Netscape 6.1

max2010 writes: "Netscape Browser Version 6.1 is released. Give it a try, grab the 25MByte junk of code for MAC, Unix and Windows at ftp.netscape.com." MSNBC has a brief story about the release.

Comments

Re:MSNBC headline is biased/inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally MSNBC would do some basic fact checking of the articles it picks up from people. Ideally the Slashdot editors would do this as well. But I realize that realistically, they are both as eager to cut corners as I am.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[madprof]

It's stable....it has a nice mail client....erm...that's it?
It has an appalling amount of support for recent web standards, it doesn't render things right even when it 'supports' them, it is VERY slow to render in certain cirumstances, it is not a browser that I enjoy writing sites for.
Netscape 6 and Mozilla are much nicer in this regard, as is IE.

25megs includes full Java JRE distrib

[jonabbey]

Which is fairly nice, actually.. finally, a web browser that can run Java 1.2/1.3 applets "natively", using the simple <applet> html syntax for invocation.

Re:Galeon :)

[Mendax Veritas]

I was using Galeon for a while, but it seemed that with every release, Mozilla's GUI got a bit faster and Galeon's got a bit slower. I finally ran out of patience with the whole thing of having to wait for a new Galeon before I could upgrade Mozilla, and now I just use Mozilla. Also, I'm much happier with Mozilla once I finally figured out how to change its menu and dialog fonts to match the rest of my desktop. (I still wish Mozilla didn't have its own theme engine. It uses GTK already; why not just use the current GTK theme?)

Re:Let's start with rendering pages properly

[DrXym]

No, the error handling does not stink. There is no browser in the world which will correct broken Javascript.

Nightly builds expire. Milestones don't.

[yerricde]

Up until milestone M18, both nightly and milestone builds of the Mozilla browser expired 30 days after release. However, milestone releases 0.6 and later (including 0.9.3, which I am using right now) have the nag screen disabled.

Re:Try Skipstone

[Balinares]

Indeed. I've not given Skipstone a try for quite a while, so thanks for reminding me. Last time I checked, it was a tad lacking feature-wise, but still very promising! :)

When I think that not that long ago, there were only two options: IE and Netscape... We've come such a long way, step after step.

Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[KidSock]

... based on the Mozilla.org open-source development effort, ..

I have submitted bug reports for Mozilla and besides the obvious hanger-ons it's very clear that all of Mozilla's developers work for Netscape. Mozilla is not an Open-Source project like everyone's been preaching. Sure people have submitted their own little gizmo to add but thankfully the've abandoned all that crap and are getting down to the metal now. The Open-Sourcing of Netscape was a failure and it's time we fess up and wrote it off as a necessary experiment.

Don't bash Netscape because you'll be bashing Mozilla in the process. The're one and the same.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[bertilow]

IE's HTML parser is crap, if the HTML is fscked it guesses what it should look like. it shouldn't do that

Well, that it does, and I agree that it would be better if it didn't, but on the other hand Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Opera, ICab, Lynx and most or even all other browsers do the same! So why single out IE?

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[NutscrapeSucks]

"* IE's HTML parser is crap, if the HTML is fscked it guesses what it should look like. it shouldn't do that"

Actually, IE usually guesses correctly what the HTML should be, in my observations.

Let's take the classic /. front page example:

<table><tr><td>
<i>Blah Blah Blah <!--According to the HTML specs the I element MUST end here, so IE silently closes the tag-->
</td>
<td>But Netscape shows this as italic, even moz in quirks mode</td>
</tr>
<!--According to the HTML specs the TABLE element MUST end here, so IE silently closes the tag-->
</body>

Now you can argue that IE should just invalidate the elements that don't have closing tags, but Netscape doesn't always do this either (see the italic example). Instead, IE does the reasonable thing that lets the DOM and CSS parser work properly.

You know the old saw about being liberal about what you accept, which IE is to a fault. But I've never seen something generates which would violate the HTML specification (unlike Netscape).

Of course Microsoft pretty much has to be loose in it's parsing, because they have to support a bunch of broken HTML converters in old versions of Word and so on.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[_xeno_]

IE's HTML parser is crap, if the HTML is fscked it guesses what it should look like. it shouldn't do that

Uh, yes it should - it's always a pain when a third-party site doesn't display, and you can't fix it. Although it would be nice to have a mode that did strict testing for your own pages - oh wait, they do. Just add the appropriate DOCTYPE.

try loading a page that is not reachable, not only does the IE window loading the page hang but ALL IE windows are completely locked up

What the hell are you smoking? Are you using IE for Win 3.1? IE 5.0 doesn't do that on any computer I've used, 98SE or 2K. And IE6.0beta on XP most certainly doesn't do it. Granted, if one window crashes the browser, all the windows for that process are lost, but at least with IE you can run multiple processes - which you can't do with Mozilla.

IE is integrated into windows, there is a Mac version but it was developed independent from the windows version. what does this tell us: IE is not at all portable

Uh, so? Very fex applications are really portable, and Mozilla isn't an exception - most of the parsing code is portable, but when you're dealing with GUI code, and not using Mozilla's hideous chrome hack and actually (gasp!) using the native GUI then it'll generally require rewritting large portions of code.

mozilla is WAY more flexible than IE will ever be. a few examples: you can modify the GUI or even build completely different applications based on mozilla in XUL, Mozilla can be easily embedded, and not just through an activeX component, it can e.g. even be embedded in a java app.

This is actually two points, so I'll tackle the first one - uh, first.

You can modify the GUI in IE too - in a sensible way - you can customize the rebars and add buttons and the like. With your mouse. Without restarting IE. Right click on any toolbar and choose "customize." You can't do that in Mozilla, and changing stuff is a damned pain, involving JavaScript and XUL. And if you think changing the "look" is important - you're wrong. Having a consistant look should be of highest importance, but Mozilla decided to go their own path.

And come November when I'm running XP, Mozilla will look really strange in the Luna-scape. Oh well.

Your second point about embedding is interesting, seeing as ActiveX is the way to embed controls in other applications in Windows (not just webpages, any app can embed any ActiveX control). And Moz does this too. I've never seen Mozilla embed via Java though, link anyone?

Microsoft keeps adding useless non-standard features claiming 'webdesigners' want them (marquee anyone?) , but they still don't have decent PNG (alpha transparency) support, something LOTS of designers would like.

It's not like <BLINK>Netscape listened to their customers either</BLINK>.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[jotaeleemeese]

I have been using Mozilla 0.7 (yes, I am lazy) since it got out.

I can e-commerce, use my bank's web services, read newspapers, web-email, etc.

Yes, it crashes. So what? It is beta code.

For me it bared fruit. I don't have to deal with constant MS or AOL intrusions that have very little to do with what I want to do: just browsing.

I will be the first one to upgrade to Mozilla 1.0 as soon as it is ready.

I have not opened IE (i think was 5, I don't care) since I installed Mozilla.

Well done guys. Way to go.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[ahde]

You believe that any time a program encounters an exception, error code, or eof, it should just quietly shut itself down and go sulk in a corner?

The web wouldn't exist if Netscape hadn't followed a different philosophy when they first started. IE may not always do the most intellegent (or consistent) thing when a html document is not XHTML 0.9 draft 1b compliant, but at least you can see a page that has a missing closing tag. I'm no fan of IE, or Microsoft, but what distinguishes a mature product (or person) is the ability to handle a situtation that doesn't go 100% their way.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[BZ]

I may have to take exception to being called a hanger-on. :)

That being said, there is little difference between current Mozilla and current branch builds. That's the whole point of "rebranding", no?

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're wrong. Mozilla is CERTAINLY an open-source project. I have the source code. More than I can say for other web browsers.

It's just not a "bazaar-type" project. It's more of a cathedral-bazaar hybrid. I'd love to discuss more, but I'm pretty busy...

Remember, Open Source means more than "who writes the code".

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[evocate]

By almost any technical measure, IE is a better browser than Netscape/Mozilla (N/M). Opening the source has not obviated the need to program better than Microsoft's IE engineers. Some open-source projects are *going to fail*. If you believe that the mark for which N/M must shoot is IE, then you must also believe that N/M is a failed project. It is also the first high-profile open source project failure

Open source projects usually have simple beginnings and humble aspirations. Most start as hack jobs to "scratch an itch" and grow incrementally to become powerhouses. Linux is a prime example. There are many many others. Mostly, these projects set their own bars. Success is defined from within the community, not by comparison to some commercial competitor. Linux was to be the best kernel Torvalds could write, not a better kernel than NT. Apache was to be the best web server, not a better server than IIS. Perl... well, what are you going to compare Perl to? The point is these projects defined their own success. They didn't let Microsoft define it for them.

The open source N/M project has never defined success for itself. It has been chasing Microsoft the whole way - matching bullet points and comparing market shares. Successful open source projects don't usually work this way. A successful open source web browser will start simply, iterate constantly, have fantastic leadership (like Torvalds, Cox, Behlendorf, Wall, etc.), remain *solid*, and define success on *its* terms, not terms set by CNET or MSNBC or even Slashdot. And what should those terms be? Easy: happy, loyal, rabidly fanatic users. Users who will only give up the product when someone pries it from their cold dead fingers. I mean... isn't that how you feel about the successful open source products you love?

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[tempest303]

uhhh.... Chris Blizzard would probably beg to differ, my friend, along with countless other volunteers and participants from other companies. Netscape is BASED on Mozilla, but don't make the mistake that they're the same.

Furthermore, why was the open-sourcing of Netscape a "failure"? It was a *difficult* task, and the first of it's kind. To say that it was easy or that it's clearly the road to take for all other commercial freeware is obviously not the case, but a failure? Not in the least! Have you tried Netscape 6.1? Give it a shot, a serious try, and then try to tell me it's a "failure".

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[KidSock]

No, you're wrong. Mozilla is CERTAINLY an open-source project.

Well, in the obvious sense of the word, yes, most of the code can actually be downloaded and shared (although there are a lot of modules that are not; e.g. the e-mail spell checker). But the point I'm trying to make is that the benefits of the community process did not bare fruit in the slightest. And yet this was supposed to be one of the primary motivations for companies to share their code. The fact is; a web browser is too sophisticated and the existing codebase was accordingly insurmountable for even the most dedicated weekend code warrior. Had Netscape been constructed of a highly polymorhpic and modular design, the code might have been partitioned cleanly enough for other individuals to participate. But this was simply not the case. Sure, you can download the code, but I don't see people outside of Netscape participating in the development of Mozilla to the point where it would be considered a community process (although I do see a lot of usefull technical discussion). Fortunately the W3C does have a thriving community process and much of their work has been implemented in Mozilla. But this is largely due to the fact that many people from Netscape make up the governing bodies of working groups within the W3C.

And about Cathedrals vs. Bazaars. I don't think either is good. I prefer a dictatorship. Put one person that truely has vision at the helm and follow them unconditionally. Implement their vision. This is something the bureaucracy will not allow in a Cathedral. The Bazaar does not work because no one person is influential enough or has the power to make changes that trancend a codebase and these changes are invariably necessary.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[BorgDrone]

By almost any technical measure, IE is a better browser than Netscape/Mozilla (N/M)

I have a different opinion.

• IE's HTML parser is crap, if the HTML is fscked it guesses what it should look like. it shouldn't do that
• try loading a page that is not reachable, not only does the IE window loading the page hang but ALL IE windows are completely locked up
• IE is integrated into windows, there is a Mac version but it was developed independent from the windows version. what does this tell us: IE is not at all portable
• mozilla is WAY more flexible than IE will ever be. a few examples: you can modify the GUI or even build completely different applications based on mozilla in XUL, Mozilla can be easily embedded, and not just through an activeX component, it can e.g. even be embedded in a java app.
• Microsoft keeps adding useless non-standard features claiming 'webdesigners' want them (marquee anyone?) , but they still don't have decent PNG (alpha transparency) support, something LOTS of designers would like.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[Compuser]

Mozilla was supposed to be the most standards compliant browser out there. That was THE goal, AFAIK, at least for 1.0 release (of course being better than 4.7 in stability and usability too). Tell me if these goals haven't already been achieved. How is Mozilla a failure then?
Mozilla was meant to be standards compliant and there is no shortage of web related standards so "start simply" would contradict the goal of the project. As for "iterate constantly", they have produced the first real alpha of Mozilla with 0.9.1 and this is where we should track the birth of Mozilla from. Since then, updates were happening quite often, not to mention nightly builds which as the name suggests are nightly. Leadership is not there now, at least since jwz left. But so long as they make a fantastic browser I don't care if they are monkeys randomly typing code. Mozilla does remain solid since 0.9.1 days and just keeps getting better. Happy and loyal users exist. I am one.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail to consider one fact. A lot of the contributers who were not Netscape employees got jobs at Netscape because of their Mozilla development efforts.

Re:Mozilla ... Netscape ... what't the difference?

[BorgDrone]

Uh, yes it should - it's always a pain when a third-party site doesn't display, and you can't fix it.

Uh, no, it shouldn't.
that error wouldn't have existed in the first place if during testing, the third party's browser would have shown a large, red page saying: "PARSE ERROR ON LINE X, DOCUMENT DISPLAY ABORTED"
too bad mozilla doesn't do this either. imho HTML should be parsed very strictly. luckily XHTML fixes some of this.

IE 5.0 doesn't do that on any computer I've used, 98SE or 2K.

IE 5.5 does on all computers I have run it on.

Having a consistant look should be of highest importance, but Mozilla decided to go their own path.

Mozilla HAS a consistent look, it looks exactly the same on every platform it runs on. people who know mozilla on windows can also use it on linux, mac, BeOS, etc. etc. etc.

And come November when I'm running XP, Mozilla will look really strange in the Luna-scape. Oh well.

I've played around a bit with some XP beta's ,and luna really is butt-ugly, it's a failed attempt to rip off Aqua, the title bars on windows are huge, and take up a lot of screen space. the green start button looks weird and is even uglier when pressed (it 'behaves' like a square button).
that start button really shows that their attempt to make the OS skinnable failed miserably (the startbutton in the 'classic' style feels wierd too.)

Your second point about embedding is interesting, seeing as ActiveX is the way to embed controls in other applications in Windows (not just webpages, any app can embed any ActiveX control). And Moz does this too. I've never seen Mozilla embed via Java though, link anyone?

check here
you can not only embed mozilla in a java app, you can write mozilla plugins in java (pluglets) and write XPCOM components.

It's not like Netscape listened to their customers either.

they do now, check bugzilla.mozilla.org , submit bug reports, feature requests. people will listen. people will discuss it. it might end up getting implemented if there's enough people who want it.

Installer segfaults

[Micah]

I have RH 7.1. Untarred the install file. It ran and downloaded everything. When it was done ... segfault!

If I run the installer again, it does apparently find the files that were downloaded, but segfaults without installing them.

Did that happen to anyone else? Workarounds?

Re:Installer segfaults

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Caldara 2.4, installed fine for me also.

Re:Installer segfaults

[Anonymous Coward]

So, send in a bug report. Use gdb mozilla mozilla.core and then type backtrace and send in the results. This will hopefully tell the Mozilla developers what is going on (assuming it has symbols).

Re:Why release before Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that on the Mozilla road map, Mozilla.org recommends partners and commercial vendors to branch at 0.9.2, which was a very stable release. Mozilla 1.0 is still a moving target.

version??

[Punto]

True. This whole story is very nice, but nobody mentions what version of the mozilla code they used for Netcape 6.1

I remember the problem with 6.0 was that they used some milestone, o an early version wich sucked.

Re:version??

[BZ]

This used 0.9.2

Re:version??

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it used the as-of-yet-unreleased 0.9.2.1

who is steve case?

[Anonymous Coward]

is steve case related to scott case?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

It's branched from 0.9.2.

Re:Why?

[Simon Brooke]

There are several different builds of IE5 floating about and they are significantly different at least at the HTTP level; I know this to my cost because (at least) one generates incorrect RFC 1967 headers, and this breaks my maybeupload package.

IE 5.5 and IE 6 are much better. While I use Konqi as my browser of choice, there's no doubt that the latest IEs are very good.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, Insightful

Please mod up

WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck of you jew bastard. Just fucking relax.

Re:Why?

[The Dev]

Well, 6.x is just as slow and bloated as Mozilla, but Netscape 4.7x is much faster than either.

The only reason I upgraded from Netscape 3.02 to
4.xx was to use the IMAP mail client. 3.02 was probably the fastest web browser ever made.

Is there any actual feature advantage to Mozilla/Netscape6.x over Netscape 4.78?

And what is all the fuss over IE? Every once
in a while I hunt down a windows machine to try
it out and it still sucks just as bad as the old
days. I really hate the was it moves things around on the screen as it renders the page. Blah.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[dublin]

A lot of us stick with Netscape because, in spite of its flaws, it still does a much better job than any version of IE.

There are a lot of things Netscape brings to the table that IE can't match, things like support for roaming profiles, excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks, slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page, a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code, and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.

As soon as IE can do all those things, all of which I use and rely on very heavily, I'll *think* about switching - until then, I'll stick with Netscape even though I would love to see a stable version of NS6 that includes all the features above. (Roaming in particular is absent in both NS6 and Mozilla, and there are no plans to fix this glaring hole. Grrrr.)

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[the coose]

I might try Mozilla again.

I highly recomend you do. I had the same feelings until I tried 0.9.2 (browser only). I used it at work (Win98) and home (Linux). It ran quite well; Java, Flash, and Real plugins work good, too. I upgraded both machines yesterday to 0.9.3 and even started using Mozilla mail here at home. I just finished getting rid of Netscape 4.7x.

I'm not saying it's bug free or, as some argue, bloated on features (I don't mind it), but it's worth another try.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[griffits]

how about the way it reloads the page every time you resize the browser. That alone was reason enough for me never to use it

Re:Freudian slip?

[MindStalker]

I meant to say nonessentials obviously opps :)

Re:Great news for all 7 users waiting for it

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see...you're not happy with Netscape 6.0, you're not happy with Netscape 4.7, you're still hating/resenting IE, and then Netscape releases an improved browser and you...complain about it before you bother downloading it. Welcome to Slashdot.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Netscape 3 was so fast because it ignores 1/2 of all HTML pages b/c they're using Javascirpt or IE specific tags, or HTML 4.0..

Re:Mozilla 0.9.3 = Netscape 6.1?

[josepha48]

mozilla and netscape branched a while ago.. There are features in mozilla that are not in netscape. Image blocking is one of them I think. I am not sure what else. While it is true that they are patching netscape from mozilla patches they are two different branches. Mozilla 0.9.3 != Netscape 6.1 and mozilla 1.0 will probably not = netscape 6.2.

Netscape 6.0(1) was buggy as hell and this is an attempt at fixing that and possibly gaining market share. I.E. Those that like to run it cause it is NOT miscrosoft or those that are using a platform that does not have IE.

I use Netscape 4.7 because....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's faster than Mozilla on my system. Now, I may be doing something wrong, but I've had internet access for 6 or so years and am now using an Athlon 500MHz, Win98, and a dial-up modem. I greatly prefer Netscape 4.7 to IE5,and although I like Mozilla /5.0 (0.9.2), but it takes twice as long to load a page as Netscape 4.7,

Re:I use Netscape 4.7 because....

[ZxCv]

First off, try 0.9.3-- in my experience, it is definitely faster and more stable than 0.9.2. I've been using Mozilla for a while now and while it used to be true that 4.7 rendered faster than Mozilla, I don't think it is any more. At least on my Windows machine, Mozilla is inching towards the rendering speed of IE-- something Netscape 4 hasn't been able to come close to for quite some time. I'm not sure about my Linux boxes because I don't have Netscape 4 installed on those (Mozilla & Konqueror only).

I'd give Mozilla 0.9.3 before sticking with 4.7-- not only is it prettier but its definitely surpassed 4.7 at this point on stability, speed, and rendering accuracy/quality.

Re:I use Netscape 4.7 because....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm still using one of the nightly builds from 7/22 on Linux, but it blows Netscape 4.7 out of the water IMHO. I used to hate Mozilla with a passion since it never ran for more than 10 minutes without crashing. Since I've been running some of the nightly builds since the beginning of July I haven't had any troubles. I got the Netscape 6 JRE plugin and installed it and it works fine as well. Java actually works better under Mozilla with the JRE plugin than NS 4.7. The only issues I have are some of the fonts are wacky on some pages and some javascript Windows-explorer like nested menus are acting weird (they're always unfolded all the way). I'll have to try the latest build and see if it is any better. Great job Mozilla team. You're winning over a convert. SSL works fine, Java works good, Slashdot renders fine... hehe.. what else is there? :-)

Re:great features, too late

[optikSmoke]

more likely it would run worse on Linux, due to "accidental" and "unexpected" problems...............

Re:1st post

[Mao Zedong]

The moderators have OCD.

The java plugin that comes with Netscape 6.1 ...

[Kynde]

... crashed the Netscape on my well kept and up-to-date linux box. But simply by replacing the java plugin that came with Netscape 6.1 with Sun's very own Java 1.3 plugin things changed. And all I had to do to get that working was a simple symlink which was also well described in their Quick Start guide for the average users aswell.

Now java applets work better than ever in Netscape...

---

Re:Brilliant lead writing...

[sharkey]

That line was probably suggested by Clippy, seeing as how it's MSNBC.

"I see you are writing an article about a product that is not made by Microsoft. Would you like some help in creating confusing^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wcompound/complex-sounding sentences to cloud^W^W^W^W^Wclarify the issues involved with this incident?"

Damn icons

[Anonymous Coward]

What I hate about Netscape these days is the excess of icons and links to AOL and others. It puts icons in the desktop, in the menu bar, in IEs links bar, everywhere.

