to complain about?
Im sorry, I just belive that Netscape has gone to hell in a handbag.
Netscape has become AOL's little toy to play with. I don't think that
AOL will be putting Netscape in their 'software' or whatever they call
their setup anytime soon. Ive switched mainly to Konqueor just because
of AOL's move with Netscape. Netscape should have stayed where they
were instead of letting AOL buy them out. The iPlanet wasn't that bad of
a webserver. Im not sure where it's development will go from here.
I would like to raise this question if it hasn't been asked.
What browser to use now? Most software companys (Macromedia)
support only IE & Netscape. No IE here, im not using it if its the last
one on Earth. Opera? um, no. Ill fall back to Lynx again before I use IE.
At least Lynx is stable. So far Konqueror 6 has better image rendering
than IE 5.x and I havn't had any problems with it other than Shockware Flash.
ETRN x
Let's face it, IE is a good browser, has huge market share (don't recall the last numbers, but it dominates) which means ALL websites will test with IE primarily. IE has won the browser wars! -- I, however, use Opera on a daily basis and LOVE it. It's fast, compliant and for the few cases it does not work I use IE. My only complaint is that Opera is a memory hog on heavy surf sessions. It's also available cross-platform (Win, BeOS, Linux [almost]). By turning off the graphics, it's almost like Lynx with support for tables. Last Netscape/Mozilla I tried was 4.7 and M14 I think and I have to say, I was not overly impressed.
Ok, ok, ok. Stop a moment and think. Netscape 6.0. It was supposed that Netscape would make a commercial version of its browser. Right? Right. Now they are the authors/proprietors/owners of this thing. On the net, to have a commercial value you should advertise. And Netscape's value, today is on all these AOL & Netscape Netcenter stuff. The browser is, in any case given for free. So how od you think Netscape will atract customers? - "Oh, hey! We are such a good guys, get our browser for free... and by the way, don't forget we do something else..." That is the way they do money today.
So it would be quite natural to see Netscape providing adds on its browser. Maybe they are too much for such a product, But that's the only way for them to keep afloat. Anyway they give the right to choose. They also gave ground to Mozilla's project, and this one is much less ad-loaded than Netscape.
Why it looks so ad-ictive in relation to IE? Well IE is a system embedded into a OS called Windows, upon which Microsoft gets some envious fees. Even from people who don't use it. And, besides, Microsoft has a much larger market in control. So it does not need to rape your brains with a menu carrying 40 ads right-tight into your eyes and calling you to "buy... Buy... BUY!!!!" having its logo in every corner. Microsoft can be more stealth and more promiscuous then Netscape/AOL because its interest is even on the stock value of many companies and not on the direct sell of the product.
Any way, if this bores you, which is understandable, don't forget that there is Mozilla, Konqueror, Lynx, Links, and a few others that have nothing to do with selling you snake oil. However most of the breath only on the *NIX. That is the cost of freedom.
IE on the various commercial versions of Unix is horid. It does appear to be a marketing trick. When Microsoft pitches something that required IE, they sometimes run into companies who have a sizable Unix workstation base. To handle this inconvenience, they pitch IE on Unix. I've seen it done with the web version of Exchange / Outlook.
I've never had Netscape actually crater XFree86. Hit enough java-embeded web pages, Netscape will crash and leave a runaway process. Its common enough that you can get a WindowMaker dock app that kills netscape sessions with a few mouse clicks.Mozilla delivers the Linux user from this annoyance.
If you don't like it don't use it. You have that choice.
There are plenty of Linux distributors making money off the back of freely contributed software. The license explicitly allows them to do so.
I am pleasantly suprised at how good NS6 is. Only beta quality but not too far off being finished.
I look forward to seeing a Solaris version soon so I can use it at work.
100%. No more, no less.
Speed
It's the only modern browser that will run decently on a 486cpu+16Mb ram over windows. On a more modern setup, it leaves the other two overweights in its dust.
