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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."
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.
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
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:
> 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
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.
... 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?
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?
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...
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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.
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
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.
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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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.
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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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.
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Anything that can go wr
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."