Re:Damn icons

[efgbr]

... try Mozilla. See www.mozilla.org

Re:Damn icons

[DrXym]

Netscape 6.1 has hardly any AOL specific extensions. There are a few dotted around such as Print Plus, Shop, My Netscape and in the default bookmark list of course but nothing like in 6.0 when they were hardcoded into the bottom bar. Most of them such as the Shop & My Netscape button can be removed from the UI via prefs.

Using 6.1 is actually quite a pleasant experience.

Re:Damn icons

[Bedouin X]

The delete key and unchecking a few checkboxes in preferences can kill ALL of the AOL icons and links in NS 6.

Netscape Success Helps Open Source

[reallocate]

Don't forget that a popular Netscape browser contributes to the long-term viability of open source. The single greatest threat to open source is the increasing market space occupied by Internet Explorer. No one but hard-core fans will run an operating system for which no browser exists.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[TheAwfulTruth]

Actually with all the "Netscape sucks" and "Mozilla sucks" every time they are brought up in a non confrontational context with IE (Such as when a new release is announced). You could say that /. is firmly on the side of Microsoft as well. Why is it that MSNBC is biased when they say that Netscape 6.0 was buggy, but when everyone on /. (and almost everywhere else on the net) says the same thing they're not? That just shows that comments like the one above are the biased ones...

memory=double; themes suck

[johnrpenner]

1) INSTALLATION - GOOD

i downloaded 6.1, and loaded it onto my machine
(a G4 with 128Mb RAM, running OS-9.1). the install
went pretty smooth, and it auto-updated all the right
things without screwing-up my netscape-4.5 install,
so good marks on the install experience.

2) MEMORY USAGE SUCKS - DOUBLE WHAT 4.5 USES:

- Netscape 4.5 = 19.8Mb RAM Usage
- Nesscape 6.1 = 39.8Mb RAM Usage

3) THEMES - WHAT A WASTE - WHY DIDN'T THEY SAVE THE
EFFORT, AND MAKE IT USE STANDARD APPEARANCE MANAGER?

The new netscape themes suck - standard mac themes are better.
The departure from system themes makes me not want to use it.
I have several thousand system-wide themes using kaleidoscope.
Microsoft internet explorer-5 uses these - there are only
about five netscape themes - therefore, the effort they put
into this is a waste. explorer wins here.

4) the only new feature i COULD use is to DELETE eMAIL
ATTACHMENTS > this does not exist in 6.1, so there is
no real useful improvement for me - there is no point
in upgrading to a netscape that uses more than double
the RAM without that new feature. the new features that
are actually useful (the multi-mailbox) is not implemented
nicely (you have to go through TWO level of the MAIL menu
to file an eMail, so its now double the steps of before,
and since i lose my ability to have a seperate window to
drag-and-drop my emails into, and it uses double the RAM - it equals a down-grade.

regards,
johnRpenner.

http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner

--

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[simong]

My company insist that we use Netscape for internet access, and the desktops seem to be stuck on 4.74. I've never been able to find a reason why. I'm tempted to download 6.1 and install it just to have something slightly better than the unstable bug-ridden non-standard piece of crap that AOL's only contribution to Netscape was.

catch 22

[Anonymous Coward]

if its not microsoft, its AOL. you're screwed either way. slashdot needs more anti-AOL stories. at least microsoft only has msnbc. AOL has the only two available cable news networks, which are seen globally. AOL has a vast movie, record and publishing empire, in my opinion they are the most dangerously influential company in the world right now.

x86 ONLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

As always, it only supports x86, no other plataform.

Re:x86 ONLY!

[pressman]

Hmmm. That's funny, I remember there being a PPC G3 466 in this here iBook running Netscape 6.1.

Re:x86 ONLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was talking about unix :).

Re:x86 ONLY!

[pressman]

I see where you're going, but there is an OS X version of 6.1. So there is a non-x86 *NIX port. ;-)

Galeon :)

[Balinares]

Yep, and that is the great thing about Galeon. I wrote a post about it a few days ago, I'm not gonna repeat myself, but basically, Galeon is the same engine as Mozilla, in a nifty, fast GTK interface. Definitely worth a try!

Another thing is symptomatic of OSS: reuse of nifty things to make niftier things still. ;)

Mozilla 0.9.3 = Netscape 6.1?

[mc2Kleen]

Okay my question is if this is a big stability upgrade to Netscape 6.0 and is based on the latest Mozilla release, why didn't they wait for the final Mozilla release or 1.0? If it is that important that they release an upgrade, why don't they just wait a bit longer? Is 6.2 just on the horizon then?

Re:Mozilla 0.9.3 = Netscape 6.1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see:

• Microsoft changes licensing terms allowing OEMs to install the software they want to.
• WinXP release date approaching.
• New version of AOL coming out any day now.
• AOL making OEM packaging deals fast and furious.
• AOL doomed if Microsoft can keep using IE to leverage MSN.

It's not rocket science, folks...

Re:Mozilla 0.9.3 = Netscape 6.1?

[dveditz]

The release was always planned for around now (it did slip a little). Since mozilla.org doesn't yet have a spec or plan for what "Mozilla 1.0" means it seems foolish to base a commercial company's plans on waiting for it to be done.

Re:Mozilla 0.9.3 = Netscape 6.1?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, IE6 comes out next Wednesday. Netscape really want to have a decent browser out by then.

don't forget S/MIME

[Anonymous Coward]

S/MIME is not supported in NS>6.0 & MZ1.x, if you need this feature: wait MZ 1.x or use NS 4.78 or IE. Another NS 4.x feature is not included in Mozilla?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why. Cuz people are dumb that's why. I was building a Windows box to image to 250 clients at my school (big tech school it should have the brightest tech minds in the city at least right?). So I loaded an old copy of Mozilla on there. They slipped out. "NO WAY!" Put Netscape 6 on there. They wouldn't budge. I explained what Mozilla is, but they still didn't care. It didn't have the name and they wouldn't use it because of that. Stupid people rule the world I guess. -Tim

Re:Why?

[japhmi]

Yup...that means I like the Windows Find applet. Sue me.

I remember back when NT could search the contents of files, instead of just file names. Someone was talking about it and just going on... Another person asked them what it was called, and the person replied "search." The reply?

"search, huh, that's an odd name for grep."

Of course, having lots of small programs that do one thing and do it well and piping them together however I want is the power and strength of *NIX command prompt, something a GUI can never give you...

Not every bug crashes the program

[ahde]

Not every bug crashes the program! copy, paste ad nauseaum.

Dictionary? How about a grammar checker!

[FrankHaynes]

Who needs a dictionary that says "their" is spelled OK in the sentence "You won't find me their".

What the world needs is a good 5 cent grammar checker!

Re:Netscape....

[Anonymous Coward]

Used t obe better , right up until AOL scum bought it and started killing the code becaouse the prefer MS and IE...

Re:On a subject of Mozilla (how to deal with pop-u

[Knuckles]

Paste this into prefs.js -->

Ack! prefs.js is overwritten everytime you change Preferences in the dialog. Create user.js in the same dir and put your customizations there. See this doc. And spread that URL, spread it. Nobody seems to know about it

Re:Let's start with rendering pages properly

[DrXym]

Mozilla and Netscape 6.1 render HTML & CSS extremely well. Where there is a problem it usually boils down to broken HTML, CSS or Javascript in the actual content and not a fault in the browser. A common fault is JS with code paths for IE (checking for document.all), Netscape 4.x (checking for document.layers) and other. Since Mozilla and Netscape 6.1 are deemed as Other because they support neither document.all or document.layers, it often runs into untested and broken JS.

Let's start with rendering pages properly

[FrankHaynes]

There is only ONE feature I would like to see in anything coming out of Netscape's doors: render html properly.

Not executing Javascript quickly, not even executing client-side Java applets without crashing, just do the most basic thing one could ever ask of a web browser: render the damned page properly!

It can't even handle tables or cascading style sheets properly, who cares about speed and so-called 'features'??!! It doesn't look the way I designed it, so Navigator gets the boot! SEE YAAAAAA!

I agree with /., Is Netscape still around?

Re:Let's start with rendering pages properly

[FrankHaynes]

I see. So their error handling stinks.

I was under the impression that the folks from Netscape had a hand in steering the development of html and css. The 4.xx versions of their Navigator browser were around after these specifications had been available for a while, yet their software couldn't handle them correctly.

This does not bode well for their future (now current) software releases, hence my great reluctance to spend the time necessary to grab the code, install it, find out what doesn't work, etc. I've been burned badly previously.

If Navigator 6.1 receives rave reviews from even the skeptics, I'll consider it.

Re:standards compliance

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Mozilla has quite a few bugs in its CSS implementation. It looks like it emulates IE sometimes. Opera has near 100% support for CSS/CSS2.

What's new in version 6.1

[lmd]

The Release Notes are here. A link to Mozilla 0.9.3 is at the top of the page so I would assume Netscape 6.1 is based on it.

Re:What's new in version 6.1

[cetan]

you assumed wrong actually. :)

It's based on 0.9.2.

Re:What's new in version 6.1

[lmd]

Actually, Netscape's Release Notes page is incorrect and my guess was based on it. They should have a link to Mozilla 0.9.2 instead of Mozilla 0.9.3.

Re:What's new in version 6.1

[cetan]

Strange indeed.

http://www.mozillazine.org/

indicates it's off of the 0.9.2 branch and that's what the mozilla site said at one point.

Looks like conflicting info.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Rudeboy777]

Give Mozilla a go, I use it on the Win partition of my home computer and find it equally stable with IE 5.5 (Win 98/Moz ver0.9.1 btw). It really is ready for everyday use with outstanding promise for 1.0

In other news...

[evilMoogle]

Pets.com released their new line of doggy chow

The Anabaptist church issued a new statement of faith

The new Atari gaming console will feature support for DivX discs.

Re:Ugh... Netcenter

[dublin]

Sorry, I just plain flat don't believe a word of this. It looks to me like you're just trying to slam AOL.

I've had several netcenter accounts, and know many other with one as well, and I've never encountered any of what you report.

I niether like nor dislike AOL - personally, I've always wanted a real Internet connection, so I couldn't even tell you what the AOL portal looks like. For the record, I have not found them to engage in any of the bad behavior you report, though...

Re:sweet god in heaven

[nramsay]

The 1.3.1 version of the Java Runtime is 5,364,696 bytes.

Re:Better for porn !

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Because it works with libpr0n

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

The advantages are these:

• Greater quality control. The commercial version is beat on a lot more than any Mozilla milestone meaning it should be more robust.
• Some limited support. Netscape will more than likely release another minor update in a few months to catch any top crashers. It will also release updates for any security issues that arise. With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone.
• Instant messenger.. Netscape has AIM built in. Clever people may even figure out how to remove the advert from the bottom by editting the chrome.
• Spell checker.. Moz doesn't have one of these due to the fact that the dictionary is licenced.
• Bundled crap/goodies.. The installer can download and install RealPlayer, Shockwave, Net2Phone, WinAmp and some other stuff if you let it.
• Netscape branding and version. Believe it or not but some people trust something more when its called 6.1 than 0.9.3.
• Netscape Netcentre integration. Register when you open a new profile and the instance messenger, side panels and home page are all customised to your taste.

Obviously some people may not be perceive some of these things as advantages, but that is why Mozilla exists. You're free to choose either. Mozilla is free of the commercialism and out on the cutting edge but you will experience more crashes as a result of that.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Anonymous Coward]

the latest release of mozilla is stable. It still uses huge amounts of memory, but the performance is better than netscape 4.

Re:Spelling error?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you're a million laughs at parties.

"MAC" ??

[green pizza]

I realize the poster is refering to the Macintosh (Mac) when he mentioned "MAC". But it just looks odd, like it's an acroynm or something.

Re:"MAC" ??

[Mao Zedong]

No it doesn't.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[HiThere]

I don't want that IE piece of *** on my Windows system (Win95). When it was installed, things slowed to a crawl. When I removed it, they sped up again. Mozilla may take awhile to start (since I don't compare it against IE, I don't know. Seems pretty quick to me.), but it never did that to me.

I don't mind paying for a browser while I'm using it. But to take that kind of a performance hit all the time is really ... well, it just seems stupid to me. I don't upgrade fast enough to be able to pay that kind of price.

Upgrading from NS60 to NS61 screwed itself up!

[cormandy]

I just sent this note to Netscape, as part of
the "[lack thereof] Quality Feedback" mechanism.

Dear Netscape,

I am completely disappointed with your latest version of
Communicator (6.1). I have been using Netscape 6.0 for
the past few months, and was somewhat let down as
the e-mail client sucked, and some of the fine features
from NS4.x were missing (e.g. filing bookmarks).
Nevertheless I persevered because I believed in you. In
fact, prior to Netscape distributing your browser for free,
I paid for your product (2 years in a row). That was
a long time ago...

I just downloaded and installed the "production" version
of NS6.1 from your website today to replace my current
installation of NS6.0. I used the "NS6Setup" program
and installed the "full" version and then rebooted my
laptop (Windows 2000, Compaq Armada).

Upon starting NS 6.1, the application starts, but the
screen layout is totally F**KED. Clicking the "N" logo
(which happens to be in the center of the window at
the far left) results in the application crashing.

How could you release this untested, bug ridden version
of crap? How the hell am I supposed to get my old
configuration of e-mail and bookmarks back? Do you
think I should revert back to NS6.0? Forget it.

A fan no more,

cormandy

Re:Why?

[Yosho]

Would you believe that I was going to guess if it was Cobol before I read that? The physics department at my college is madly in love with it for some reason, but luckily, it's not required for a CS major...

Re:I thought they said they were done with browser

[iceT]

Yeah, no more pesky end-table HTML tags...

we can finally kiss JAVA good bye.. everything will be VBScript!
W3C can finally disband... If people are only writing to the browser, then there's no need for a standard.

They say there's no Netscape Loyalists.. Bullsh*t! IE renders nicely. I'll give it that, but it's everything ELSE that SUCKS, and that's why I can't STAND to use it!

Re:Freudian slip?

[MindStalker]

Well, it uses alot of small .gifs for one thing, But you get a much better picture if you look at the individual packages (which can be downloaded seperatly, so you don't have to get the full 25MB)
browser.xpi = 5.6MB = The main program
jre13i.exe = 7.5MB = Java Runtime Engine
mail.xpi = 1.4MB = Mail program (which isn't standalone btw)
nsrp8.exe = 3.7MB Real Player for netscape
winamp275.exe = 1.6 WinAmp
And another 5MB of 16 smaller packages like PSM, Flash, and spellcheck, many of which are essential like aol's art extention, net2phone, and some plugin for helping identify HP printers.

Attack of the Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

As a web developer Netscape has been my biggest nightmare. Their earlier version do not properly support tables, and have real problems with style sheets. We've had to constantly remove functionality to support an even halfway decent appearance on the Netscape Browser. I wont even go into the difficulty of Netscape on a Mac.

Re:Why?

[gavlil]

Is there any actual feature advantage to Mozilla/Netscape6.x over Netscape 4.78? YES - its NOT 4.78 :-)

Re:Why?

[pmz]

I often want to essentially combine grep and find...

Okay, what about egrep, fgrep, sed, awk, tr, chmod, chown, gzip, rm, dos2unix, cp, mv, perl, ispell, sort, cat, cut, bash, ...ad nauseum...

find already does too much; adding all of these commands to make it more convenient would make it a yucky beast. find needs to be small and flexible to make it more convenient not more integrated.

This is why MS Windows is the anti-OS to UNIX. Windows has spoiled people to think that thought isn't required when using a computer. Not only does MS have a monopoly on the desktop, it goes further to capture the (whiny voice) "but thinking makes my head hurt" market. I wince when I hear "system administrator" or "software development" in the same sentence as "Windows."

Re:great features, too late

[Ephol]

If Microsoft had ever released IE for Linux... Oh my goodness, as a web designer I could think of nothing better happening... But seriously, while IE is still far superior (go ahead and flame me all you want, make yourself feel 31337 for bashing MS :) ) I could live with IE and Mozilla(-based browsers) being the norm. If only there were a way to rid the world of Netscape 4.x's existence...

Posting with Netscape 6.1 (love it)

[Uggy]

No doubt about it, 6.0 sucked. We all agree. However, I must say I'm very impressed with 6.1. I've been using the nightlies for about two years now (laugh all you want, those were the lean years. In my day we had to walk backwards, uphill in the snow... but I digress).

0.9.3 nightlies in a word "ROCK". This is THE fastest browser, period. It blows the doors off IE on complex tables, and general page renders. To see what I'm talking about hit cnet.com where they have those flash ads in the articles. They are pretty intensive on the CPU when you're page scrolling. You'll see them bounce around a bit. Netscape/mozilla has no problems with them now.

I am suitabley impressed with Netscape 6.1. I'll have to wait to see, however, if there are any showstoppers that'll chase me back to IE.

So far so good though.

NBC isn't trying very hard

[Anonymous Coward]

to look impartial, is it?

Nomatter how bad mozilla is, it doesn't deserve the kind of jew-baiting NBC is dishing out.

(.93 might be faster, but it sure has alot of extra non-penultimate features that I haven't seen in the last several releases.)

Not exactly...

[Mustang Matt]

I make sure my pages run in Opera 5.12, IE5+, and Konquerer.

I know IE is loose with html decoding, but I am strict when writing it.

There are certain things that are broke in the new Netscape.

Don't believe me? Load up www.Bridge.com in Netscape 4.72, no problems... Load it up in 6+... Oops!

We spent a whole lot of manpower trying to keep it compatible with 4 to 4.72 and every single freaking release changed the specs and things broke. Granted we were taxing dhtml to the maximum capability it still should have worked fine and it does in NS4.72 and IE4+. Opera still has some problems but I'm working with their developers on fixing them.

Re:In what way is 6.1 "better" than 4.x?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

uh SSL support is included in NS6 and Netscape. It even has a cool personal security manager where you can store your passwords and stuff.

Re:Why release before Mozilla?

[ahde]

6, I just gave up when I saw .93

Re:Netscape has lost all meaning to me

[koekepeer]

what was the purpose of this post?

34 million lines of code

[Mao Zedong]

And it can't even render pages correctly.

Re:34 million lines of code

[WildBeast]

hell, it's enough to start an OS with :)

Re:Freudian slip?

[cyb3r0ptx]

Ha, I thought that was intentional.

Without even trying it, I'm sure that slip was correct. Mozilla has only recently .9x gotten around to being useable for everyday use (at least for me), but I'll bet the codebase for NS 6.1 is even older.

p.

notoriously buggy?

[byoung]

No "editorial bias" here:

AOL Time Warner released the first final upgrade to its notoriously buggy Netscape 6 browser, promising a smoother and faster ride for Netscape loyalists.

netscape loyalists?

Are they trying to position Netscape users as a bunch of militia members or something? Wait'll we see Rosie attacking Tom Sellick saying we have no right to keep using Netscape.

Beautiful example of objective reporting there.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[segfaultdot]

IE 5 vs. Netscape 4?

Do version numbers really mean ANYTHING?

If so, then you could say that Red Hat 4.1 is much more advanced than Debian 2.2... clearly not the case.

Mozilla has improved in leaps and bounds and promises (once they crest into version 1.0) to be an extremely viable browser.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[cyberdonny]

> What about the articles that you couldn't read that they chose not to run?

Or articles that you couldn't read because they conveniently forgot to close a <table> tag...

Re:notoriously buggy?

[The Dev]

Um, what exactly don't you like about Netscape 4.x
(now 4.78)? It's stable (as least on windows and FreeBSD), fast and a nice integrated mail client (sucky for newsgroups though).

Re:notoriously buggy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you know... They're releasing code based on beta software. That's a fact, there's no way around it. Calling it "notoriously buggy" would be fact not an editorial rant.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[Swaffs]

Well, I am one person that is using Windows and has not caved and started using IE. I've been using Mozilla happily for months now.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[snilloc]

4.78 was not as stable (win95) as I really wanted it to be. For me, it crashed at least as often as IE, probably more. And 4.76 (or 4.77 - forget which) wasn't exactly rock-steady on Red Hat 7 either.

I do like the mail client. I can't remember how many times my parents would call me at school and ask about some retarded problem in Outlook Express, giving me fits because I had never used the program at that point...

Sucky for newsgroups? Better than Outlook express, IMO. Not that that says much for N4.7x tho.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[Dr_Claw]

[snip lots of very valid problems in NS 4.x]
some of these gripes also carry over to Mozilla (eg integrated HTML editor)

To be fair, there is a reason for this. A lot of the code used for the editor is also used for text dialogues like the one I'm writing this comment in - in the browser itself, and in the mail/news client. Hence you can't compile them without the Composer part. If you don't like it, don't use it - but remember it's not bloat, you are using the functions it provides.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[Blue Neon Head]

The point is that MSNBC should know quite well that referring throughout an article to the "buggy version 6" of a product competing with its owners' products if going to raise an eyebrow - and rightfully so.

It's also worth noting that there are plenty of other reasons not to use IE. Perhaps, for instance, you are disturbed by some of its more security-compromising features.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[bricriu]

Well, they do kinda have a point, especially if you buy into the "browser wars" buzzword. By this point, if you're on a Windows box -- which most people are, especially those who read MSNBC for their "news" -- the odds are that you're using IE. I use a Windows box, and, honestly, I like IE... and I was one of the most die-hard against it, until it went to version 5.0 (SP1) while Netscape was still wasting away in version 4.x.

The point that he's trying to make is that by now, unless you have a major grudge against M$ (not that anyone on /. has such a thing) or have a Linux box (same difference? ;-)you've probably caved and gone with IE now. So loyalists are all that are left.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[sydb]

I'd imagine it wasn't stylish and pretty enough. That's why I don't use it, anyway.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[baboin]

You haven't noticed any MS bias reading MSNBC articles? What about the articles that you couldn't read that they chose not to run? Don't think you have the whole picture just by reading MSNBC for bias.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[benedict]

MSNBC didn't write the article, they got it from syndication.