Stability
In two years of usage, I think Opera has crashed on me twice
Interface
When initially installed, Opera's interface is a bit funky. Once you figure it out, however, it is completely customizable. Being able to set separate settings for different pages is a huge blessing. The full set of keyboard commands makes surfing much more convenient. Being able to change buttons is an nice bonus
Platform Independence
One area I wish they would catch up on. However, they are working on it.
Features
One man's feature is another man's CPU and ram eating useless bloat. ActiveX is an internet feature only if you don't give a rat's hiney about your computer's security. True, Java isn't built in but you do get the choice of which JVM you can hook up. It's compatible with most Netscape plugins.
It is free software from a corporation. They have to make money off of you somehow. Fortunately you are not FORCED to use any of the services. Microsoft is in a different position. They don't make their money from banner ads and 42 other services. They just want every piece of software in use to be a Microsoft product. And giving away a web browser for free is just one step.
I don't know about Netscape 6, but the first thing I do when I install Netscape is hide that bar that has "Members" "WebMail" etc. And I change the default home page. Maybe you should start complaining when Netscape prevents you from changing the default home page or they force vendors to not set the default home page in factory installations.
I hate banner ads and such as much as the next guy, but it certainly isn't just Netscape/AOL doing it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
No revenue? Uhm, they were kinda bought by AOL.. No revenue there?
-TimmyC, Tech Guru
I don't do a lot of E-commerce. If I do, I'll seek vendors out myself. I don't need my browser to be a frigging billboard. I never visit Netscape.com, because I don't need a blasted web portal. And I certainly don't need one built into my browser.
Screw 'em. If I'm going to use a newer non-MS browser, it's going to be Opera or Mozilla. I'm sick to death of Netscape.
Five tons of flax.
What the Hell, people? We all bitch and moan about how IE has bullied it's way into the market and there's no real competitoe, and yet here we are getting ticked at Netscape for trying to integrate it enough with the rest of its company to get some synergy going and make money? I'm sorry, but putting a viable, competitive browser product out there to challenge IE *costs* *money*. Even with Team Mozilla working on the engine there's a hell of a lot more that people expect and work that needs to be done before it's a real shrink-wrap product, and we need to be more supportive of Netscape making the money to fund that than this story would indicate.
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Your drunk.
IE is more stable and much quicker. And this is coming from a guy who is posting this from a recent nightly build of mozilla.
For privacy reasons, I insist on using a open-source broswer (who knows what malware code lurks in IE). What irks me is that people on this site are so blinded by their hate of MS that they will not acknowledge a superior product, and in turn are too forgiving of mozilla Netscape, letting them slide by with a sub-par product.
lynx?
This is exactly how other Open Source projects work. Somebody develops for free, then a company comandeers the project, and profits from it. It's happening right now with Apache (even as you read this). So, why shouldn't Netscape take advantage of Mozilla and profit from it?
Have Justin Farkel over at WinAmp write us up a Plug-in to overlay all the banner ads with Winamp Graphic EQ's. Then he can piss of the parent company and a fellow subsidiary all in the same shot
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
Have you seen the new MSN Explorer lately? It has tie-ins and advertisements that Netscape can only dream about...
FYI - While I am sure that there are many ways Netscape is making money off of ads, I know for a fact that the banner ads displayed with their "advanced search" (when you select which search engines you want results from) are the banners served from those search engines, generating revenue for themselves and not Netscape.
/netscape/searchplugins directory and edit the .src files, removing the banner tags.
If you would prefer not see the banner ads, go to the
I resent that bad impersonation.
I've got a brand new modem and a silver plated scrotum.
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There's a new trend in the free software world, and it isn't a healthy one.
Suddenly, free software people seem to think they're Doing the Right Thing, when they complain about businesses making money using free software. Redhat, Netscape, and I'm betting there are others, are examples.
Folks, if you don't want someone else to make money from your hard work, don't give away your code. For Pete's sake, there's nothing in a typical free software license that prevents it, so why publish under a free license then?