I have detected no editorial bias towards Microsoft at MSNBC, and I think I'd notice, since I'm quite biased *against* Microsoft.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[rabidcow]

Same here. I did use IE to download mozilla, though.

Still, while I think it's to the point where there's no reason to switch to IE, there really is no compelling reason to switch from IE.

Re:notoriously buggy?

[Gleef]

The Dev asks:

Um, what exactly don't you like about Netscape 4.x (now 4.78)? It's stable (as least on windows and FreeBSD), fast and a nice integrated mail client (sucky for newsgroups though).

(Note: I am not an IE fan, in fact I use Mozilla as my main browser; also note: most of my Netscape 4.x experience is with the Linux version, your mileage may vary).

Here's a quick, of the top of my head, list of some things I don't like about Netscape 4.x
* Pathetically non-standard CSS implementation
* Annoyingly quirky DOM implementation
* Crashes more than Mozilla 0.9.2 and above (at least for me)
* Mail client can't handle multiple accounts
* Does not properly handle being executed more than once at a time
* Pointless HTML editor that just takes up space
* Awkward rendering; particularly bad handling of fonts and text placement
* Badly chosen or missing keyboard shortcuts
* Occasionally corrupts downloaded binaries

Yes, some of these gripes also carry over to Mozilla (eg integrated HTML editor), but it's already pretty much surpassed 4.x in features (it's missing a few, but has many that 4.x couldn't even think about), and blown way past it in standards compliance and ease to develop for.

IE 5.x is (mostly) more standards compliant than Netscape 4.x, but at the expense of security (on windows) or performance (on unix). It is also, in my experience, far less stable than Netscape 4.x.

I'm looking forward to the day when I can focus my website development on looking good on IE 5.0+, Netscape 6.1+ (6.0 is best forgotten) and Mozilla 1.0+, and dump support for both Netscape and IE's obnoxious 4.x browsers.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[ahde]

The reason corporations and the goverment still use netscape exclusively is because the IT departments are scared to death of IE (and microsoft security in general.) But since that brown out or whatever its called a while back, there has been a lot of defection.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[stu42j]

Actually, if you use the standard Installer download, you'll only have to download the components you want to use.

Why release before Mozilla?

[iceT]

Mozilla is still not production? Why would Netscape release their product when Mozilla hasn't released there? Is this just to cover up the SCREWUP with Netscape 6.0(1)? Will there be a 6.2 when Mozilla reaches 1.0?

Re:Why release before Mozilla?

[BrookHarty]

I hope they skip straight to Netscape 7.0 (-;

Re:Why release before Mozilla?

[snilloc]

It's not as though there haven't been software releases that were not worthy of an x.00 release number...

Despite being pre 1.0, Moz is (now) good enough to branch a Netscape production release. If there were no mozilla/netscape, there would only be 2 users instead of 7 users waiting for the next Netscape release.

One word.

[supabeast!]

Opera.

Explanation: Netscape and Mozilla are just too big, bloated, and annoying. Honestly, I don't give a damn if the source is open or not, I just want a web broswer with a small footprint that doesn't crash, and doesn't churn out pages in some ugly little courier looking font I can't read when I am in Linux (Yes, I know that there are simple fixes for that problem, I just don't even want to be bothered.). Konquerer kicks ass, but alas, it is tied to KDE, so Opera is my Linux browser of choice.

Of course, what really makes me feel bad is that I would LOVE to see a good IE for Linux...

Windows ported to Unix?

[NullAndVoid]

Also, in this subthread, folks correctly mention that IE exists for SunOS 5.x and HP-UX. I believe that both ports are straight (and half-assed) ports from win32 using MainWin.

Drifting further off-topic: I've always wondered why a bigger deal wasn't made of this during the MS antitrust trial. The Mac & Unix ports of IE would seem to indicate that IE isn't as inseparable from Windows as MS claims. Would it be so easy to port the file system, memory management, and other OS components to the Mac?

Re:Windows ported to Unix?

[WNight]

They didn't claim IE wouldn't work without windows, they claimed windows wouldn't work without IE...

I do think integrating an HTML renderer is a good idea. The bad idea is taking over all file extensions, putting the icons on the desktop, intentionally 'fixing' your OS so the competitors products don't work, and everything else MS did.

Re:great features, too late

[MrDolby]

I wouldn't consider that a half-win. Yes they got the surfer to use IE but they still don't make any money. Where if they get the surfer to buy the OS then their in business.

Re:Why? I use Moz and Netscape

[Electric Eye]

Who in the world calls Netscape for support anymore? Who needs a dictionary for web browsing? Stable? Netscape and stability have neevr been synonymous. Bleeding edge features? LOL!! Bro, this fucker is so BEHIND the edge, you might as well refer to it as bleeding to death. You wonder why most people still use 4.7x? Because it's still better. But, IE has so far surpassed Netscape in just about every way (except the brilliant Usenet news reader NS has always had and remains my favorite) that it's a dead issue at this point.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[DrXym]

If you don't want all the value added crap, simply choose not to download and install it when the installer asks you. If you choose just to install the browser the download is only 7Mb.

Incorrect use of case in Class names

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the problem with ESPN. Check it out. IE5 incorrectly treats Class names as case insensitive. Mozilla/Netscape 6.1 treat them according to the HTML 4.01 Standard.

Just because you don't know how to write HTML+CSS don't blame it on Netscape

Re:great features, too late

[geekoid]

so what you mean to say is: "Netscape, the Apple of browsers"

Run and grab those AOL/Netscape ads, you bet!

[Anonymous Coward]

This browser just gets lamer every iteration. I haven't upgraded but I just bet there are more of those netscape and aol corporate property-oriented buttons all over this piece of crap.

International Language Packs

[MrJones]

I wonder if there will be once again an spanish version of Netscape in ftp.netscape.com?

I really want to deploy this beast to my users, but I need that language pack.

Any ideas?

Re:Why?

[archen]

still, you tend to run the risk of getting a build which has regressed farther. Getting nightly builds is sort of like playing darts - sometimes you get a good one, sometimes a bad. But that makes it more fun in my opinion.

How to Install Spell Check in Mozilla!

[stu42j]

According to this article on MozillaZine you may be able to use Netscape's proprietary spell checker in Mozilla by installing the spell check XPI from Netscape 6.1.

Re:How to Install Spell Check in Mozilla!

[ehackathorn]

:-)
You made my day! Too bad nobody else is going to see this...
Eric

Bugger

[Saxerman]

I still recall the trouble I had when I finally "upgraded" from Netscape 4.7 to 6.0 on my windowz boxen. When I finally made the jump to the more recent Mozilla I had everything Netscape provided in a more stable format, without the annoying install process.

I know I am part of the small minority still trying to suffer with the non-MS browser. I fail to see why anyone in this small majority (which should include only the geek fringe) would want to suffer with more Netscape. At least Mozilla says it is still in beta, which holds the promise of an eventual stable release.

Netscape 6.1 = (Mozilla 0.9.3 + branding)

[BroadbandBradley]

Branding = AOL/Netscape inspired bookmarks and messenger.
add the AOL messenger in the sidebar, and a dictionary.
oh, and don't forget the product registration and mynetscape account setup. You can bypass the registration, but the myNetscape portal is a nice addition to the browser if only to backup bookmarks and adress book.

Re:Netscape 6.1 = (Mozilla 0.9.3 + branding)

[Hazzl]

Actually it is based on Mozilla 0.9.2 but a lot of the bugfixes that went into 0.9.3 are also in Netscape 6.1 as the netscape engineers worked on both branches parallely.

Re:Netscape 6.1 = (Mozilla 0.9.3 + branding)

[AntiTuX]

Actually, it's 0.9.2 + bugfixes + branding. trust me, I'm a build engineer at nscp.

Re:Netscape 6.1 = (Mozilla 0.9.3 + branding)

[BroadbandBradley]

god I love the bleeding edge. thanks for the correction, I knew it was 0.9.something.
regardless, Mozilla, is part of our not so evil plan to take over the WORLD!!!! Down with the evil empire!!!!

Re:No it's not...

[cyberdonny]

> To view the image, click on the link and then add a ? to the end of the URL. (If you're using Mozilla, pressing enter in the location bar is sufficient.)

... and if you use Konqueror, just clicking on the link is enough! D'oh.

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

The spellchecker engine in Mozilla isn't just a list of words. I don't know the details but I expect dictionary contains tables and trees to ensure rapid checking and catching of typo errors.

Sure you could write a checker in Mozilla that you read a big .txt file of 150,000 words but it would be as slow as hell. Someone will have to source a decent GPL spellchecker library or write one and a dictionary before Mozilla will have anything similar.

Re:Why?

[MrBogus]

At least on Windows, Mozilla knows how to pickup known compatible plug-ins from the Netscape 4.x plugin directory automatically.

On my box works for Flash, QuickTime, Real, and Acrobat -- all registered in Help+About Plug-ins, but not in the Mozilla plugin directory. (And what happens if you don't have NS4 installed? Guess everyone needs to update their plug-in installers.)

Re:Why?

[ncc74656]

I'm stuck in a Win2k lab at the moment and the IE5 here must be different from everyone else's IE5. It crashes CONSTANTLY. It abhors PNGs.

It must be a badly broken install for it to behave like that. I use Win2K Pro SP2 and IE 5.5 at home and at work, and it almost never crashes. Come to think of it, I think IE has never crashed. I've had some weirdness at work lately with VC++ and MSDN (gonna try uninstalling and reinstalling tomorrow), but most of the rest of the time, It Just Works. It certainly doesn't have any problems with webpages (mine uses PNGs for nearly all graphics that aren't JPEGs).

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[MrBogus]

Nope, there was an IE 1.0 -- I saw it distributed with a CD collection of MS PR/white papers. (My boss at the time ran out of his office saying "You gotta see this!" so that we could all gather around and chuckle.)

I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Above]

Hoping to upgrade my tired Netscape 4.7 setup I decided to give Netscape 6.1 a go. I tried on a Windows 98 box, not wanting to push my luck yet with a Unix version. The install went smoothly and quickly, it appeared all was well.

That lasted for about 3 seconds. The installer auto-launched Netscape 6.1, which promptly hung. I let it sit for 3 minutes before CTL-ATL-DEL'ing it. I reran it then and it came up. I went right for the preferences, to make sure they were acceptable. Boom, a crash while closing a section in the preferences menu.

Launch again. Go to my own web site, it hangs mid-download on the home page. 3 minutes later it's CTL-ATL-DEL again.

Launch again, go to the netscape web site, move the scroll bar, bam, another crash.

Go to the control panel, deinstall Netscape 6.1. Go to slashdot and post about experiences, using Netscape 4.7.

I might try Mozilla again. 3 months ago it was still unstable on windows and very slow compared to 4.7 or IE. I find it sad, but I think Netscape (and possibly Mozilla) are going to be too little to late to get any market share and use. I may be using 4.7 for a very long time.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Problems with windows 98 SE fall into 2 categories Crappy software that takes the system out. Or Crappy hardware .. it never ceases to amaze me what kind of crap harware is speced for windows 98. I was plesently supprised to see how much LESS 98 crashes when I put it on a box with hardware speced for Windows 2000 or Linux.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having crash doing simple operations probably means problems with your hardware or drivers. I would first try updating the video driver, because web browsers, as simple as they may seem, are pretty demanding on a good video card. And also make sure you have enough RAM to run it. If you're running win98 on a 64MB machine, with IE (bloat and pre-loaded), winamp, icq2000 (which takes 11MB!!), etc., all running in the background, then you're pushing it too hard.

I've been runing NS6.1 on win2k since it was "unofficially released" a few days ago, and so far no single crashes yet. You should definitely check your system configuration, even if NS6.1 is the only app that malfunctions.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Todd Knarr]

That's odd. I find Mozilla 0.9.3 incredibly stable on my systems. Then again, I use it on Linux and Windows NT, which are both relatively stable base OSes. I have crashes in it on my Win98 system, but then I have crashes in IE5.5 on that system about as often. Which implies that it's the underlying system, not the browser, that's unstable. It's hardly news that Win98's not nearly as stable as NT4, and if you've installed any third-party software on that Win98 box, things get really hairy.

Re:I dove in, and found the pool empty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you don't have a old Mozilla profile around that is hosing it up? Or even a NS 6.0 profile. Try starting fresh and see if the problems disappear.

standards compliance

[Doviende]

opera still doesn't comply with a bunch of CSS and CSS2 features, and mozilla does almost all of them perfectly.

Re:Why?

[fredrik70]

Ok, I'll bite.
Emacs kicks vi ass big time, always has, always will! ;-)
*grin*

Re:"MAC" ?? (ot)

[Ross C. Brackett]

You might be thinking of MAC as in Media Access Control as in the hardware address for Ethernet (and other types of networks as well, I presume.)

Re:Why?

[GunFodder]

How come zealots of tools that lack major functionality always turn it into a badge of honor? "Plugins? Those are for luzers! Music and video don't belong on a computer!" Why don't you prove you are a real geek and go back to lynx on a vt100?

Re:IE6

[ZxCv]

I'm not sure exactly what beta stage of IE6 I'm running, but its build 2462.

I only upgraded this Windows machine because VS.NET Beta2 requires it and was pretty weary because I had heard horror stories about earlier IE6 betas. But in use, I've had 0 problems with it-- no crashes, no slowdowns, nothing. I personally like the resize feature but that and the privacy features are about the only visible changes.

And btw, I don't know how far back you've been using Mozilla, but if you've never had Mozilla bring down your whole system, I applaud you. Granted I haven't seen one since 0.9 was released but I had more than one during the 0.8 series.

Please cite authorship correctly

[Jeremy Erwin]

This is not a MSNBC story. It's a CNET authored story-- the original of which is here. It is inaccurate and short sighted to continue to give credit to a Microsoft owned network, but even more so in this particular case, where a conflict of interest might reasonably be suspected.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[msh8er]

Why is it that MSNBC is biased when they say that Netscape 6.0 was buggy, but when everyone on /. (and almost everywhere else on the net) says the same thing they're not?

Simple: /.ers aren't paid employees of what tries to be a news organization. This forum is for the discussion of opinion; a front-page story on CNET News.com or MSNBC is for the presentation of fact.

Of course, if you want to see some real bias, consider that it's only in the last month or two that CNET and others have dropped the word "beleagured" when talking of anything Apple related. Don't get me started....

Re:1st post

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it these AC posts, which start out at 0, get modded down twice? There are trolls around here who get modded down once, and goofy shit like this gets modded twice. Lame.

Re:spell checker?

[stu42j]

Only the spell check "interface" was released. The actual spell check that Netscape uses is "International ProofReaderTM text proofing software, copyright © 1995 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V." so it's not Netscape's to release.

See this bug for information on work to get aspell in Mozilla.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your complaint about IE is a result of the person who wrote the page leaving out width and height attributes for images. Ideally, for perfect validation, width and height attributes should always be used.

IE displays whatever it can, without waiting for the whole page to finish loading. IMO (connecting through 56K dial-up) this is a good thing, despite the occasional redrawing as images download.

6.1preview on MacOS X

[Anonymous Coward]

it's runs beautifully on X... sweet as butter on corn... mmm, eat it, eat it good... -richy

Re:6.1preview on MacOS X

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX, not X. Get it right, macboy. You're not on the real X.

Re:6.1preview on MacOS X

[NDPTAL85]

But you can install X on OS X so you never know now with Mac users............

Re:New Theme!

[spektr]

Netscape has released a new Toy Factory theme for Netscape 6.1. Big bright buttons!

Cool! Now we've even got a XP-compatiblility-extension!

user.js

[Capsaicin]

THANK YOU!!!

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

But Asa, nightly releases are even more buggier than milestones (in general). This means to fix one security flaw you're having to run code which is even more likely to contain bugs.

And I didn't say NS came out with fixes any faster than Mozilla, I just said they provided limited support for a release. That means fixing the security holes and crash bugs without dragging in a new bunch of features with their own set of problems. I know Mozilla has come out with plenty of milestones between 6.0 and 6.1 but that's nothing to do with the point I was making.

Re:I used to love her, but it's all over now

[Anonymous Coward]

I went thru the same thing, Got tried of it wrote a PHP/MySQL script to keep my bookmarks. And the great part is is works with just about any browser.

And the article looks crap in Netscape 4...

[sparkz]

validator.w3.org has a field day with the MSNBC article!

Re:And the article looks crap in Netscape 4...

[Hassman]

Who actually uses that validator crap? It whines about the stupidest things that is common in HTML code. In fact, I don't think I've found a single site that the validator doesn't yell at.

Re:Why?

[reaper20]

The mozilla nightly's expire after thirty days. They are nightly builds for a reason.

The Mac OS version crashes

[pnadeau]

Well I wasted my time downloading it and it consistently crashed with an "error of type 1" (segfault) as soon as i tried to open a menu. :-(

Re:great features, too late

[iceT]

It also doesn't matter how BAD a technology, as long as you don't take too long to produce it, and don't market it.

Look at everything MS does... including the luke-warm reponse to Win2k...

Re:Why?

[walt-sjc]

Those beta testers must only surf p0rn sites or something...

Try downloading staroffice from Sun, or browsing CNN, NYTimes, or any other major site. Crashola / bugcity. Mozilla suffers too. NS 4.7 still works much better.

Re:Why?

[anthony_baxter]

w.r.t. spellchecker, I'm pretty sure you used to be able to just slot the NS6 xpi component into Mozilla without too much drama.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft slut..

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

You are wrong about this. Netscape 6.1 has been beaten on internally and by beta testers for the last three months to ensure the top crashing bugs are eliminated. No risky new code has been incorporated as is the case with main trunk development.

The net result of this is that NS 6.1 will be an extremely stable product, much more so than Mozilla in the next few milestones anyway. Having said that Mozilla is reasonably robust itself so its horses for courses.

bummer!

[ehackathorn]

./mozilla-bin: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/local/mozilla/components/spellchecker/libspel lchk.so: undefined symbol: StartAssignmentByValue__14nsXPIDLCString

Anybody have a clue what I did wrong? I'm using the UNIX version of mozilla and downloaded the UNIX version of spellchecker.xpi...

Re:bummer!

[stu42j]

I haven't actually tried it myself (I'm mostly happy with 6.1 for the moment and have gotten pretty accustomed to not having a built-in spell checker anyway) but there is a new reply on MozillaZine suggesting that the XPI may only work with 0.9.2 not 0.9.3 or the latest nightlies.

This would make sense since 6.1 is based on 0.9.2 but a bummer none the less.

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

This might work with a raw 0.9.2 build, but probably not 0.9.3 or anything later.

This is because changes to string classes, smart pointers, interfaces and so on mean the spellchecker module won't load correctly at runtime. It will fail because some export or other cannot be found in xpcom.dll or it may crash Mozilla outright.

Re:Who truly needs a dictionary...

[big_cat79]

I know this is going to sound stupid, but what the hell is 3l337. i can't figure it out.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[Quinn]

> Strange that they chose a 3rd party review that > is so negative towards Netscape, though, eh?

I don't think so. It'd be strange, even miraculous, if they'd managed to find an objective review that's /positive/ towards Netscape.

I'm using Mozilla now, but it's slow as shit on Pluto. I suppose the best positive thing someone can say is, "It's gonna be great one day!"

Do plans remain for Mozilla getting faster, or has that goal been abandoned?

Re:Who truly needs a dictionary...

[damiam]

31337 is script-kiddie h4x0r speak for "elite". Variants include 1337 and l33t.

great features, too late

[fetta]

If Microsoft had ever released IE for Linux, this would be even more of a dead issue.

A valuable lesson here - it doesn't matter how good the technology is if you take too long to produce it and don't market it well. (of course, that same principle could be applied to almost any product.)

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you that make me not use windows. Go fuck yourself .

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

There used to be a few Linux programs available from Microsoft. Back in 95 or so, there was a Windows Media Linux client, and there was a Microsoft internal Linux IE 4.x alpha driver that went around for a while. Suddenly around 97 or 98 all Linux activity at Microsoft ceased, for some odd reason.

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for letting me be a part in you not using Windows. I'm getting all warm and fuzzy inside! :)

Re:great features, too late

[Swaffs]

Not to mention that it wouldn't look good when it ran so much better on Linux than on Windows.

Re:great features, too late

[Sabalon]

not likely.

IE was out for HPUX and Solaris years ago - and there is still no Linux version. I don't really see MS making anything for Linux. Partially because it would give some validity to the OS, and partially because it runs on the same hardware as Windows - which means if someone no longer had to boot Windows to view a web page or read a doc, there is one less OS sell.

Re:great features, too late

[netsharc]

Linus was once asked, what if Bill Gates started porting programs like Office for Linux? He said "Then I would have won.", meaning Linux was finally big enough that Microsoft started catering to it.

Don't know if the same goes for the browser, I don't even think any self-respecting Linux user would use IE on Linux, and if they did, they'd still have some amount of clue to escape out of the "internet" that is MSN. Microsoft probably doesn't want a half-win either, it's a half win because, yes, they got the surfer to use IE, but he's still running Linux! Not the latest version of Windows eXPloit!

Re:great features, too late

[antis0c]

IE Already exists for Solaris, in fact I'm running it right now on my Sun Ultra5... Which means Linux is probably around the corner. Whats a better way to compete with Linux than to create products for it? Futher pentrating the market.. Sigh..

Re:great features, too late

[Mao Zedong]

Are you insinuating that Mozilla is a good product? The reason most folks do not use Mozilla/Netscape anymore is because IE is a *Better Product*! Ding.

Re:great features, too late

[Karn]

What version of IE are you running, out of curiosity?