Me, on the other hand, I want anyone, individuals, corporations, whatever, to be able to use my code any way they want, as long as they don't try to prevent others from using it, or embrace-extend-extinguish it. So for me, the GPL works out great.
So in short, if you want to contribute to free software, do. If you don't want to contribute to free software, don't. Don't confuse the two.
It is clear that Netscape is no longer in the browser development business. They are an advertising arm of AOL. Makes sense, as their browser is free. I have switched to Microsoft for some time now, despite their horrid Bookmark system. Indeed, I am about to switch into Outlook Express because Netscape Messenger is not extensible enough to open MSIE to view links. I hope Mozilla makes a better browser but I'm not holding my breath, they are surely out gunned.
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Dr. Hodad
Black's Beach Tanning Supply
La Jolla, California
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Dr. Hodad
Black's Beach Tanning Supply
La Jolla, California
Excuse me, but I couldn't help but bring up the following point: Programs having to do more do not necessarily have to run slower.. They need to be redesigned to avoid this. A whole lot of the problems we see with slower code as features creep in has to do with lack of code management and programmer inertia. Code management means that those with the bigger picture in mind redesigns to keep the feature creep from resulting in bloat and bugginess. Programmer inertia means the inability to ruthlessly discard what no longer serves a purpose, or at least longevity in doing so.
Combine these and you get a program that grows featurewise by patching beyond reason, not by redesigning when needed.
I'll not comment on Mozilla particularly since I haven't been doing any of the code, but I've been coding for almost 20 years now. Invariably, when a program goes through many generations successfully, it is because it gets all but rewritten from time to time. Case in point: Up until IE3, Microsoft reversed-engineered Netscape to make their browser. From IE4 and on, they scrapped everything and made their own. Essentially, they decided that they couldn't possibly keep adding features to their current codebase without serious problems, and decided to act on that knowledge. MS should do that more often - but so should just about every programming project in existance...
I know that more complex standards seems like they are probably harder to program for. But more complex standard does not necessarily demand slower code (or even more complex code) - it is my experience that you can usually find a good solution by being able and willing to realize that what you've written so far is no longer good enough.
The bottom line: When very substantial features are to be added to a program, very substantial changes should be made to the program to cleanly incorporate those changes into the original design. Failure to do so WILL lead to bloated buggy code much more easily than otherwise.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Is it currently is, many of the former/current Netscape developers also work on Mozilla. This seems harmless enough from a development perspective, but the fact is, much of the Mozilla code is imported to netscape and therefore abused by AOL. In light of this and the fact the the mozilla source has some major problems in some areas, it may be a good idea to completely restart the Mozilla project from the beginning. This will allow Mozilla to remain free (and unexploited) from N$. A rewrite will also encourage developers to rethink the program's arcitecture and weed out a large number of the most prevasive bugs while adding new and improved features. The promised 100% W3C standards compliance would also help...
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Also, one of my favorite features is search within a page (ALT-F), which was previously a button, (Binoculars symbol). I think AOL is manuvering Netscape to discourage you from going where you want to go, and encouraging you to only follow linkes, ie to their banner-laced sites.
If someone can suggest fixes to the above, or can suggest an open source browser that lets you configure the buttons, I would appreciate it. (Disclaimer: I have not tried other browsers besides netscape and IE)
In fact, in the 2 days I've had netscape 6, I was forced to reinstall it once, and have had to reboot my computer ~12 times in the past 48 hours due to Netscape related crashes. MSIE, I've found, has crashed maybe 6 times in the past week (and another 15 times regular 'explorer' has crashed, or hung, or otherwise became unstable.)
Isn't it interesting that prior to this, Mozilla/NS6 was considered (and loudly proclaimed as) the second most important Open Source project in existance after only Linux itself? Now all I keep reading here is "Well, it's mostly funded by/developed by paid NS/AOL employees." Funny thing.