Re:great features, too late

[antis0c]

5.5 beta 2 or something.

Re:great features, too late

[gini_]

Thats funny, the Quake3 benchmarks I've seen were pretty much equal on M$ and Linux. On low resolutions Linux Quake was actually slightly faster. O And besides, I think Mozilla looks real cool with the Aqua theme I downloaded. Only problem I have is that it freezes when I try to download 78,000 headers from alt.binaries.images. n high resolutions windows quake was faster (nothing dramatic though). So this is a video driver issue really.

Re:great features, too late

[complex]

5.5 beta 2 or something.

would you look at that. the kid is right. http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp shows a link to ie 5 for solaris. i have to admit, i thought, like many others, ie 3.something was the last unix attempt at ie, on hp-ux and irix, like someone else said. this is pretty cool. i'm tempted to take over my friend's solaris box just to install this.

Re:great features, too late

[imevil]

I have been working lately on some hardcore css/JavaScript/XML stuff which was based on hiding and displaying parts of a document, and we had to test it on several platforms. We arrived to the following conlusion:

IE is not bad.

Come on, look at the reality: it does CSS well. Netscape kinda sucks in that. It is more W3C compliant than Netscape. XML: IE can interppret xml/xsl stuff. Netscape 6 can do that too, but it sucks at it.

The bad things about IE are: it's Micro$oft and I can't run it on my machine from linux. Hey, if there existed IE for Linux, I'd install it. I kinda need it now. I might delete it afterwards, but hell, it would last on my computer as long as this job of mine.

E

Re:great features, too late

[Sabalon]

I doubt it would. I know the HPUX version came with it's own versions of the X libraries that it was linked to. Mucho extra memory.

Re:great features, too late

[Yakko]

If Microsoft had ever released IE for Linux, this would be even more of a dead issue.

If MICROS~1 had released IE for Linux, I'd give it a shot. However, they're being obstinate, so I can also be obstinate and ignore IE even when using wintendo. I install Mozilla, NS4, and Opera whenever I (re)install windows... just wrapped that spiel up under XP. Mozilla 0.9.3 works great.

Also, in this subthread, folks correctly mention that IE exists for SunOS 5.x and HP-UX. I believe that both ports are straight (and half-assed) ports from win32 using MainWin. Not the way to make your product shine. Had they put some effort into it and written a native version for Unix (like the Mac team apparently did for IE MacOS), I may have used IE under Solaris instead of netscape. I certainly would've found it much easier to stick with it for more than 20 minutes.

Re:great features, too late

[mimbleton]

No need for "accidental" anything ...
Look at Quake, runs much better on Windows ( and most of Loki's offerings run much better on the same hardware on Windows)

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Netscape is *much* more W3C complaint than M$IE, and that includes CSS. That's a fact that cannot be argued, if you don't believe me check the W3C site yourself (http://www.w3c.org).

Re:great features, too late

[jesser]

Mozilla also loads and displays pages slightly faster on Windows than it does on X. You can see weekly graphs on the netscape.public.mozilla.performance newsgroup. I don't know if this is because more effort is put into optimization on Windows or if it's because of inefficiencies in X, because I just read netscape.public.mozilla.performance for the pictures.

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, i've got some pickles and peanut butter and rye bread. together we can make a nice troll sandwich. how bout it?

Re:great features, too late

[RacerX69]

I find it hard to believe you think "Netscape kinda sucks in [CSS]" unless you're talking about NS 4.x-.

Have you ran through the CSS1 Test Suite at W3C? I have and compared to Mozilla, IE 5.5 is piss poor at implementing CSS1. I mean come on! When I ran through the tests. Mozilla 0.92 had 3 or 4 rendering errors, all minor technicalities. I lost count of how many IE 5.5 had after 40 errors. And this is just CSS1. CSS1 has been out since December 1996, CSS2 since May 1998, and IE barely has any of its features implemented completely. Mozilla has most of them properly implemented. I'm sure when CSS3 is released as a Candidate Recommendation, Mozilla will probably be the first to implement it also.

As far as the XSL stuff, it is still being developed at mozilla.org. They haven't worked all the bugs out. XSL was only released as a Recommendation in November 2000 so it's new. Now that the standard has finalized I'm sure they'll get it working soon. On that note, keep in mind that IE STILL doesn't do xml/css at all right!!

I haven't taken a look at IE6 yet, but I do hear M$ has improved it. (No doubt because of competition they see coming with Mozilla and other standards compliant browsers.)

I'm waiting for the final release of IE6 before I try it out. I remember getting burnt installing the IE5 beta a year or so ago so I'll wait.

Whether Mozilla, Netscape, or any other browser wins back any market share, we all can only stand to benefit from the competition. I simply believe that without any competition, M$ wouldn't have any 'innovation' at all.

Re:great features, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's just your subjective opinion on what "accidental" and "unexpected" means. In my experience, *any* application drops dead "accidentally" and "unexpectedly" after a short while, on Linux.

Much like Linux itself is just a little accident. A total crap OS with a bunch of religous zealot followers, only because they hate MS so much.

Now, let me tell you something: this little toy OS of yours will never stand up in the free market economy because it sucks rock hard smelly Stallman cock! Take that for an argument, sucker!

I've never seen anything worse than the pathetic product called lunix, which has less than nothing to offer in terms of stability, scalability, usability and modularity.

That's just it. 'Nuff said. If you want to discuss it, fine. But it doesn't take away the fact that open sores software mostly sucks goats, hard.

Misc Icons

[PBCODER]

I'd really like to go back to Netscape but I think 4.08 was the last version that wasn't OS invasive. Can anyone suggest a good browser that is not OS invasive, is safe, and will load 90% of the current web pages without crashing, and doesn't come bloated with extra software addons? F/P

Re:Misc Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Go with Opera...aside from the fact that they endevour to follow W3C guidlines to the letter, and the beta for Linux I tried was a helly lot more stable than any Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner product (sorry, I'm a bit biased, but I had Netscape 4.7 crash while running it under linux, and it slagged KDE, X, I mean, I still brought things back up from the command prompt, but if this had happened in Windows, I'd have had to reboot, so there's a principle involved. PLUS that's the ONLY time I've really had anything like taht happen under Linux).

Re:Misc Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

damn your post was informative
I'm completetly in picture now
thanks slashdot idiot moderators

Re:Misc Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera

Re:Misc Icons

[reddeno]

Mozilla.

Re:Misc Icons

[Peaker]

Konqy :)

Re:Misc Icons

[nomadic]

I've been using Opera for the past few days, and it seems pretty good. More stable than either IE or NS on W98, and it seems to support just about everything I've run into.

Re:Misc Icons

[SylvesterTheCat]

I cannot say about the 'OS invasive' part, but I have been using Opera 5.x (both win32 & linux) and I like it a lot...

The free version has a small ad-window, but it isn't too annoying.

Size? If you do not have jde installed, you have to get the larger version (~10M, IIRC), after that updates are small (~2.5M).

Re:Misc Icons

[unphased]

I'd place Opera into that category.

Re:Misc Icons

[brainy]

What about Opera? It's very standards-compatible, and no addons that I know of. You can even choose to download without a JVM. It renders pages pretty quickly, doesn't crash much. It has that little ad window in the free version, but it's not too invasive.

Re:Misc Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

konqueror

Re:Misc Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla!

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[pboulang]

You do know that MSIE is based off of NCSA Mosaic, right? You can still reminisce by going to the help->About link and see:

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc. Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd. Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc. Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp. Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[RacerX69]

There are still corporations who will use Netscape 4.x in part because of the increased resistance to viruses which exploit Outlook scripting vulnerabilities. I worked for a company who was using Netscape when the Melissa & ILOVEYOU viruses hit. Our company didn't suffer the amount of problems that other less fortunate companies did. Sure, the 4.x browser doesn't render the latest web technologies as well as IE/Outlook might, but that is a small price to pay for protection from the script kiddie viruses.

Re:"MAC" ?? (ot)

[Anonymous Coward]

Could also mean Message Authentication Code

Unfortunately I don't.

[MtViewGuy]

I've tried the new Netscape 6.1.

It definitely renders WAY faster than Netscape 6.0x and also renders pages much better.

However, the interface of NS 6.1 still sucks like a vacuum cleaner. -_- Ctrl-Shft-L just to open an address window? How unintuitive. And on some pages on http://www.airliners.net it starts spitting out weird messages about downloading HTML files to your local hard drive. (???)

I still think IE 5.5 SP2 and the upcoming IE 6.0 is way better, especially the Outlook Express module for email and Usenet newsgroup access.

Netscape has lost all meaning to me

[six11]

okay, I don't really post on Slashdot very often, but I feel like I would be doing a disservice to my own need to waste time right now bitching about Netscape if I did not bitch about Netscape, so here it is, in all its bitchy glory.

Netscape had a chance to be a great company. Instead, they blew it in a way reminiscent of the death star at the end of ANH and increasingly at the end of Jedi. They choked when Microsoft clued in and started beating them at their own game, but the shit they've done and continue to do is evidence that they don't need Microsoft beating them with their own severed limbs. Netscape makes me sad, because they were the only company who stood a chance of outdoing Microsoft in the market, and they blew it on just about every conceivable level. They had the browser, they had a loyal user base, they had THE CENTRAL web site for the first few years of the post-Navigator-1.1 web.

Every once in a while I think to myself "I wonder if Communicator still sucks ass" and download the new release, and get disappointed that my premonition was right. So when I see that 6.1 is out and that people on Slashdot aren't ripping it apart, I succumb to the feeling and install the thing.

What's the story with the widgets? I'm on Windows, and they use these funky buttons with nonstandard, frequently mismatching fonts, uncentered labels, and in places, text so small I have to change my resolution just to read it. But the splash screen looked pretty, so I keep going. I finish installing things, and find that it put FOUR new links on my desktop WITHOUT ASKING ME. WTF is NetPhone? I think that's what it was, I'm not sure. I just selected them all and deleted them.

I start it up. It prompts me for some bullshit username thing for their website. Cancel, cancel, whatever. Finally I am taken to the start page and am presented with the horror that is the 6.x series UI. The browser's buttons are ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. WTF?!? I click on something, some bullshit poll on their bullshit web site they've got set up as the start page even though I have IE and Netscape 4.non-suck set to something else. Half the text disappears and some of the graphics from the first page REMAIN ON THE SCREEN after the second page has loaded. I have to hide the window momentarily to force it to redraw in order to fix the problem.

I try the mail reader. (I'm a big fan of 4.non-suck's Messenger.) I edit/mail_settings and am confronted with the top most item listed as "notused on mail". WTF is that? Is that [username] on [mail host]? Has anybody at the former NSCP heard of usability or human factors? If they have, do they care at all?

Frustrated, I quit the entire thing. I go to start Winamp a few minutes later, this being the first time that I have use the Start button in Windows since my harrowing experience with 6.shit. Of course there's going to be an entry for it in the 'Programs' section, but they also stuck some useless marketroid shit on the first click menu, right above the 'Programs' submenu. WITHOUT ASKING ME. Whatever. Winamp starts, and NETSCAPE HAS DECIDED TO CHANGE MY SKIN FOR WINAMP WITHOUT ASKING ME. There's a big fatty advertisement for Netscape right there on my Winamp interface. Do they think they're gaining points by putting their logo in every fucking location on my computer? They don't even have a product any more. They just do what minimal things they can in order to sell advertising. Reminds me of a news article I read once, though Netscape isn't even good at advertising, only good at pissing me off and disappointing me.

It's shit like this that turns me off from sympathizing with the Slashdot worldview (to quote from an AC posting the other day) that MS is Borg / MS is Borg / MS is Borg. Netscape lost due to its incompentence, from making the worst calls at every point in their game for the last four years.

So, that's my rant. For best results, mod it down.

Re:Netscape has lost all meaning to me

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

Re:New Theme!

[jesser]

Kent Thuresson, the creator of the 6.0 Orbit theme, has released post-6.0 versions at http://www.ninelineman.com/orbit/. It looks like he had it working in builds as recent as Feb 15, 2001, which was around Mozilla 0.8.

Re:I thought they said they were done with browser

[tialaramex]

That's right. So-called "Web" designers want to make "web pages" for IE 5 running on Windows 98 in 16-bit color at 800x600 or 1024x768. (some of them will begrudge you that last choice) You have IE5.5? You run W2K? You like 1280x1024? Sorry, web designers have no time for non-standard setups, it's all about the Average User. If you're paying any "designers" who think along these lines -- fire them, at best they'll buy you an accessibility lawsuit down the line, at worst your customers will upgrade and just stop using your site.

Re:Your PIC is wrong

[alecto]

You've heard of the object oriented COBOL? It's called ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL-PLUS-ONE.

Your PIC is wrong

[rhinoX]

You can't have PIC X's that large. Not on DEC COBOL-78 anyway.

Damn cobol. Why didn't you use an indexed relative file to load your data set?

Re:Your PIC is wrong

[shepd]

Actually, they made us learn on Fujitsu Cobol for windows. I never tried a PIC that big on it, but that compiler even let you write object oriented, graphical windows applications in Cobol.

No joke. I couldn't believe it either until I saw examples in the book.

>Why didn't you use an indexed relative file to load your data set?

Sorry man, I tried to avoid learning anything even remotely complicated in that language... My goal was freedom 55 in that course (passing mark at the College). I somehow ended up with better than that though. :-)

Thanks, I'll take your advice..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always willing to try it out - it's not like I'm in love with 4.7, but until I nail down a house and commit to broadband, speed (followed by stability) is definitely a priority over relatively minor feature differences. Incidentally, 4.7 is THE ONLY program on my system that EVER crashes (and I have about 6G of system / program files) - and it does so with some regularity (about twice a day on average) Thanks for the encouragement - I'll try it soon - -dave

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[DrXym]

Paul Festa has to be one of the most misinformed, biased reporters I have ever read.

I've seen numerous pieces he's written about Mozilla or Netscape where the facts have been grossly distorted and crucial details have been omitted or the wrong emphasis has been place. And all of this with large amounts of negative spin and sometimes even going as far as to accuse AOL of some major conspiracy or other.

Personally I think he's been slighted by Netscape in the dim and distant past and now he has an axe to grind. Certainly it's not about browsers because I get the distinct impression he would print the same mulch even if Mozilla was by far and away the better browser.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[nramsay]

The 25 MB figure is the maximum file size.

If you chose a custom installation and disable many of the optional features (eh: NetPhone, AIM, Java, etc) then the download size reduces down to around 8 or 9 MB.

Re:Cool, but...

[Helmholtz]

Over a year ago Mozilla was supposed to be put under a dual GPL/NPL licensing scheme. To date absolutely nothing has been done about it. I'm rather amazed that the KDE people recieved such a thorough lashing over the licensing issues with Qt, while Mozilla has been allowed to scamper along for over a year without as much as a whimper.

I'm often amazed when I hear people talking about Mozilla and it's GPL nature. Mozilla is not GPL at all. If it were, Galeon could include the Gecko rendering engine without having to carry along the whole freaking Mozilla project.

I like Mozilla; I think it's a valiant effort, but if the reason you're chosing to use it is because it's "Free" ... well, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[untermensch]

canadian term, dept. of corrections is the branch of the federal government dealing with the prison system.

Re:Spelling error? NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

download the broswer - Junk is more than appropriate for the latest AOL umm i mean Nestcape browser

Re:Why?

[gengee]

There aren't any real advantages. Netscape has some added-value stuff, but none of it is really that important. The jist of it is that Netscape /is/ Mozilla. It's just a branded version. In the same sense that gtk-licq /is/ licq - with gtk. (There are better examples, but I can't think of any right now).

So average joe-blow might use Netscape because he doesn't like Internet Explorer, and has never heard of any other alternatives besides Netscape. Dell might create a Dell-branded, Mozilla-based browser. And Earthlink might create an Earthlink-branded, Mozilla-based browser.

It just nice to see that a company as visible (Albeit, a lot less than they use to be) as Netscape has released a new (Now worthwhile) browser.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[The Minus Man]

The only reason I use Netscape 4.78 is because I'm still having ridiculously annoying basic browser problems with mozilla, yes, even 0.93 (like the lovely randomly stop working issue I'm having). I played around with mozilla for a while, and had some big time stability issues. I could use Konqueror or Galeon I suppose, but I like the mozilla interface better. Plus, I don't want to have to install KDE to get a web broswer (nothign wrong w/ KDE, I just don't want it). On my windoze box, I use IE, cause I'm tired of things randomly crashing. I don't care who the hell makes my damn browser, but it better *work*. I'm hoping the mozilla effort pays off though, when it finally reaches 1.0 I think I'll have my new broswer of choice.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[jamesbromberger]

I'm in a corporatation that still uses Netscape 4. We have some users on Cirtix, and IE does bad things on multi user MS systems: it fiddles with explorer.exe (not iexplorer, but the system shell). Plus, there is (or has been) so many bad JavaScript sniffers out there, it just hasn't been worthwhile. Unfortunately, up to now IE has had a better renderer on the PC, and with the release of 6.1, I'm looking forward to rolling this out. *Not* being integrated into the OS can be an *advantage*. ;)

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[sydb]

Dept. Of Corrections

Sounds very Orwellian... Forgive my ignorance but wtf is that?

Product Integration

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf? It installed AIM, Winamp, and Real Player? When did they stop having their own downloads? Why is this necessary? At least MS still has the decency to keep IE, Media Player, and MSN (Windows) Messenger seperate downloads. And they are the ones that get trashed for "product integration".

Re:Product Integration

[Bedouin X]

Use the stub installer and choose a custom install. You can deselect everything but the raw browser if you'd like.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[tempest303]

have you *tried* NS6.1? I've been using it since it was "unofficially" released yesterday morning on NS's FTP, and it's *excellent*.

While I won't contest the fact that 6.0 and 6.01 were complete shit, this latest edition does *not* act like beta code. NS6.1 is a real browser, and a serious IE5 competitor, IMHO.

Give it a shot - the integrated AIM alone will be enough to win some favor with a lot of people...

Re:Why?

[bribecka]

we have enough technical know-how to install the ones we want (and only the ones we want)

But why not make life easier for everyone and include the plugins that everyone wants anyway--is there anyone here who wants mozilla but does *not* want the Java plugin?

The argument is understandable, but if it's taken too far it just hurts the end product. Case in point--Java not included, Debug/QA is. Of course, this *is* still a beta officially, (right?), but now everyone has to download that stuff!

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[sharkey]

And hopefully, in a couple of years, you'll get to setup web devices running a version of Netscape for Gates, Ballmer, Allchin and the others to watch through the bars while your guards surf the 'Net.

Re:based on mozilla 0.9.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that 10MB wasn't just the network installer?

Re:Geez who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

K-meleon used to (v0.4 last I tried) remove the registry associations for .htm and .html - even if told not to change those associations at install time - when uninstalled.

That's bad, basically killing all browsing (.htm/.html is now an unrecognised filetype, so IE prompts you to save pages rather than displaying them) until the associations are correctly replaced (which is easy enough if you are familiar with the registry but impossible otherwise).

Bad K-meleon.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[khendron]

I don't agree with your premise. The early version of IE were laughable, but laughable IE is not what allowed Netscape to assemble an overwhelming lead. It was because Netscape, being the first serious Win32 based web browser, had over a year head start. It is easy to lead when there are no real competitors.

The race didn't start until the release of IE 2.0 in 1995.

GAAH! More crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, we can all agree that Mozilla absolutely beats netscape 6.1 hands down, but most users don't even know what mozilla is. When i mention mozilla and get them interested and install it for them, the first thing they say is "WTF! This looks like netscape 6! It's gotta be crap!" or something to that nature. It just gives mozilla a bad name. WHY OH WHY did netscape release 6 early? At least with mozilla i can say "see it starts with a 0.x that means it's BETA, think how cool the final will be", but instead i have to deal with explaining why netscape decided to relase a beta and such =[

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[ToWnSaVeR2]

Actually, I do a lot of work in the Dept. Of Corrections and they are very slow to upgrade. In fact the browser of choice in this circle is Netscape. Maybe it has more to do with a dislike of Microsoft.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Anonymous Coward]

And apparently there is only five brain cells left in your head.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[sharkey]

25 megs? What the hell did they put in it? Why can't they just release the damn browser by itself?

8.2 MBs of browser, 6.8 MBs of Java and 10 MBs of a video clip of Steve Case jumping around like a monkey, screaming, "WOO! HOO! WAA! HAA! Look at me, I'm Steve Ballmer! HEE HEE!"

hotmail crash

[Anonymous Coward]

Just downloaded netscape 6.1, it seems to crash on trying to access my hotmail account! This is strange as Mozilla-0.9.2 had no problems whatsoever. Any one else?

Re:Cool, but...

[asa]

a few corrections.

Sometime less than a year ago mozilla.org announced intentions to (begin) work toward a dual licensing scheme with the _MPL_ (not NPL) and the GPL or LGPL. This is not as easy as flipping a switch and saying "done." It will require contacting the hundreds of developers that have checked in millions of lines of code in thousands of files and getting agreement. More than "absolutely nothing" has been done about it. The list of contributors is being constructed. The research and discussions about the options available (dual with GPL or LGPL or modifications to MPL) is happening. Big projects don't happen overnight.

Where do you hear these "people talking about Mozilla and it's GPL nature"? I hear people talking about it and it's MPL nature. You're right when you say "Mozilla is not GPL at all". It isn't. It's MPL and NPL.

If you don't consider Mozilla free then you have a fundamental disagreement with stallman and the fsf who say the MPL is a free software license (GPL incompatable but free).

http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#So ft wareLicenses

--Asa

Re:Why? I use Moz and Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

At work Netscape: Because it is more stable, it has a spell checker, it has a better Help system, and it has support from Netscape if others in the office have problems with it. At home Mozilla: Because it is usually a month ahead of netscape in new (bleeding edge) features and functionality. And I can report new bugs and help out the developers (who a mostly netscape empoyees). .