You can remove these buttons from the Preferences dialog, on the "Navigator" tab.
Well I sat here in the Lotus position meditating until I became one with my cable TV converter box, and I'm composing this message in my mind.
DAILY ROTATION
and log out. When you log in again, the button will be gone.
I'm really tired of people complaining about Netscape, complaining about Mozilla, etc. "They shipped too early." "They shipped too late." "How dare they try to make money." Blah blah blah.
All the links to Netscape.com can easily be configured out of Netscape 6. Take a look at the Preferences section. If that doesn't satisfy you, you can go into the chrome and delete those chunks of XML.
You'd rather use Mozilla instead? Fine. Use it. Plenty of people aren't savvy enough to get the nightlies from mozilla.org, and THEY are who Netscape 6 is for.
I'm very concerned that the open source community spends all its time flaming Netscape and Mozilla, and zero time supporting it. If I were a Mozilla developer, I'd probably quit. It just seems too thankless.
Lest we forget, for those of us who run Linux on the desktop, Netscape/Mozilla is the only substantial chance we have for a good browser. Opera, you say? Still in beta. When I've used it in the past, it's been nag-ware. Konqueror? I started trying to use it under KDE2, but it crashes plenty and is missing a lot of features.
I don't see what net benefit there is from all this criticism.
Monkeytreats
Well, some people are actually afraid of using their computers, because Windows crashes so much. Some people prefer not to tinker with default settings because Windows is so prone to destroying itself. Most people never change any default settings.
Burn Hollywood Burn
It appears that the commentator fails to appreciate the flexibility of Netscape's interface. Though the interface tools at mozdev.org (chameleon) is still relatively primitive, I anticipate that they will evolve to allow relatively easy modification of the interface.
Netscape has every right to create their own branded interface. Not just because they funded and staffed much of Mozilla's development but also because this is their interface. Heck, it's only a matter of time before AOL replaces it's kludgy access software with a Mozilla derivative--not just as an embedded module but rather as the entire access software, because ultimately it's just a new skin plus plug in modules.
If you don't like the Netscape branding use the chamleon program and create your own interface. Much more than just bookmarks, you could have your own shopping channel, your own travel channel, your own music channel, etc. Don't like the search or task menu items? Delete or replace them! You can easily keep the same essential look and feel but personalize it to meet your needs. And even share such with your friends.
And, of course, you could radically change the look and feel of the browser, given enough time and artistic talent, by creating your own theme from the ground up, a la Sky Pilot.
Personally, I want to see a MacOS X/ Aqua theme. I think that would rock. Whaddya say, Steve Jobs? Can you spare a HUI designer or two?
Because if they did, they should have seen something like that coming. For that matter, every company makes it's money off the hard work of developers, open source or not. Redhat, Debian, et al make money off of developers. So do Microsoft, etc...
But in the end, that's the whole thinga about opensource. You develop, people can take your work and make changes to it. In AOL/Netscapes case, they decided to try to make some money off of a free product. End of story...
Remove it from the sidebar, using the conveniently-placed "Tabs" button. Voila.
Also, I'd have to check this, but I'm pretty sure that while a sidebar tab is not the visible frame, it's ignored - so while you're not actively looking at the "What's Related" tab, it's not doing anything.
Charles Miller
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The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
The hardwork of the Mozilla team isn't lining Netscape's pockets at all. Those of us who want Mozilla have downloaded Mozilla and are using it. Yet there are still people who are downloading Netscape. Why? Brand name recognition. That's what's lining Netscape's pockets, a brand name they've earned for themselves over the years. There was a time when a lot of people you talked to would call the web "netscape". (I hope this time has passed.) Mozilla doesn't have this brand name recognition, it just has a beautiful piece of software. Since I'm looking for beautiful software, I download mozilla and use it. If I were looking for commercial advertising and a brand name, I would be punching up netscape.com right now and downloading netscape. It's that simple.