Re:Why?

[Tack]

Well, 6.x is just as slow and bloated as Mozilla, but Netscape 4.7x is much faster than either.

6.1 is better than 6.0 in all respects, especially performance. Mozilla has seen amazing performance increases since the branch NS6 was forked from. It's still got some improvements to go yet, but 6.1 (Mozilla 0.9.x) is actually usable, as opposed to 6.0.

Yes, it's true. Netscape6/Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4 (at least as far as the UI goes). For better or for worse, Mozilla really is a platform, and along with it you get all of the overhead. But not only is that overhead seeing plenty of profiling and optimization, but keep in mind processor speed has at least doubled since the project began. And processor speed continues to increase. So while Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4, there will come a time when the performance difference will be statistical noise, and no one will care. Yes, we all want a competitor to IE that can beat it in performance now, but I like to think of Mozilla as the "browser of the future."

Is there any actual feature advantage to Mozilla/Netscape6.x over Netscape 4.78?

I don't know if you deliver web content or not, but the big thing is that Mozilla/NS6 implements the W3C recommended standards like CSS1/2 and DOM. If you're just a normal user, this may not impress you so much, but believe me, this is very significant. The sooner we can bury Netscape4, the sooner content deliverers can start to develop using CSS, and truly cross-platform web applications can be built using the DOM. In other words, there may not be an immediate advantage (at least, a big advantage from a user's perspective), but the real benefit is in the web's future.

And what is all the fuss over IE?

Maybe I'll get tarred and feathered for this, but IE really is a good browser. It implements quite a bit of CSS and DOM, and, while it does have its braindead idiosynchrasies (like all browsers), developing IE-compatable content doesn't make me pull my hair out like NS4 does.

Cheers,
Jason.

Re:No it's not...

[rjamestaylor]

Mozilla .09.3 is superfast on my Toshiba 2805 Celeron 650 with 192MB. Markedly faster than IE 5.5 or 6 beta. Very nice. Oh, I am using the "preload" feature (so does IE).

Too bad it still doesn't render advanced DOM1 and CSS1/2 stuff correctly. For all the touts abouts standards compliance...where's the beef?

Netscape 6.1

[johnnysmoke]

I did DL it as suggested by /. It did not crash the first time it started. But I have a real weird problem: the url I type in the url text field on the top of the window (you know where on all browser on this side of the galaxy you enter you url) just won't render the page when I push . I see activity on the bottom right of the page but no refresh... I can load page by using Command Open-Location.... I think next step is Uninstall.

Not too late for Unix users at all!

[Baki]

Most Unix users still use Netscape, since IE simply doesn't exist and the alternatives are either still in development or not free, or simply out of habit without one established de-facto standard alternative.

So for Unix users I don't get why it would be too late. Yes it is late and it would have been nice to have a more decent browser earlier, but that doesn't change the fact that finally there is a browser (NS6 or Mozilla) poised to become the de-facto standard browser for UNIX.

Re:I thought they said they were done with browser

[Satai]

Web developers rejoiced across the world on that day.

There was an article the other day that made that exact comment - that web developers were anxious for Netscape's market share to drop so they could tailor their content directly to MSIE.

Re:MSNBC headline is biased/inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, calling it beta is definately wrong. Because it's alpha quality.

<g>

Re:No it's not...

[visualight]

Step one - clear your cache
Step two - load up the biggest waste of bandwidth page you can find in IE. Make a mental note of the time it took to load the page.
Step three - repeat with Mozilla.

Even with my cable modem there's a marked difference. When I load /.'s front page IE takes about two seconds to get from the top banner ad to the bottom of the page. With Mozilla I can't time it. The whole page just pops up.

And besides, I think Mozilla looks real cool with the Aqua theme I downloaded. Only problem I have is that it freezes when I try to download 78,000 headers from alt.binaries.images.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

HA! Not even CLOSE, bitch! You SUCK!

-- the fucker who got fp

CSS Pull-down menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, CSS Pull-down menus that work on Netscape 4.x and IE 5.x do not work on Netscape 6.x I SO WANT TO USE NETSCAPE! I download the newest version, install, and uninstall all within 5 minutes. Come on allready!!!!

Re:Why release before Mozilla? U_dummy_U

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla is still not production.." You dont seem to realize Mozilla will never be "Production" . It will always be "Developmental" that is the reason it exists; to support the spin off of versions that can be polished into production by any Producers..

IE for Linux? Maybe not, but this is better:

[MsGeek]

One word: Konqueror. It does the IE thang better than the Beast of Redmond ever will. A better browser, a better file manager.

And Konqui not only works under KDE, but under several other window managers, including Ice. The combo of Konqui and Ice is pretty studly if you ask me. And slimmer than Konqui+KDE.

Yeah, I'm posting from a Windozer right now...sue me. But when I'm in Linux, it's Konqui all the way.

Re:IE for Linux? Maybe not, but this is better:

[Anonymous Coward]

And Konqui not only works under KDE, but under several other window managers, including Ice.

Under different Operating Systems now as well. khtml has been ported to AtheOS. Spanky!

Re:IE for Linux? Maybe not, but this is better:

[banshee2000]

I never liked IE ever. It's bulky and slow and java script sux big time. Even when I did run windows back about 4 yrs ago I used Netscape. Netscape has become very unstable under any platform so I switched to Opera. It's a great browser ... it's stable, fast, and not so full of bells n whistles that it's bogged down. I hope they don't go the same route as IE and NS.

Re:thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[TVmisGuided]

AOL Time Warner released the first final upgrade...

FNORD!

This begs the question...was it an editorial error, or did the "MS" in MSNBC slip it in, along with the headline proclaiming that this is a "new beta"?

We now return to our regularly-scheduled anti-Microsoft trolling and flaming, already in progress.

Re:No it's not...

[visualight]

uh no I haven't. I used to with always check that when I was using netscape but so far I haven't noticed any leaks with mozilla and I haven't been paying attention to that. To be honest I have 512 ram and it didn't occur to me to check that. Good point.

screenshot of Mozilla w/Aqua theme

check out page properties

[BroadbandBradley]

with a list and display of images, this browser has cool stuff in it.

Re:No it's not...

[Mao Zedong]

Have you compared memory usage?

damn you slashdot!

[Sublimed]

first i submit the starwars title story and i get rejected, and now this!!! I'LL GET YOU SLASHDOT, YOU ARE YOUR LITTLE DOG TOO!

2001-08-06 18:19:18 Netscape 6.1 browser-suite released! (articles,netscape) (rejected)
2001-08-06 21:06:32 Star Wars Episode II Title announced (articles,news) (rejected)

Re:damn you slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wah. Did it occur to you that another of the 187 identical stories submitted to Slashdot might possibly be better written?

C|Net has a review of 6.1 up

[caferace]

"...the only compelling reason to switch remains the same: Netscape isn't from Microsoft."

Whatever...

Review: here

Re:C|Net has a review of 6.1 up

[rudy_wayne]

Netscape (all 6.x versions) is crap. If you want to use something that "isn't from Microsoft"
(and who doesn't) use Opera.

Re:Freudian slip?

[beowulf_26]

That has got to be one of, if not the best sig I've ever seen.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

• Spell checker.. Moz doesn't have one of these due to the fact that the dictionary is licenced.

It's for a spell checker. It doesn't even have definitions. I wish I'd been the one to get the IP rights to a list of correctly spelled words!

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Even people running OS/2 can run Mozilla (which is what Netscape is, after all.) Mozilla is the people's browser, IE is for the whores.

Re:Why?

[re-Verse]

Its aimed to the great ignorant masses. It hooks in to netscape.com and all of the portal madness that entails.
Its fluffier than mozilla, and unlike mozilla, it won't expire in 30 days, asking for you to download the newest nightly. Yes, i know, it IS mozilla, but its mozilla with a AOL facelift.

You or i will use mozilla, and will probably get violent if someone tried to force us to use netscape ( i went from 4.x to mozilla about 3 months ago in linux and windows), but there are a lot of simpletons who like a browser they can understand.

BTW did you see the advertisment? "Less confusing! Less buttons!"

I think that sums it up.

I haven't "caved"

[Mandrias]

I'm using Windows. In fact I'm using Windows XP RC1 and 2 and I still won't use IE in any version of Windows unless some site makes me use it for some function (some webphone sites for example.)

I use Opera. And now I'm spoiled. I can't use IE without getting upset. It's much slower in any respect to Opera.

Opera. Small, fast, reliable... and cool.

I'm sold.

Re:thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[Master Bait]

I would think that the editors of Slashdot wouldn't point their users to the MSNBC site, especially since Miscos**t wants AOL-Netscape to die. Yet time after time they do! Bill Gates and the stockholders make money on every Slashdot clik-thru. This means they have more resources to eliminate things like open source. DO YOU UNDERSTAND, SLASHDOT EDITORS!?!?!

I think MSNBC sucks, anyway. They have very few original articles. They mostly rehash Washington Post and standard wire services stories. Why not link to the real Washington Post or CNN or better yet Northern Light.

Re:Why?

[nuhonda]

uhh... better icon?
joe public would have trouble with moz. and the seamonkey.

Re:Why?

[Verteiron]

Mention "Netscape Navigator" to Joe Internetuser and he might have a clue as to what you're babbling about. "Mozilla", while sporting an infinitely cooler name, doesn't have nearly as much recognition. Your average user might be willing to try Netscape because they at least know the name, but why should they try Mozilla? Most people don't know (or care) about the connection between the two.

For us geek types, Mozilla is the way to go. But it's important that Netscape stick around, making these releases, so that the rabble can remember there ARE alternative to the great AIEEE!!

Try Skipstone

[Hazzl]

Galeon also depends on a lot of GNOME bloat. If you want a truely lean and mean browser, give Skipstone a try. I have to admit, that it is not quite as feature rich as Galeon (I loved the automatic bookmarking) but it is really fast and works amazingly well even on RAM-challenged machines (I have 32MB which makes running Mozilla a pain but is more than plenty for Skippy).

One advantage to Netscape 6.1

[Anonymous Coward]

For all of us employees of AOL-TW, NN 6.1 will allow us to use Netscape Mail to access our soon to be mandatory AOL Mail accounts. We are losing our Exchange/Outlook in favor AOL Mail. It has been mandated. So at least we'll have a half decent Mail client to get our mail...

Mozilla and netscape have missed the boat

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry AOL and mozilla folks, but IE is just so much better now. Faster, smoother .. less to no crashes. MS now owns the browser. Netscape and/or mozilla better have something amazing HIDDEN up there shirt or they have no hope in the long run.

wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

by the time I finish reading the list of bugfixes, version 7 should be out.

What really annoys me about Netscape 6/Mozilla...

[UnnDunn]

... is that the Gekko rendering engine is really nice and fast, but everything else is either buggy or not finished.

Pretty symptomatic of OSS, in my experience.

Just out of curiosity

[Swaffs]

Does anyone know what build of Mozilla this is based on?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

0.9.2 plus some patches

Re:spell checker?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can any Mozilla developer tell us the progress on this work?

Re:Spelling error?

[Swaffs]

On a qwerty keyboard, yes.

Re:25MB my arse.

[Mao Zedong]

Mozilla is still bloat less the extras.

MAC

[Anonymous Coward]

>25MByte junk of code for MAC, Unix and Windows Since when is "Mac" (short for "Macintosh") an acroynm ("MAC")?

Re:fp!

[Anonymous Coward]

A.D. 2001
6.1 was happening

CTO: What happen !!
ADMIN: Somebody set up us the crap.

USER: We get web page.
CTO: What !!
USER: Main browser turn on.

NETSCAPE: How are you gentlemen?
NETSCAPE: All your memory are belong to us.
NETSCAPE: You are on your way to crash.

CTO: What you say !!
NETSCAPE: You have no change to shutdown make your time.
NETSCAPE: Ha ha ha ha ....

USER: CTO !!
CTO: Take off every 'IE6' !!

CTO: You know what you doing.

CTO: Move 'IE6'.

CTO: For great browsing.

Re:Netscape

[Mao Zedong]

You are a moron.

Brilliant lead writing...

[wrinkledshirt]

AOL Time Warner released the first final upgrade...

If it's the first one, doesn't that preclude the possibility of it being the final one?

I'm so confused.

Re:Brilliant lead writing...

[Anonymous Coward]

^W deletes the whole word. You ought to be using several ^Hs, or a single ^W. The latter is better form.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't they give you Java in a plugin?

New software... Oh, who cares...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, before long, at this rate, Web browsers (and everything else, for that matter) will be patented to hell and back... "Hey, sir, I invented a software device to retrieve information instantaneously off any TCP network and display it with a just-in-time interpration of a markup language in a commingled display interface!" And there, you have it. :/

... Alright, so mod me down to hell and further, that's as off-topic as it goes. I live in Europe and that software patent thing really comes as a tough, tough blow. :/

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Merk]

I'm guessing the guys who run the prisons?

Netscape

[Adrian Lopez]

I stopped upgrading my copy of Netscape since they introduced their new installer. It won't allow you to download the software unless you agree to the License terms.

MSNBC headline is biased/inaccurate

[John Harrison]

AOL releases new Netscape beta
Final upgrade to buggy version 6

The release isn't a beta. The article itself mentions that the beta came out in June. Strange that MSNBC would miss a tiny detail like that. :)

Re:MSNBC headline is biased/inaccurate

[owillis]

The article is from CNet.

Re:MSNBC headline is biased/inaccurate

[John Harrison]

You are right, and CNet has posted a correction here.

there's actually a few useful features

[Trepidity]

There's a few features not available in Mozilla:

• Ability to read AOL email. This is probably not of interest to most people here, but it might be to a great many other people. AOL uses a proprietary system for its email, and as far as I know, Netscape 6.x is the first piece of software other than the AOL software itself to be able to interface with the mail system. And since the Netscape email client isn't bad, this could be useful to AOL users, of whom there are many.
  
• Built-in AIM client. This is convenient for some people, though I personally prefer the Win32 stand-alone client. But for the Linux users, it's a working official AIM client that will never be blocked, so if nothing else is useful as a last resort for when GAIM/Jabber/etc. are blocked.
  
• A dictionary. Sure, there's dictionary.com, dict.org, etc., but a built-in dictionary sure is handy, especially for modem users.
  

Re:there's actually a few useful features

[jovlinger]

dictionary?!

when did you last use a dictionary for anything other than an authored document, as opposed to an email or news posting?

Speaking of news, how is it for that? Is NS 6.1 better than the crap 4.7? I swear that thing has an O(N^2) algorithm for loading group overviews. Anthing over 1000 msgs, and you're out to lunch before its done. *mp3 has 60000 msgs these days..

Re:Why?

[NonSequor]

I'm stuck in a Win2k lab at the moment and the IE5 here must be different from everyone else's IE5. It crashes CONSTANTLY. It abhors PNGs. For quite some time it wouldn't let me post to Slashdot for no apparent reason (now its letting me). Mozilla is my normal browser and its much better than what I've seen here. I assume that IE5.5 and IE6 must be much better.

Why?

[Swaffs]

Why would anyone use Netscape when there's Mozilla? What advantages are there?

Re:Why?

[ronny_magic]

A dictionary for one.

Re:Why?

[Dr. Spork]

Also, you get Java installed. That's why it's so big.

Re:Why?

[Karn]

Netscape comes with plugins, Mozilla doesn't. Big deal for a slashdotter? No. For your average user? Yes.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see... 1) Stupid websites that use browser sniffers that only recognize two possible browsers 2) Stupid plugins (QuickTime anyone?) that refuse to recognize Mozilla as a browser it works with (and it does) Neither of these are Mozilla's fault, of course, but they seem like pretty decent reasons to me.

Re:Why?

[abdulwahid]

The only advantage I can think of is when you tell someone what browser you are using they don't say, "Huh, never heard of it!"

Re:Why?

[ibotan]

And of course there is a bug logged in bugzilla on using pspell. Try http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56301 and that should get you there. It hasn't moved in a while, but maybe someone can help.

Re:Why?

[GreyDuck]

Because there are people who will never touch "that Mozilla thing or whatever" who will nevertheless give Netscape a chance. Most of 'em have no idea, even after all this time, that the two are related, or that one is spawned from the bowels of the other. Mind you, I think Netscape blew most of their remaining mindshare capital with the last few poorly-built ripoffs of early Mozilla builds. This may be the last chance Netscape has to regain any sort of credibility for the brand.

Not, mind you, that I expect it to work. Netscape will implode, the Mozilla team will be cut loose, but they'll still end up making a workable product that many of "us" will use regularly and

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no quality control at all. It took just long enough for them to insert their bookmarks and branding in .93 after everyone got excited about it, for them to decide that its time for a major release. The Netscape marketeers need to realize that what makes a QA team excited isn't the same thing that will please an ordinary person. And sometimes "fewer crashing bugs" doesn't mean "fewer bugs total"

Re:Why?

[BeanThere]

With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone

Or just grab one of the nightly builds from the ftp server or from a mirror.

I haven't tried this myself though, so forgive me if its not quite as simple as that.

Re:Why?

[japhmi]

Word is almost half as good as emacs

Word and emacs are 2 different things. Word is a wordprocessor, emacs is a text editor. Comparing the 2 is insane. Besides, (since you brought it up) vi is better than emacs (IMHO, no flame wars please, they are at least comparable), and WordPerfect is better than Word (IMNHATO -in my not humble at all opinion, I work with both, and Word is the bane of my existence)

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

My IE5.5 crashed when there was any PNGs on the page (it caused error on pngflt.dll). Only way I could get rid of the problem was to install WinME on top of the old installation. Don't know what really caused the problem, though... Reinstalling IE didn't help.

Re:Why?

[anthony_baxter]

Plugins: I ended up turning off (removing) the flash plugin, because the only thing I saw it used for was bloody banner ads.

The final straw was a banner ad that played music. Beyond anything I could stand.

Now if only there was the round tuits to look into blocking IFRAMEs as well as IMG, I could be banner-ad-free. (And yes, that kills off an entire poorly thought-out business model. Boo hoo.)

Re:Why?

[pdiaz]

Word is almost half as good as emacs (well, it's not perfect, while emacs only lacks multithreading and per-buffer pixmap backgrounds), which puts it far ahead of everything else out there. (after all, what is a post without a bit of polemic?)

*re-reads*. *re-reads again*.Are you comparing a text editor with a word processor??. Are you really doing that?.

I'm really getting tired of all the morons here who think they are computer scientists just because they have some idea on how to click windows at the super-mega-extra-cool win2k, or just because the know how to do that-nifty-thing on the word processor.

Go out and learn something, and now stop pretending that you really now something about computers

Mod this as a flamebait, because thats what it is

Re:Why?

[asa]

* Some limited support. Netscape will more than likely release another minor update in a few months to catch any top crashers. It will also release updates for any security issues that arise. With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone.

correction, with Mozilla you must wait for the next _nightly_ release. You don't have to wait for a milestone. About avery 12 hours a new build for mac, win32 and linux is made off of the tip of the development trunk. To suggest that updates from Netscape come any faster than updates to Mozilla is plain silly. Even if you were just talking about Milestones, we had about 7 of those between Netscape 6 and 6.1

-Asa

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

expire? what are you smoking?

Re:Why?

[shepd]

Well, they did do it in a very limited fashion (ssssh! I shouldn't refute my own arguments! It's wrong I tell you, Wrong!).

grep -r blah xyz/

Is probably what you want. It is quite similar to windows find in that fashion...

Re:Why?

[MaxVlast]

> but keep in mind processor speed has at least > doubled since the project began. Maybe yours has. Mine's still the same as it was when the project began.

Re:Why?

[Tazzy531]

This is why MS Windows is the anti-OS to UNIX. Windows has spoiled people to think that thought isn't required when using a computer. Not only does MS have a monopoly on the desktop, it goes further to capture the (whiny voice) "but thinking makes my head hurt" market. I wince when I hear "system administrator" or "software development" in the same sentence as "Windows."

But that is why Windows is so successful. I would say that a great majority of the people in the world don't care how things work. They just want it done and done right. They want to be able to click a couple buttons without even thinking about the commands. I'd even go as far as to say that without Windows, the computer industry would not have expanded to the extent that it is in now.

Now on the other hand, I think MS is going a little too far now. By using money, not innovation, to lock out competitors they are creating an unfair playing ground. Yes, it makes it easier for the users...but it doesn't allow for variety.

Re:Why?

[ZxCv]

Netscape 3 was so fast because it ignored half of the HTML on the page.
</sarcasm>

The main advantage I'd give to Moz 0.9.3 is that it finally seems faster to me than 4.7. I think it still takes a few more seconds to startup, but once started, it is just as fast if not faster than 4.7. Beyond that, it actually renders correctly and (mostly) according to standards. Try bestowing that distinction upon 4.x.

And if you think IE still sucks as bad as it used to (pre-3.0 days), I certainly wonder what you're actually trying it out on. I've used IE extensively for the past couple years and I can't stop laughing at your assumption that it is still as bad. IMHO, IE 5 is the fastest, most feature complete browser available for any operating system. Maybe one day I'll be able to say this about Mozilla instead (and I hope I do!), but I certainly know that I won't ever say that about Netscape 4.x.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, most of the developers are paid to work on the product full time by netscape/aol. Remember that they were the $$$$ behind this?

If netscape implodes, you'll end up with longer dev. cycles than we've already had on it, because there won't be good, professional developers who are forced by nature of their jobs to work on it some 40 hours a week.

Instead, you'll have dabblers and tinkerers, with 10 hours to spare each month and more experience in systems admin and qa than software design/programming.

Re:Why?

[shepd]

>Someone will have to source a decent GPL spellchecker library or write one and a dictionary before Mozilla will have anything similar.

This was done before Linux even existed (I believe I read about ispell in a book that was printed before the Linux "revolution").

Newer stuff like aspell and pspell would be well suited to Mozilla. It should be in there, and I'd help do it, but my skillset is currently limited to simple TurboC, Assembly, Turing, and Visual Basic (and another language I won't speak of). :-/

Re:Why?

[shepd]

>How come zealots of tools that lack major functionality always turn it into a badge of honor?

Because the plugins are separate.

Remember the Unix code of coding: Do One Thing, And Do It Well.

A web browser should browse the web, nothing more. A plugin should plugin to the web browser to add enhancements.

Just like you could (in some strange fashion) consider grep a plugin to find when used like this:

find . -iname blah.txt -exec grep -i hello {} \;

That doesn't mean grep should be embedded in find. Infact, if it was, you yourself would likely cry out in horror (or so we would hope).

Re:Why?

[DennyK]

The point is not that we don't WANT the plugins, but that we have enough technical know-how to install the ones we want (and only the ones we want) all by ourselves. This gives Mozilla greater flexibility for users who might not want everything but the kitchen sink installed with their browser.

DennyK

Re:Why?

[sacherjj]

Netscrape hasn't been an alternative to IE since version 4.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

my IE experience:

box one:-
IE5, plus appropriate patches: rock solid. never crashed, ever. didn't switch to 5.5 or 6, no need.

box two:-
IE5, unpatched: started OK but within a day started to crash about 50% of the time. rather than patching I decided to go to v5.5 --
IE5.5: rock solid.
IE5.5, plus patches (installed as they became available): rock solid, always.
IE6 (build 2479): rock solid.

Get an admin to run AdAware (a spyware remover: www.lavasoft.de) on the computers in that lab. Spyware is well-hated for causing browser problem (including crashes) and usually installs without user knowledge.

Re:Why?

[DennyK]

1) Mozilla's user agent string is easily changed in user.js:

user_pref("general.useragent.override","(insert user agent string here...)");

2) I have never had any problems with the plugins I use. If a plugin doesn't "recognize" Moz, keep an install of Netscape 4 around and copy the plugin files from Communicator/Program/plugins to Mozilla's plugin directory. Works like a charm for QuickTime at least, and I haven't found any other plugins I have a use for yet... ;)

DennyK

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded the Mac version of Mozilla 0.9.3 this evening and all I can say is "WOW!!!" This is how Netscape 6.X should have been! None of that AOL crap, slightly faster, and daily updates! What more could you want? Love the email client! This is my NEW browser of choice.

Re:Why?

[The Dev]

"keep in mind processor speed has at least doubled since the project began"

True, but Aack! I hate it when developers think
this way. More features are good but there is no way they can justify the performance difference we see today. I'm sure Mozilla will get faster as focus shifts from features to performance.

The other side is what if I want a browser for my Sun3? That is one of the benifits I was hoping for with an open source browser. Maybe Netscape will someday (now!) release the source code for 3.02 so we can port it to older machines that need
(want) a usable browser. I'm sure we could hack in the necessary standards upgrades to it and still have a browser that runs on slow hardware.
Just think, it would also run that much faster on modern hardware too!

Re:Why?

[Paladin128]

Yes, it's true. Netscape6/Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4 (at least as far as the UI goes). For better or for worse, Mozilla really is a platform, and along with it you get all of the overhead. But not only is that overhead seeing plenty of profiling and optimization, but keep in mind processor speed has at least doubled since the project began. And processor speed continues to increase. So while Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4, there will come a time when the performance difference will be statistical noise, and no one will care. Yes, we all want a competitor to IE that can beat it in performance now, but I like to think of Mozilla as the "browser of the future."

Although what you say about CPU's getting faster all the time at a seemingly exponential rate, the same cannot be said for other technologies, such as hard drives. Yeah, my current 7500 RPM IBM 75GXP is probably twice as fast as the 4000 RPM Western Digital Caviar drive in my old system, but my 1.2ghz Athlon is MUCH more than twice as fast as the 90mhz Pentium that was in the same machine. With Mozilla/NS6, things take forever to load, and swap constantly. My paltry 256MB of RAM is evidently not enough if I'm running Mozilla/NS6. That's why under Win32 I use IE, and under Linux I use Konqueror. Neither is perfect, but I run a lot of apps simultaneously, and don't want one app bogging everything down.

Re:Why?

[Genyin]

>Turing... (and another language I won't speak of)

Would brainf*ck happen to be that other language? ^_^ IIUC, its like turing on crack...

Re:Why?

[jovlinger]

absolutely.

M$ almost never gets it right, the first, second, or even third time (it is widely acknowledged even among their most ardent fans, that Windows -- their flagship -- was only usable in its FOURTH incarnation: WfWG).

But they always get it right in the end.

Word is almost half as good as emacs (well, it's not perfect, while emacs only lacks multithreading and per-buffer pixmap backgrounds), which puts it far ahead of everything else out there. (after all, what is a post without a bit of polemic?)

Explorer is no longer Exploder.
Excel and Access are no longer Edsel and Absess.
And One Day, they will even get IIS and Exchange right.

The main difference from other players being that they can afford to get it wrong for a Long Time, both in money and mindshare. By making sure that ever version is better than the last, and making a big marketing hoopla about that, they're all set.

In a way, it suprises me that they haven't spun off their brand management division. These guys are Fscking geniuses.

ramble

rambe

Re:Why?

[shepd]

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

PROGRAM-ID. SLASHDOT-COMMENT.
AUTHOR. SHEPD.
INSTALLATION. UNIVAC.
DATE-WRITTEN. THE-EPOCH.
DATE-COMPILED. NEVER DID GET IT TO DO THAT.
SECURITY. NONE.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

DATA DIVISION.

FILE SECTION.

WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.

01 PLEASE-GOD-NO.
05 THEY-MADE-ME-DO-IT PIC X(3) VALUE "TRUE"
05 OUTPUT-STUFF PIC X(100000) VALUE SPACES.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.

LET-ME-OUT-PROCEDURE.
IF THIS-LANGUAGE-SUCKS IS GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO TRUE THEN
MOVE "COBOL" TO OUTPUT-STUFF
WRITE OUTPUT-STUFF AFTER ADVANCING 3 LINES
ELSE
MOVE "NOT COBOL" TO OUTPUT-STUFF
WRITE OUTPUT-STUFF AFTER ADVANCING 3 LINES
END IF.
END-LET-ME-OUT-PROCEDURE.

MOVE SPACES TO OUTPUT-STUFF
WRITE OUTPUT-STUFF AFTER ADVANCING 1 PAGE
STOP RUN.

Does that explain it? My College thought that Cobol would be a good skill to have when we graduate in 2002 so they figured they would make it a mandatory credit.

Instead I think it brain my damaged.

*** SNIP HERE ***

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Re:Why?

[Denial of Service]

VT100? Who are you, Liberace? I use a VT52 and feel like a chump because it's smaller than a tuba.

Re:Why?

[porges]

Just like you could (in some strange fashion) consider grep a plugin to find when used like this:

find . -iname blah.txt -exec grep -i hello {} \;

That doesn't mean grep should be embedded in find. In fact, if it was, you yourself would likely cry out in horror (or so we would hope).

Well, I'll tell you...I often want to essentially combine grep and find, and if there was one command that did it more easily than the "find" command you give, I'd use it in a heartbeat. Would it be an elegant program design? Maybe not. But when I'm using it, I don't care how it's designed.

Yup...that means I like the Windows Find applet. Sue me.

Re:Why?

[Capsaicin]

unfortunately this changes only the USER_AGENT string, and not how the browser respsonds to javascript queries such as navigator.appName (or the more pernicious navigator.platform. don't know who, but when you tell Konq to fake its identity it gets through that hoop as well ....

Re:Why?

[porges]

Okay, what about egrep, fgrep, sed, awk, tr, chmod, chown, gzip, rm, dos2unix, cp, mv, perl, ispell, sort, cat, cut, bash, ...ad nauseum

As the saying sort of goes, "Let their mother worry about it." The idea "I want to see all files *.c in this tree that have the string 'funcname' in them", for instance, comes up all the time in real life; if I used the other combinations you imply a lot, I might have an opinion about them too.

Windows has spoiled people to think that thought isn't required when using a computer.

I've been using Unix systems since 1977; I don't need your advice on how much thinking is appropriate, thanks.

Re:Why?

[porges]

Hey, I didn't know that. I haven't checked out new features of grep since God knows when.

In passing, in the original example

find . -iname blah.txt -exec grep -i hello {} \;

I usually really want

find . -iname '*.txt' -exec grep -i hello /dev/null {} \;

to get the names of the matching file names, which makes it even worse. Plus you get a grep process for each file, which seems pretty clunky.

And at this point I'll admit I don't recognize the -iname option at all; I just know -name.

*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

First Microsoft's excellent IE 6, now this piece of Netscape trash. Netscape has no chance in the
Post-browser-war era.

Cool, but...

[Carlos Laviola]

Well, alright, Netscape 6.1 has been released. Isn't it much more worthy to keep tracking Mozilla's nightly builds though? I'd rather use it, since Netscape is based on it, and it's code is open, after all.

AIM features lagging (proxy)...

[Augusto]

... from the current AIM client you can already download.

One feature I really need is HTTP proxy, but it's not available (only SOCKS and HTTPS).

:-(

Re:What really annoys me about Netscape 6/Mozilla.

[Mao Zedong]

Not really. A time ago, I had the misfortune of trying Skipstone & Galeon, and it was only a tad bit faster than the full blown Mozilla shithole.

But I thought ..

[uhmmmm]

Netscape was Backing out of the browser market

Re:But I thought ..

[WildBeast]

Well, they lied. Can't people make a dishonest living anymore? What's wrong with this country?

Great news for all 7 users waiting for it

[hackman]

Great, 6.1 - just what we all were waiting for. I tried 6 and it nearly locked up my 400MHz machine.. absolutely ridiculous!

I used to hate IE, but I find myself transitioning slowly to it. Netscape 4.7 runs well on my slower machine (how hard can it be to look at web pages, jeez), but still crashes a lot.

*Sigh* I wish Mozilla would hurry up..

Freudian slip?

[sheetsda]

25MByte junk of code

Doesn't he mean "chunk" of code? Little Freudian slip there? :)

Re:Freudian slip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tjeee...i think you better go and use IE or Konquerer. You do not have to install them. Oh..oh..its so difficult to install........

Re:Freudian slip?

[BZ]

Actually, 6.1 is based on 0.9.2. After some stabilization and major crash fixes, of course. :)

Re:Freudian slip?

[sheetsda]

Thank you. If you like that one you might get a kick out of a couple other ones some other people found.

Re:Freudian slip?

[dfiguero]

I just downloaded and after 15 minutes of installation and 5 minutes of having all sorts of problems with the bookmarks I think he did actually mean junk of code.

Re:Freudian slip?

[Mike Monett]

Can anyone explain how code can occupy 25MByte?

What does it do? Where do all the bytes go?

Opera needs ~1.5MByte. MSIE takes a lot more.

I cannot believe that a few lines of code in any simple language can explode to megabytes under Windows.

Who can tell us how this happens?

Regards,

Mike Monett

Geez who cares?

[Mittermeyer]

This browser is so hideously laced with AOL advertising and linkages that it reminds me of, well, of, ummmmm, what's that company?

Frankly I keep a current copy of Netscape and IE around so I'm not locked out of any given site's functions, but I prefer something light like K-meleon or Opera, thankyewverymuch.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Swaffs]

There already is only five Netscape users left.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Tumbleweed]

25 Megs _is_ rather amazing, especially considering the Mozilla release it's based on (v0.9.2) is only 8.32Meg in size (for the Windows version).

Weird.

I'll be sticking with Mozilla v0.9.3 for now, thanks, though I _do_ wish they'd speed up the bookmarks manager by at _least_ an order of magnitude (at _least_!). Definite bookmark weirdness in v0.9.3 for me (on Windows).

I used to love her, but it's all over now

[rudy_wayne]

I was a long time Netscape user (4+ years) and always thought it was better than MS IE. Then they released the horrible load of crap known as Netscape 6.

Since then I've been using Opera which is great.

And what's deal with Mozilla? I've tried a couple of builds in the 0.8 - 0.9 range and they're still horribly buggy. After trying 0.91 and finding that Bookmarks were still seriously broken I gave up and went back to Opera.

They've been working on Mozilla since 1998 and it's still a buggy pre-1.0 ??

A mirror anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone have a mirror to download Netscape 6.1?

Mandrakeforum...

[joestar]

...was faster.

http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1191& lang=en : "Download speed has been decent at 30 K/s, but better get it before Slashdot announces it *grin*."

Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[tswinzig]

No "editorial bias" here

Note that the article was written by Paul Festa of CNET News.com. As soon as I read that article yesterday on CNET (about the upcoming release, with the same wording), I sent him a letter and CC'd Jai Singh (Editor-in-Chief) about it.

Paul Festa has been, throughout the browser wars, firmly on the side of Microsoft. At least, that's the opinion you tend to get after reading his articles.

He also has no memory of history. Here is an excerpt from my letter to him:

Paul writes, "Whether Netscape 6.1 can rally the Netscape faithful remains to be seen. While Netscape 6 encountered first delays and then scathing reviews, Microsoft assembled an overwhelming lead in the browser market."

You know Paul, that sounds strangely familiar. Those that forget history are "doomed" to repeat it. To add a little integrity to your article, you might also point out that the same was true in reverse when Microsoft started out with MSIE: Their first versions received scathing reviews (was usually LAUGHED at), while Netscape
assembled an overwhelming lead in the browser market.

Let CNET know you don't like his biased reporting by emailing their editors.

And just so you don't think I'm some crazy, "Netscape loyalist," I actually use MSIE throughout the day and like it.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm using Mozilla now, but it's slow as shit on Pluto."

Hey, if you were on Pluto, I bet you'd be on the slow side too!

(Oh, dear God, I hope we're talking about the planet!!)

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[DrXym]

I've seen plenty of negative reviews of Mozilla and I may not have liked the conclusions I couldn't fault the reporting. If a reviewer doesn't Moz for one reason or another they should say why constructively instead of blanketing it in negative spin.

Mr Festa is certainly not constructive. He takes the known facts, trawls netscape.public.mozilla.general for some inflammatory remarks and sensationalises them into a highly negative article. There is nothing constructive or reasoned about it, it's a hatchet job pure and simple. I have seen it happen time and again which makes me think he doesn't just have opinions, he has an agenda.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[Jeffrey Baker]

AFAIK IE 2.0 was the first release. It didn't even support tables.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[Anonymous Coward]

All reporting is biased, misinformed and shows poor understanding of the subject.

All of it.

All of it: everywhere, anywhen, on any subject.

Really.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[tswinzig]

Actually with all the "Netscape sucks" and "Mozilla sucks" every time they are brought up in a non confrontational context with IE (Such as when a new release is announced). You could say that /. is firmly on the side of Microsoft as well.

Considering that slashdot is not a single person, but many different people, in many different roles, I don't think treating it as a single entity is fair.

Why is it that MSNBC is biased when they say that Netscape 6.0 was buggy

MSNBC didn't say this, at least in this article. They posted a CNET article. Probably because they didn't want to appear biased. Strange that they chose a 3rd party review that is so negative towards Netscape, though, eh?

but when everyone on /. (and almost everywhere else on the net) says the same thing they're not?

Slashdot, again, is not a single entity. What's more, even if it were, it is not paid or presumed to be an unbiased source of journalistic integrity. CNET, and yes MSNBC, *are* supposed to be those kinds of sources.

That just shows that comments like the one above are the biased ones...

How exactly was I biased? I read yet another Paul Festa article on how much Netscape sucks, one-sided as usual, leaving out how much better Mozilla is than Netscape, etc. I write Paul Festa and the editors of CNET to complain about this so-called journalism. I see someone on slashdot agrees, and I point out that they should let CNET know how they feel.

You're right -- I guess I'm biased against crappy journalism.

Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC

[tswinzig]

The early version of IE were laughable, but laughable IE is not what allowed Netscape to assemble an overwhelming lead.

Correct. Netscape already had an overwhelming lead. IE's laughability was what allowed Netscape to keep that lead for a long, long time, and make it even stronger.

It is easy to lead when there are no real competitors.

Ahhh, I see you've taken a good lesson from Microsoft's camp. However, Netscape led well after Microsoft released their browser in 1995. Things didn't start getting interesting until well into the 3.x's, and Microsoft didn't match Netscape very well until 4.x. At that point, they took the gloves off, shoved MSIE into every single Microsoft application sold, forced admins to install it at every turn, and embedded it into all their new versions of operating systems.

The race didn't start until the release of IE 2.0 in 1995.

Much like Paul Festa, your remembrance of the history of the browsers is very sketchy...

How much deeper does this hole get?

[shr3k]

The more Netscape keeps releasing beta code, the more users it's alienating. I know it's tough not having the latest and greatest 5.x (err 6.x) browser to market, but come on. By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[cetan]

NS 6.1 is based on Mozilla build 0.9.2 which is pretty darn good. Prior to 0.9.3 coming out, 0.9.2 was my browser of choice for home.

though you may think a x.0 to x.1 step is small, in terms of the mozilla code, it's a huge step.

Netscape is just branded-Mozilla and it's looking pretty good. If it actually makes a dent in the browser "market" remains to be seen.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[TheFrood]

The more Netscape keeps releasing beta code, the more users it's alienating. I know it's tough not having the latest and greatest 5.x (err 6.x) browser to market, but come on. By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.

Basing 6.0 on Mozilla 0.6 (or whatever it was) was an incredibly stupid idea. But building 6.1 now off the Moz-0.9.2 source is the right thing to do. First, because Moz-0.9.2 is actually very stable -- the Mozilla folks are setting very high standards for Moz-1.0, and Moz-0.9.2 is already better then Netscape 4.x. Second, and more importantly, releasing 6.1 now gets 6.0 off the market and out of sight as soon as possible.

Even if 6.1 isn't a perfect browser yet, it at least gets rid of the abomination that is 6.0.

TheFrood

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Quintin Stone]

It's not a Canadian term. I used to work for my state Department of Correction here where I live (in the U.S.). They manage the prisons as well as probationers and parolees.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[ConceptJunkie]

That term is used in the U.S. as well.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Slurm-V]

Dept. of Corrections: Correctional institutions like prisons and borstals, juvenile halls, parole offices and the people who work in them, plus the supply and distribution of batons, chains, whips, cat'o'nine tails and the occasional stones for upset fundementalists.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[Ranger]

By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.

Yeah, I gave up on Netscape along time ago. I doubt Mozilla is "the Great White Hope" for Open Source, but I'll give it a try when it comes out. Oh, for the days of NCSA Mosaic.

Re:How much deeper does this hole get?

[jesser]

The more Netscape keeps releasing beta code, the more users it's alienating. I know it's tough not having the latest and greatest 5.x (err 6.x) browser to market, but come on. By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.

"Mozilla 1.0" is more likely to be an API freeze than a "this is no longer a beta-quality browser" release. Netscape's version numbers are more reflective of the state of the product: 6.0 was new features and major rewrites, like most x.0 releases, and 6.1 is an improved version with more emphasis on stability and not many new features since 6.0.

sweet god in heaven

[nomadic]

25 megs? What the hell did they put in it? Why can't they just release the damn browser by itself?

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Jeffrey Baker]

It comes with some plugins, Java, and a dictionary.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

hot damn, are you serious? I need to download that right away so I can watch the video!

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Jebediah21]

Well... it seems there is a lot of crap in there than. I stand corrected.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but as far as I know Steve Case does not enjoy having sex with teenage boys.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Jebediah21]

In the end I am thinking less that 500K of advertising is bundled with the thing. If I remember right Java is bigger than Mozilla itself, something like ~15MB (this is off the top of my head). We'll say 500K for the dictionary and 500K for the plugins. Doesn't leave much space for anything else.

Re:sweet god in heaven

[Tumbleweed]

Well, plug-ins are certainly useful, and a dictionary is nice. Client-side Java, however, is hardly worth it's weight in bits, and definitely isn't worth the download time.

Also, I'm still amazed at how bad the bookmark-handling is in Mozilla considering how great most everything else is in it. Very strange. Do the developers not use bookmarks? It's still _way_ behind Navigator in bookmark handling, both in functionality of bookmark UI issues, and in speed.

thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[Puddin]

August. 8 -- AOL Time Warner released the first final upgrade to its notoriously buggy Netscape 6 browser, promising a smoother and faster ride for Netscape loyalists. ROFL notoriously buggy. netscape loyalists LOL LOL LOL i use IE, cause netscape does stink, but that line was seriously funny

Re:thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[hansley]

you are such a silly twat for being a. Funnny b. using IE and reading slashdot unless there is IE on *nix or anything else for that matters.. Oh yea i am on M$ now, but i have the decency to use and debug mozi.. H.

Re:thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[PKB351]

Why didn't Slashdot link to the CNET review of Netscape 6.1p. This was a rathewr favourable review and even provided some benchmarking of Netscape and IE using Windows 98 and Windows 2000. The benchmarking was interesting. Using Win 98 Netscape was half as fast as IE using the test tasks, but on Win 2000 Netscape was either on par with IE or significantly faster. Why did Slashdot link to an article which slams Netscape using the vehicle of a thinly disguised news story when they could have linked to a much more credible CNET review that has actually test driven the browser to back up its comments on Netscape. Does Slashdot have something against the Mozilla project and hopes it will not succeed? Hmmmmmmm? Paul.

Re:thought this was funny in the MSNBC topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... yeah.

Especially since the story is about the final release of Netscape 6.1, yet the title of the story is:

"AOL releases new Netscape beta"

*sigh*

Ugh... Netcenter

[PingXao]

I mistakenly signed up for NetCenter years ago. Never thought too much about it until AOL bought them out. At that point, I wanted OUT by the most direct route possible. Heh.

Every month they sent me stuff I didn't want. Mostly drivel, but hardly unsolicited - I mean, I did sign up for it, right? Opt-out time. Yeah, right. I basically sent them 4 or 5 emails a week asking to be taken off their "membership" list. They ignored each and every one. Not to mention that the "Unsubscribe" link on the NutCenter page absolutely never worked, either. I resorted to flaming away at them. I cursed them out and called them every filthy name in the book. I harvested emai addresses from their site and cc'ed every name I had. Multiple times a week!

No response. Then after a couple of "warnings" that my account had expired, it all finally ceased. And that, my friends, is about the closest I ever want to be to *anything* even remotely connected to AOL.

Re:Ugh... Netcenter

[purplemonkeydan]

They did the same to me. I got quite annoyed, and sent a nastygram, and cc'ed it to TRUSTe. I've never received another e-mail from them since.

Re:Ugh... Netcenter

[snilloc]

Netcenter really suffered during the AOL acquisition. Stuff didn't work right for months.

Things at least work now, but they screwed up the email client. Before, it was a little slow to load, but a nice interface. Now it is significantly quicker, but they bailed out on a lot of the features (filtering!) that were in the old webmail.

I can't remember the last time I got one of those membership info emails... they mostly pertained to the crap they were changing (including my friggin' login name and email address!!! That was re-goddamn-diculous!)

I ended up keeping the account. I got a new IM screen name (good for "hiding out"), and the spam sent to the old email address (that I barely used anyway - my 3rd account at the time.) magically stopped when the old email became defunct. I'm even experimenting with the calendar thingie...

Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozilla

[Guppy06]

First off, let me just say that while "Netscape loyalists" may not be all that much of a misnomer, "computer geeks" aren't the only bunch of people still using Netscape. A big group of people who still use it are those who aren't all that computer literate and wish to continue using Netscape because it's what they started with and what they know. The same reasons why my mother still uses Eudora Lite (or whatever they're calling themselves now) since WFW 3.11 instead of Outlook Express. There are also a lot of corporations that use this kind of mentality when deciding on software. "Netscape still works for us, why bother changing software?"

As for the "Why Netscape instead of Mozilla?" group, there are advantages to using a mildly invasive, "shrink-wrapped" piece of software. The fact that it's official Netscape means that customers have a single and (usually) definative source of help and information in the form of Netscape themselves. While Mozilla has Bugzilla and on-line forums, that's not all that appealing to those who view themselves more as "casual computer users" than "participants in the community." And again, this is something the corporate types prefer.

So before you jump down Netscape's throat for releasing this, remember that not everybody is a Free software junkie. Personally, I wish they released this update sooner, and I think it will be interesting to see how Mozilla vs. Netscape works out. This could be the definative closed-source vs. open-source competition, with about as even a playing field between the two as you're going to get.

Submission of article is buggy

[Ilgaz]

Netscape has a network based installer, it isn't a "junk", it is based on mozilla 0.9.2...

Where are those infos? I even could send a better submission.

spell checker?

[ehackathorn]

Anybody know if they re-released their spell checker so I can use mozilla again for email?

Nice spell checker

[jawtheshark]

"Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V." ?!?
Aren't those guys broke and gone by now? For those who don't know it: it's a Belgian company that promisied speech products already years ago. The founders have been arrested for fraud (see here in german or here in english. I don't think the arrests had to do anything with the technology tough.

To stay on topic: I still use Netscape 4.76 and the reason is that I like the profiles that are stored *not* as a part of the user configuration but in a separated directory ([ProgramFilesDir]\Netscape\Users). This is very usefull if you have multiple computers and want to be able to use the same profiles all over the network: just share the directory and load your profiles on the central computer (the router in my config).
I know what you think: hey, but just use a domain server where you store remote user profiles (W2K and NT4 workstations) and voilà, same profile everywhere due to the duplication at login. True, this works...at work....not at home where I do *not* have a dedicated domain server in sitting the cave and that we lay the network cables only when needed. Local browsing can still be done, you just need to add a "Local" netscape profile on the harddisk of each machine, and of you go.

With Mozilla and Internet Explorer, I cannot use this setup because user preferences are stored as a part of the Windows User profile. Implementing a domain server is not an issue: I do not have an machine lying around to take over this task (can this be done using Linux by the way? Using Samba? Presumably!).
I'm sure my family will get pissed off if when I tell them: oh, bookmarks will now be local to the machine: you'll have to update your bookmarks on every machine :-(

+5 Informative???

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment is in no way 'Informative.' It is, however, a clear example of moderator bias and an attempt to (mis)direct the flow of comments on this thread. On a discussion of NS 6.1, this post is, if anything, '-1 Offtopic.

But Netscape 6.0 was *good*!

[Anonymous Coward]

NS6 was the best browser available at the time (as long as you don't treat Mozilla as a separate browser). 6.1 is certainly better, but 6.0 was already a huge improvement from 4.x and a small step above IE 5.5.

unix != linux

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* Netscape (and most of /.) is under the impression that a "unix" release is just a 2.2 linux binary. So when is the DEC Alpha port going to be released? ;P~

Re:Netscape 6.1, a few thoughts

[ahde]

Mozilla fails to render pages at all! Very often. And there are a heap of showstopper bugs (not browser stopper) in the Standards. And where did they get the piece of shit gecko for .93? Its worse than I've seen since M9.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[Derkec]

"There are also a lot of corporations that use this kind of mentality when deciding on software"

Some of these stick with Netscape because they believe in branded products and have a deep hatred of Microsoft. I've seen this a few times, it's kind of funny really.

Re:Java and Mozilla

[aok]

Yeah, I think you need the entire runtime environment because how else would the Java applets run?

After installing the jre, I then manually copy over the NPOJI600.dll (and similar .so under Linux) to the Netscape/Mozilla plugins subdirectory.

Java works everywhere I've tried EXCEPT hushmail.com :( I'm not sure if it's a hushmail programming bug or a Mozilla bug or a Java bug...but when I type in my passphrase, every keystroke is repeated.

Anyways, hope this helps.

Re:Misc Icons - Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you only have a couple browser windows open at once, then it's fine. But often times when I'm websurfing, I have lots of windows open. Think 10+. Let me tell you how annoying it is to have 10 brower window icons hogging up space on my taskbar, and my alt-tab switch space. That's what I hate. With Opera, I just let it keep track of the windows on its own little taskbar, and then it isn't taking up 10 spots on alt-tab. I love MDI for the most part. I thought it was annoying when they switched Word to SDI.
And um, no, a frameset won't work the same, because it will put all the pages in the same browser window, not just the same parent window which are completely different. Try loading 5 pages in a frameset and getting them full screen. That's what I thought.

"I don't read AC posts..." Tell slashdot to email me my password already and I would log in:P

Re:Poorly Dubbed Browser

[pressman]

Imagine, if you could, a poorly dubbed foreign film ... where the actors look like they are speaking english, but the words don't exactly sync up with the lips.

Oh? You mean Final Fantasy? heh heh

Re:Better for porn !

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I'm gonna use it for, with the pornscape skin

Re:Choice is bad?

[DrXym]

I said choice was good not bad if you care to read the last paragraph.

Basically Mozilla is for people who don't mind trading off stability for cutting edge features. If a security flaw is found the choices you have are those I mentioned. Yes, you could download a nightly but that would be even more buggier than using a milestone.

Re:hi

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello.
How are your doing today. Its very freak'n hot-n-humid up here in western New York ...

Hope you all have a good day!!!!

Re:Look @ the numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about what I expected. Mozilla is huge! Perhaps they should try what I do. Every 3 days I take an hour to study the code I've written. So, far it has saved me a lot more time than I spend studying. This has also resulted in the reduction of the amount of code and bugs in many of my programs and extensions.

Java and Mozilla

[bedouin]

When I try and install Java through Mozilla's update program it always seems to fail. Anyone know how I can go around this? Do I just have to download the entire runtime environment?

Re:sweet god in heaven.. it's MSIE

[Anonymous Coward]

minimum install of IE5.5 is about 5 megs

IE6 beta (includes OE6) is about 10 megs

Better for porn !

[koekepeer]

From the CNET review:

In fact, in certain scenarios, including loading a large page comprising mixed text and graphics, Netscape 6.1 completed the job up to one-third faster than IE.

So me thinks this makes NS6.1 the preferred browser for watching porn pages ;-)

Netscape 3.02 fast?

[Dacmot]

Man... you've never seen Lynx going...

Re:Netscape 3.02 fast?

[big_hairy_mama]

Yeah, and every time it shows an error or question, the keyboard freqzes for three seconds. Bah!

No it isn't

[Chuck Chunder]

Netscape 6.1 = (Mozilla 0.9.2 + further tweaking + branding)
Netscape 6.1 comes from the Mozilla 0.9.2 branch, not the 0.9.3 branch.

Re:Who truly needs a dictionary...

[Anonymous Coward]

31337 = ELEET = elite

At least that's been my interpretation.

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[scrytch]

> support for roaming profiles

IE bundled this into windows logins. Different user, different bookmarks, different settings. Not terribly "roaming" unless you have an NT server to to do a domain login on, not the most reliable thing at 28.8 on the road...

> excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks

Funny thing that, I use the filesystem to manage my bookmarks, using explorer, which lets me move things around with a more familiar interface than netscape. I can import bookmarks over a remote share or from email with drag-and-drop. Managing my bookmarks doesn't require a modal dialog.

> slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page

Bookmarklets (as such javascript bookmarks are nicknamed) are also available on IE. In fact there's more of them for IE. And a personal toolbar does exist, in fact it's pretty much the way I manage bookmarks 99% of the time.

> a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code

IE lets me choose my mail client -- I prefer Eudora. In fact, IE for solaris (which manages to be slower, bloatier and crashier than netscape) lets me use dtmail and mutt.

> and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.

Whereas windows has MAPI, a standard API for accessing and manipulating mailboxes. Power tools able to understand this API include Perl and Python. It's a windows philosophy -- where unix has file formats, windows has interfaces.

Re:DHTML and 6.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this page, Netscape is doing a great job helping web developers sorting out these issues... http://devedge.netscape.com/evangelism/ Also have a look at their "DevEdge Web Tune Up Wizard". You'll love it !

Why bother?

[nagarjun]

This is hilarious:
The world's 14 remaining users of the Netscape browser exulted this week over the release of Netscape 6, the first new version of the browser in two years, and a product Netscape executives predicted would blow away Microsoft's Internet Explorer "if this were 1997."
More at SatireWire.com.

Re:Misc Icons - Opera

[ncc74656]

The feature I liked most about using Opera (when I used windows a few years back) was the ability to have multiple pages opened inside of the main application window.

Ick...I tried Opera a little while back, and while most of it was pretty good from what I could see, that misfeature was a showstopper for me. MDI sux. With all your browser windows in one parent window, you can't easily mix browser windows with other apps' windows, as the parent window is often maximized. Click in one of them and they'll all block other apps' windows. IIRC, you also couldn't start multiple instances of Opera to simulate SDI. Windows apps have been migrating from MDI to SDI for some time now...IE, Nutscrape, and Mozilla are examples of SDI apps (well, IE is anyway...can't speak for Nutscrape or Mozilla, but they behave like SDI apps). I don't know if other versions of Opera behave the same way...haven't tried the Mac version as they didn't have a 5.x for 68K Macs last time I checked, and my Linux box is a server with a TTL mono display (tried X11 and KDE on it once for sh*ts and grins...it worked, but I wouldn't want to use it that way on a daily basis).

If you want multiple webpages in one window, make yourself some frameset HTML and load a different page into each frame. If you always want the same set of pages to load, this will work. Since you mentioned that you use it for searching, the Google toolbar has some nice features that speed up searching (you can set it to spawn a new window for each click, for instance).

Poorly Dubbed Browser

[UID30]

Imagine, if you could, a poorly dubbed foreign film ... where the actors look like they are speaking english, but the words don't exactly sync up with the lips. Thats the feeling I get when Using NS6 / Mozilla. Press a button and get an ever-so-slight delay before it does anything. Not much, but just enough to be annoying and give you time to think "Go, Damnit, Go!"

That's my reason for using NS4.x.

Spelling error?

[Basset]

I am sure max2010 meant to say "hunk of code" not "junk of code". Right? The 'j' and the 'h' are right next to each other on the keyboard.

Netscape was once the darling of open source, how times have changed.

Re:Spelling error?

[Anonymous Coward]

You spelt parity wrong.
Also, your sentence does not parse.

Re:No it's not...

[11223]

Actually, it worked just fine for me, so I think the parent is pulling your leg. (Moz 0.9.3+ Slowaris 2.6)

Examples?

[Walles]

Could you give some examples of URLs that don't render well (or at all) with Mozilla? As I'm not having any problems with Mozilla myself I'm kind of curious.

Cheers //Johan

O My

[Anonymous Coward]

I had had bad luck with N6 on my windoes (98) box. Crash crash crash. What the heck, I thought, having read all the discussion here, I'll give it another go. K, so, download the installer, choose custom and get rid of Net2phone and all the other crud I don't want. Install. Run for the first time. Cancel activation. Crash on start-up. Crash on start-up again. Bug tracker tries to send bug report. Crashes . Try to run uninstaller. Uninstaller removes ADD/Remove programs entry and nothing else. Deleted program folder. Spend next hour removing entries from the registry. Wonder what the hell THAT was all about. I really wish I had an alternative (free, cheapskate me) to IE. ARG!

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[marcovje]

I work for an ISP, and the largest Netscaping group
is definitily still Macintosh. Netscape is simply
faster on older pmacs. But that might not necessarily mean that they will adapt 6.x, since
6.x is slower than 4.x

Of course, the *nix flock also uses Mozilla. But
they call helpdesks less, and therefore aren't
covered by above statistics :-)

Memory usage

[WowTIP]

I ran a little test and opened up 1 local page in IE5.0, NS 4.78, NS 6.1 & Opera 5.11 (w. jdk). Then I opened 4 local pages, then 4 local + slashdot in all browsers.

The result:
IE 5.0: 8096 k | 10100 k | 11740 k
NS 4.78: 8904 k | 9756 k | 11088 k
NS 6.1: 20736 k | 22600 k | 26576 k
Opera 5.11: 7324 k | 7776 k | 9100 k


I dunno, but NS6.1 seem to use a *lot* of memory, even though the NT Taskmanager has a funny way of showing memory usage...

Will it run for more than 5 min?

[E-Rock-23]

I downloaded Netscape 6 a while back. Had it running on a Win98 P3-550, and it wouldn't stay alive for more than 5 minutes without crashing totally. Maybe the .1 fixes that, but screw it. Konqueror works just fine for me now that Linux is running well on the same box. The hell with both IE and Netscape. Windows users: Check out Opera, it's rather nice, small, and free...

Did anyone else notice Micro-fud in the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming this is build from the 0.9.3 Mozilla release.. if so this should be pretty good for the netscape crowd. Faster and more stable than the 4.x series. This should finally give IE 5.0 a run for the money, 5.5 is slower and 6.0 blows chunks.. microsoft needs to up the FUD while they try and fix the crap that IE 6.0 has become.

--iamnotayam

Netscrape

[afschmidt]

I can't believe this BS!!! 25 Megs of Bloat Code and they still can't declare this thing stable. I HAD to give up on Netscrape 6.0 after my PC kept crashing into oblivion. I don't like MS or Internet Exploder, but it's a lot more stable and lets me get my work done.

Re:Netscrape

[Glytch]

Try Opera. You won't regret it. Runs beautifully, and doesn't cause the entire OS to crash on the (extremely rare, btw) occasions that it crashes.

Re:Netscrape

[Mike Van Pelt]

I tried Opera.

I hated it.

I spent a while with it, trying to give its "all browsing is sub-windows inside the one "Web Browser" window" model a fair shake. It was no use. I just plain detest that way of doing web browsing. I want separate windows for each web page. YMMV

Other than that, it seemed nice, pretty stable, and I really liked the ability to scale the magnification on web pages. That's a feature I really want to see in a "separate windows" type browser.

Is Netscape 6.1 worth my time? The previous version most emphatically was not. I basically stick with Netscape 4.7x by default, even though it's a buggy piece of crap, because Explorer, of course, is Evil.

AOL/Netscape had to release v6.1

[abischof]

In a way, AOL/Netscape had to release v6.1 Right Now (TM), since IE 6 is going to be released next Wednesday This isn't to say that I don't like Netscape, though -- I download the Mozilla daily builds every day..

Yeah, but where is the Webmail support?

[aufecht]

I still can not retrieve my Webmail even though the Netscape 6.1 download page says that it has the ability to do so. They have been saying this since The first Netscape 6 betas. Has anyone else had any luck with this feature? If I could send and recieve my Webmail with the Netscape Mail client I would use it all the time. I find Web based mail to be short on features and just clunky. I loved Messenger, but since my only choice of Email with Bellsouth DSL is Web based (Bellsouth's web based Email is a joke) I signed up with a Netscape account. It's small thing like this that start to deter people from using a product. Don't tout a new feature if it doesn't work. I tried to get my roommate to switch to Netscape 6 because she could check her Webmail with it. But when it doesn't work she asks why she should bother upgrading to 6.1 since this is one features that would make her use it. Also, on the download page they show a new Theme and tell you that you too can have this theme. But when you go to the Theme download page it is nowhere to be found. Inconsistencies will ultimalely push people away from your product. Netscape/AOL should stop relying on release numbers to draw people to their product. Does anyone still download a browser because it has a higher version number? Maybe when there was actually a browser war. That is over. Stick to making a product with features that work.

Re:Yeah, but where is the Webmail support?

[shaji]

Yeah ... it works for me. The catch is when you install it you should also install the AOL instant messenger. Just Navigator and Mail installation will not be enough. And it rocks .. Free email account with no ads .. And about the New modern theme, it is already in the package, View->Apply theme->Modern.

Wrong

[Hobobo]

Release of Netscape 6.1 was based on the readiness of the product and had nothing to do with the IE6 release schedule

Re:No it's not...

[Bedouin X]

I have, and it's pretty much on par with IE 6 beta 2. They both average around 4 MB or so on my box. I've have them both get up in the 70 - 80 MB range though. I've had IE 6 b2 take up 82 MB in 5 processes. Of course IE 6 and NS 6.1 are technically both beta technology so take that for what it's worth.

Final Fantasy and Final Fight

[yerricde]

If it's the first one, doesn't that preclude the possibility of it being the final one?

Both Final Fantasy and Final Fight have had sequels.

Lets see:

[PinguinoLoco]

PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT TIME COMMAND

421 4.9 14.3 120496 56196 ?? S 7:23.22 /Volumes/Kronecker/Netscape6-macosX/Netscape 6

431 1.1 2.4 59240 9296 ?? S 0:15.66 /Volumes/Leibnitz/iCab_Pre2.51_English_Mac/iCab

430 0.2 3.2 64276 12656 ?? S 0:20.20 /Applications/Internet Explorer/Internet Explorer.app/.../IE

This was posted while in Netscape --which I have
to admit it is faster than iCab & +|- = IE.
I like it ... but it comes AOL-over-stuffed.

What do you think?
PingunoLoco

DHTML and 6.1

[rufusdufus]

I have 6.1 just to test DHML on it. Its real neat because I can write code that runs on IE 5 and Netscape that works on both, though you have to write it just *so*. NS 6.1 has been stable and error free for me so far. The problem is, NS 6.x doesnt support most of the DHTML that works on 4.x. This is a ridiculous strategic move move since now it really makes Netscape a pain. You have to detect different versions of Netscape, and run your IE code on the newer Netscape browser. So you start thinking what the hell, just blow off NS 4.x. This of course means that you have to prompt users to upgrade to 6.x if you want to run this page, which will just annoy them. In the end, everyone just ends up mad at Netscape for being so squirrely.

"Unix" version only available for Linux 2.2

[Anonymous Coward]

"Netscape Browser Version 6.1 is released. Give it a try, grab the 25MByte junk of code for MAC, Unix and Windows at ftp.netscape.com."

Beware that the only "Unix" version available under /pub/netscape6/english/6.1/unix/ is "Linux 2.2"!

Re:"Unix" version only available for Linux 2.2

[NDPTAL85]

Use Mozilla

Netscape 6.1

[Anonymous Coward]

For all those making pointless comments Netscape 6.1 is based on a branch of Mozilla 0.9.2 that has been maintained since the Mozilla release of 0.9.2. The reason for a seperate branch was to allow Netscape to bug fix, and incorporate any propritory code. The closed code to Netscape 6.1 was avalible at mozilla.org on 27th July. It shames slashdot that all those comments above are merely pointless flaming about mozilla/netscape without having any real knowledge about the code. The Mozilla project is one of the most important projects currently being undertaken by the OSS/FSF community. Without the support of the whole community there is little chance of denting IE's share. In order to foster competion within a sector it often requires people to act according to their belief's and not convience (look at Wal-Mart). Mozilla is a similar example! Support it and believe in it! Without that belief's in competing with the encombent really are meaningless.

Because 6.0 sucks so badly

[Dr. Spork]

They couldn't stomach telling people to "upgrade" to 6.0. That's why. 6.1 works great, no crashes yet!

Look @ the numbers

[PinguinoLoco]

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
431 iCab 0.0% 0:21.39 7 98 117 4.36M 9.23M 9.08M 57.9M
430 Internet E 2.3% 1:02.72 8 118 198 15.1M 12.1M 18.6M 69.5M
421 Netscape 6 7.9% 15:46.16 7 122 411 49.9M 24.9M 55.0M 119M

What do you think?

New Theme!

[TheFrood]

Netscape has released a new Toy Factory theme for Netscape 6.1. Big bright buttons!

TheFrood

Re:New Theme!

[Pope]

I wanna know what the heck happened to "Orbit" from the 6.0 preview. That one was cool...

Broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tryinig 6.1 on Mandrake 8.0. i have two diff. accounts. one on AOL, one on another place... well it mixed them into one account then now.. i can't even create a new one... i wonder if i would manage to see my aol mail.. nice thing has ssl since no way i am logging to aol without ssl....

LISTEN TO ME!!!!

[BroadbandBradley]

DOWNLOAD THIS BROWSER AND FORGO THE EVIL EMPIRE!!!!
UNINSTALL YOUR COPY OF IE!!!! what, you can't remove IE from your system?, I guess you'd better remove your system.

Inertia?

[Invisible Agent]

If I understand your point, you're saying that the reason that people use Netscape is because they have learned it's "interface".

The interface of a web browser isn't really that interesting. I mean, aside from starting it and having it record your favorites, the rest is just cruft. The real interface is found in the web pages it renders.

I think the reason that naive users continue to use Netscape is because their tech-savvy kid installed it a few years ago, and it still works. I'd be pretty amazed if those users were upgrading...

Re:No it's not...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno about newsgroups (the latest version of pan is good. has inline image rendering through the gtk html lib), but when it comes to web pr0n, netscape 4.7x is tough to beat. Mozilla is way too slow and the file save dialogs take a second or two to disappear. Sucks when you're trying to grab images fast and spank it at the same time!

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[Mr. Jackson]

I use Netscape because I can delete to an IMAP folder with one click, it doesn't continue to clutter my inbox, and I can recover it if I need to. OE won't do that.

Congratulations on displaying a lack of clue

[Chuck Chunder]

about the meaning of the words "Open Source". I regularly use the source which is available to me in an Open manner to compile my own Mozilla. I regularly compile Galeon against that.

The majority of the core coders may be Netscape employees but that doesn't change the nature of the source. The "Hanger-ons" as you so politely put it should also not be discounted. Among them are some very good people (and some average people, like myself, who occasionally help out by creating test cases or other mundane tasks which may divert core developers from using their time more effectively) who make very real contributions to Mozilla.

Re:Congratulations on displaying a lack of clue

[KidSock]

about the meaning of the words "Open Source".

Answer me two questions.

1) How did Netscape benifit from Open-Sourcing their code?

2) How did the Open-Source community benifit from the Open-Sourcing of Netscape?

[Note: Before you mention Galeon, remember that it was born in response to the poor performace of earlier Mozilla builds.]

I think carrying the burdon of the Open-Source initiative was why the development processed has dragged on as it has. Do you remember the first couple of builds? Is it possible that they would have made more progress without this burdon?

Don't get me wrong (again), I am quite pro-Open-Source and manage two 100+ dl/month OSS codebases myself. I'm simply stating the fact that in the case of Netscape, it turned out to be a poor example of why companies should Open-Source and share their code. Companies should share this code in the name of progress but they should be more sophisticated about how.

NS4 "DHTML" vs. NS6 DHTML

[Ferd Lamarche]

Hey! My job is mostly centred around DHTML, too, and I have to say that while I'm glad Netscape 6 has finally adopted proper DHTML (<IFRAME>, <DIV>, etc.), I noticed that the document.frames array in Netscape 6.0 doesn't seem to be present. That's really stupid. I'm sure it's part of the official specification. Hopefully Netscape 6.1 will correct this, tho they should have got it right the first time!

I wish I could tell my users to ditch Netscape 4.x and get Netscape 6.x, but Netscape6 is such a big RAM/disk space/processor power hog that they probably wouldn't. Furthermore, there's the missing support for document.frames[], the fact that Netscape6 can't run LiveConnect plug-ins from Netscape4, the huge download, etc. I don't know what Netscape's goal is with this, but they do appear to moving in one particular direction: to get the whole world to switch to IE.

I suppose I'm a big hypocrite, because I'm sitting here composing this in Netscape 4, the very browser I wish the world would drop. However, it's fast to load and doesn't use a lot of RAM or require a really fast processor, so it's good for small stuff. IE 4.0 and even 5.0 (and especially the dog's breakfast known as IE 5.5) don't have those qualities. But Netscape 6 really takes the cake. It makes IE 5.5 look fast and un-bloated. I'm not worried about holding back the transition away from NS4, because if the browser usage stats from the websites at my workplace are any indication, IE already rules the world. I'm talking about a >95% market share.

Anyway, the "DHTML" in Netscape 4.x is garbage. <LAYER>?? What the hell is that?? Have you noticed that if you try to load documents into two layers in quick succession, only the first one loads? If you have two <LAYER> tags on a page named "Layer1" and "Layer2" and two documents named "doc1.html" and "doc2.html", this code, which should load doc1.html and doc2.html into Layer1 and Layer2, will only load Layer1 most of the time:

document.layers["Layer1"].src = "doc1.html";
document.layers["Layer2"].src = "doc2.html";

You actually have two wait a bit after Layer1 is finished loading before Layer2 can start. I think that's because Netscape can only load one thing at a time, and while one thing is loading, all other JavaScript or other activities must wait...

Anyway, Netscape 4.xx continues to exist. They just released 4.78 about a week ago! Why don't they put that stupid thing to bed?

By the way, were you ever able to get the <ILAYER> tag to work? I couldn't; it would either crash the browser or just not appear.

what happened to k-meleon?

[tankrshr77]

talking about k-meleon, what happened to it? i just read about today, but their site is down and i was able to get v.4 from sourceforge..

Ability to read AOL email

[ayden]

This, one key feature, points to something I haven't seen mentioned, yet.

It looks like this is a migration tool to move AOL users from an IE based AOL client to one based on Netscape (Mozilla) code. Is Netscape's ability to read AOL email confirmation of something only suspected prior to this release?

There were only two options...

[tankrshr77]

There are more options on linux than windows now. The latest: Choice of buggy ie, bloated mozilla/netscape, and opera with ads.

I'd prefer to have something like konqueror or galeon for windows.

I thought they said they were done with browsers?

[Mustang Matt]

Didn't they have a press release about two months ago that said they weren't going to release any more browsers?

Web developers rejoiced across the world on that day.

Do you believe everything you read?

[edunbar93]

Um, didn't you know that "objective reporting" is a fallacy to make you believe that all the major "news outlets" tell the truth, rather than putting their own spin on the news?

There is no such thing as objective reporting. There never was. Take everything you read with a huge lump of salt, with an eye to who wrote it and who paid them to do so.

Re:Do you believe everything you read?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exhibit A: A man appears to have been murdered last night in an alley behind a nightclub. This is the third such death this year.

Exhibit B: A man was brutally slain in a dark alley behind the X nightclub, where two other men died under very suspicious circumstances several months ago.

One insinuates, the other doesn't. There're still a few sources where exhibit A is closer to the norm.

Netscape 6.1 vs Internet Explorer 5.5

[Jotham]

I just performed a few tests and actually had Netscape 6.1 performed quicker that Internet Explorer 5.5 in page rendering.

System: Windows 2000 (PIII 800,256 Mem)
Netscape 6.1 - Navigator only (Mail, Composer & Java2 NOT installed) - everthing else standard.
IE 5.5 - standard Install/settings (ie. cache set to Automatic)
Test site: Slashdot (Clicking from the main page into a comments page)

Results:
Clicked on IE -> Read More
Clicked on NS -> Read More
(clicked both as quickly as possible)
....
IE flips straight away to show the Slashdot header while Netscape hasn't even left the page yet (not looking good).
....
Netscape jumps to the page and displays the header and the initial post - IE still only showing header.
....
Netscape starts displaying posts (about 50 display ) - IE still only showing header.
....
Netscape continues to stream in posts and finishes
IE displays completed page shortly after.

Basically there's not much in the final difference but the streaming effect of the comments table makes a huge difference and the longer the page the bigger the difference in overall speed. It definately seems that Netscape 6.1 is better for a t least long pages... IE is pretty even and may win on smaller pages but either way the main speed limit now is simply download rate.

Note: Initial boot-up time and Memory footprint are still won hands down by IE - can't beat a browser built into the OS and already half loaded. Netscape 6.1 without Java 2 installed is MUCH quicker in boot-up and is quite acceptable.

Nice to see Mozilla coming along so nicely...

Re:Netscape 6.1 vs Internet Explorer 5.5

[Xiphoid Process]

as for startup times, try using the quick launch in the advanced options tab... it preloads parts of mozilla, just like ie does, and now comes up faster than IE on my system.

Good, hopefully R.I.P. Netscape 4 really soon

[brocktune]

I write web-based intranet applications. The sooner Nutscrape 4 dies, the better. Its proprietary DOM and weak CSS support cause me to write and test all my stuff twice. I had high hopes for Netscape 6.0, but its performance on Windows is abysmal. If Netscape 6.1 performance is close to the latest Mozilla, it will be a lot easier to convince people to dump NS4. None of the IS departments of our customers would ever allow Mozilla or Opera. For the few brave souls willing to venture away from IE, it's Netscape or nothing. A robust mainstream browser on Windows other than IE goes a long way towards keeping browsers standards-compliant. Yes, I realize Gecko is the same on NS and Mozilla, but try telling that to Fortune 100 companies. I'm looking forward to the day when I can write DHTML for one browser and it works everywhere.

At least Netscape got good bandwith...

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded 6.1 at 322kb/s while I usually download MS shits at 50kb/s :) One good reason to download it.

Re:Misc Icons - Opera

[Jebediah21]

The feature I liked most about using Opera (when I used windows a few years back) was the ability to have multiple pages opened inside of the main application window. Getting 4 browsers open in one window made searching very, very fast. Tux Bless those Norwegians.

for MAC, Unix and Windows

[MavEtJu]

Make that: for Mac, Linux and Windows.

257 "/pub/netscape6/english/6.1/unix" is current directory.
ftp> dir
227 Entering Passive Mode (205,188,212,74,239,245)
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 3 5743 bin 96 Aug 1 17:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 5743 bin 96 Aug 1 17:15 ..
drwxr-xr-x 5 5743 bin 8192 Aug 8 09:00 linux22
226 ASCII Transfer complete.

Mozilla nighly builds are better!

[dhart]

Recent fixes landed to speed loading time and new window drawing. For example, on my PII/366 192MB, a new message compose window takes NS6.1 4.5 seconds to draw and place the cursor in the "To:" field after striking ^M, 2001-08-07 nightly takes only 2.1 seconds.

Alas, the bloated footprint is no better, but fortunately memory leak bugs are coming in fast and furious now.

On a subject of Mozilla (how to deal with pop-ups)

[porky_pig_jr]

since we are on a subject of Mozilla: I've tried 0.93 on Win98, and just loved it. But - there is a problem. How to deal with pop-ups? I am using Pow! which works great with both IE and Netscape, but it is not compatible with Mozilla. I've found some threads on 'how nice would it be to be able to control javascripts from Mozilla', but that's about it. Pop-ups are getting more and more obnoxious and so - very unfortunately - I had to revert back to IE. TIA.

Choice is bad?

[BlowCat]

Some limited support. Netscape will more than likely release another minor update in a few months to catch any top crashers. It will also release updates for any security issues that arise. With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone.

I cannot imagine how anybody can consider this as an advantage. What you are saying is that Netscape users must wait for the next version, while Mozilla user have a choice - either to wait or to apply a patch. Not quite true - they can also try nightly builds. But anyway, are you saying that having choice is bad?

Ultimate test: the ESPN home page

[MtViewGuy]

My concern in regards to Netscape 6.1 using the Mozilla 0.9.2 code is this: will it render the ESPN home page (http://espn.go.com) correctly? Netscape 6.0 and 6.01 could NOT render that page correctly (unlike IE 4.01 to 6.0 Preview Release 2 and Netscape 4.7x versions), which was the reason why I never used Netscape 6.0x versions for long. :-(

Re:Ultimate test: the ESPN home page

[WildBeast]

Sorry to tell you that but it still doesn't render it correctly.

Re:On a subject of Mozilla (how to deal with pop-u

[jbs666]

since we are on a subject of Mozilla: I've tried 0.93 on Win98, and just loved it. But - there is a problem. How to deal with pop-ups? I am using Pow! which works great with both IE and Netscape, but it is not compatible with Mozilla. I've found some threads on 'how nice would it be to be able to control javascripts from Mozilla', but that's about it. Pop-ups are getting more and more obnoxious and so - very unfortunately - I had to revert back to IE. TIA.


Paste this into prefs.js --> user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

Re:IE6

[hammock]

I installed the IE6 Public Preview (read: Beta)
and I found the autoresize image thing to be the most annoying feature, so I disabled it. Never used the sidebar. IE6 also fucked up Windows Explorer, so that large directories, when expanded, lost the "-" sign to unexpand them in the left pane. There was no symbol at all.
Uninstalling IE6 did not correct the problem.

This was in Windows 2000.

Mozilla does not change how the operating system behaves.

Re:No it's not...

[jesser]

Mozilla is way too slow and the file save dialogs take a second or two to disappear. Sucks when you're trying to grab images fast and spank it at the same time!

I'm glad I'm not the only person who ran into this problem. Please vote for bug 66723, "Download window should not appear when saving from cache". The bug is currently marked as INVALID, but it's likely to be reconsidered if several people vote for it, especially since fixing the bug would be matching IE's behavior.

Mozilla question

[child_of_mercy]

well the only reason i don't use moz for everything is that there's alot of java stuff on web-pages i can't read in the default settings.

anyone know how to turn that on?

i've actually got a java runtime environment on and configurerd on this machine.

Re:Mozilla question

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Copy these files from the bin\ dir of the JRE installation to the bin\plugins dir of mozilla:
NPJava*.dll
NPOJI600.dll

2. Restart mozilla

Re:Mozilla question

[oseng]

On my RH7.1 Linux machine, I downloaded and untarred the java-2 sdk from Sun (java.sun.com), then I just put a soft-link in the /opt/mozilla/plugins directory to point to the libjavaplugin_oji.so file located in the 'jre1.3.1/plugin/i386/ns600' directory. When I start mozilla, it sees the plugin in the directory

Re:No it's not...

[jesser]

screenshot of Mozilla w/Aqua theme


GeoCities doesn't allow you to link to images hosted on GeoCities from other sites. To view the image, click on the link and then add a ? to the end of the URL. (If you're using Mozilla, pressing enter in the location bar is sufficient.)

The real solution would be to create a web page in geocities with an tag pointing to the image, and then to link to that page instead of the image. I'm not sure if the page would have to be in the same geocities account, or if it just has to be on geocities.

Re:No it's not...

[garcia]

Netscape 6.1 is slow as hell for me right now. 128mb and a dual 400. At least this version will actually run. 6.0 wouldn't get past the download...

I don't like any of the Mozilla builds, they crash constantly and don't work that well. This has been all right so far, but I expect the same problems I always see.

Probably going to be stuck w/4.77 for the rest of eternity.

Congratulations CNET

[icqqm]

An entire article on Netscape 6.1, including references to bugfixing and other elements related to its creation, and the word "Mozilla" doesn't appear ANYWHERE in the article.

BTW: Most of the past nine months' work has been fixing bugs and improving performance and stability, according to sources close to Netscape.

Is it just me, or can any idiot just look at MozillaZine and figure this out for himself?

Re:No it's not...

[visualight]

Doh! The pic was in my cache when I checked the link and thought loaded fine. Thanks for the info.

download mirror in australia

[jason andrade]

You can also download 6.1 - only the full installers, sorry - from a local mirror in australia at

http://planetmirror.com/pub/netscape/netscape6/e ng lish/6.1/

cheers,

-jason

Important or not?

[Ogerman]

While I don't use the branded Netscape 6, there are a lot of Windows users who still associate web browsing with "netscape," whether they now use IE or not. Netscape releasing new versions, while it may not convert any IE users, at least keeps their name visible. When Mozilla 1.0/Netscape 6.2 is released and people finally have a good alternative to IE, it'll get rave reviews and attention. Current IE users will then say, "hey I remember Netscape.. new version eh? Maybe I should try it." Heck, at that point, I'd even be for them packaging it with every AOL disk / AIM client / etc. The point is, they have the power to win users away from IE. In contrast, most non-techies have no clue what Mozilla is. Embrace and extend. The more users who switch back to Netscape, the weaker Microsoft's grip on the desktop will become. The Open/Star Office project is the same way. People will trust a big name like Sun and it too will be big news when 1.0 is released. And the funny thing is, their stock price will probably jump that day too. (-:

Re:Misc Icons - Opera

[jovlinger]

Multiple Document Interface.

I HATE that. I want the speed and simplicity of Opera, but I just can't use those MDI programs.

Even MS-Word, for which I think microsoft invented/developed the whole MDI thing, has given up on that.

I mean, let the window manager take care of windows. Mind you, I love emacs's buffers, but that's different...

Netscape 6.1, a few thoughts

[shaji]

I just have a few comments regarding netscape 6.1/mozilla.

Standard compliance : Netscape is the most standard complaint browser out there, even the internet explorer 6.0 beta fails to render pages correcly. For example just go to W3 CSS page and compare the pages rendered my mozilla/ns and ie. Note the position of the toolbar as you scroll down the page in both browsers. Also you can choose alternate stylesheets on that site using View->Use Stylesheet

Speed : Performance is comparable to that of IE now.. If you want faster than IE browsers use Galeon or skipstone which are based on mozilla

UI issues : Unfortunately mozilla/ns does not support some features which used to work in NS4.x. Dynamic Font issues bugs 52746 Ugly list items ON LINUX 91816

Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill

[Hadean]

The only people I know who still use Netscape (any version), other then careful website designers, are government agencies... Those poor souls are still using Netscape 4 in some places - although, amazingly, some are quietly switching to IE whenever they get a chance (and whenever a kindly visitor helps them in the switch). A lot of these saps, though, will be switching to Netscape 6.1 ... Why? Who knows... just "because that's what we've been using" ... pfft.

Product Activation??

[Alakaboo]

Okay, looking good...

Converted my 80MB mailbox just fine...

Started up fast... real nice...

What's this? Product activation?? Netscape account (passport!!) required? What? *FRNAK!*
AAARRRRRGGHHHH!!!

ie 5.5 and NS6.1 render it identical...

[Xiphoid Process]

if you really care i could upload some screen shots... they are nearly pixel identical.

Re:sweet god in heaven.. it's MSIE

[dalutong]

Hey buddy.. next time you download MSIE (assuming you follow the upgrade-or-die mentality).. take a look at the minimum install. 17 megs last time i checked. (it has been a LONG time since i used windows/ie...)

Try to get (at least in linux) the netscape-installer and make a bare minimum install. what? 12MB...

Re:No it's not...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's not Mozilla being faster, it's Slashdot being very, very, very ill designed. You'll notice Slashdot pages are a whole, single html table: a bad design choice, if you ask me Tables were created for functional, not for aesthetical purposes. You use them to show tabular - duh - data, not for page layout enforcement. This is CSS purpose; for my sites, for example, I use entirely CSS-positioned div's to render panels. They look awesome in Opera and MSIE, and probably in Mozilla too, and I know (I can't try it - it won't run on Windows NT because of my strict policies, and no, I'm not giving them up) they'll look shit in Netscape Classic, so what? I don't care that crap anymore, since Opera was adwared Netscape users have no excuse, short of historic/sentimental reasons. Oh, FYI they look just fine in lynx too (I don't have lynx, but the "downgrade" feature of Opera is enough for me to judge), as long as you don't choose to privilege layout over internal structure Anyway, back to MSIE and Moz. Essentially we have two rendering filosophies: MSIE won't render atomic elements (such as tables) until fully loaded, it simplifies the rendering engine but brain-damaged page layouts from the HTML 3 era will render sort of "clunky", piece by piece; this approach permits concentrating all the cpu-intensive work at the very end (you'll notice, right before Slashdot pages are shown, a sudden peak in cpu usage); Moz has a more sophisticated technique, it renders tables as their cells and rows are loaded, better looking but more resource-intensive as the page layout has to be recalculated each time a new element is read; expensive but nonetheless useful, since you can easily tell the degree at which a table-intensive page is loaded, and abort the loading when you've found the info you were looking for, not just when you got too bored to wait for the entire page to load

Microsoft released the first final upgrade to...

[bartszyszka]

And you know when Windows XP is coming out, they're not going to start out by saying "Microsoft released the first final upgrade to is notoriously buggy Windows Millenium...".

A Better Idea

[rootmon]

Two Words: Get Konqueror It supports HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, Java Plug-ins, Netscape Plug-ins, Mozilla Plug-ins, and Active-X support is in beta using Wine. Oh- and now you can disable pop-ups and control the browser type it provides to the web server. In three years Konqueror has gone from a curious part of KDE to a killer web browser. It crashes less than Netscape, Mozilla, and IE.

Re:sun compatibility on linux?

[mickgardner]

how hard would it be to produce a compatibility layer on linux so the sun solaris version of IE would work?? is this possible...?

This guy is completely unbiased!

[e_n_d_o]

What's wrong with you paranoid slashdotters, why can't you see that this article reads the exact same way as THIS ONE? :-)

Who truly needs a dictionary...

[Pollux]

...when we send and receive e-mails like this daily:

duuuuudes!

i's got net61 its 31337 way sweeeeeeeeeeeet

emails cool n i lik its grphx

ttfn l8r

It's emails like that that make Webster turn in his grave.

A Grand Experiment indeed

[Chuck Chunder]

The Open Sourcing of Netscape has been a grand experiment, certainly not without it's hiccups.

Your Question 1 is a very difficult one to answer as it demands some supposition as to what would have occurred had they not opened the source. Possibly the dumping of the "Mozilla Classic" codebase was forced somewhat by Open Sourcing. While this has had both negative and positive aspects, ultimatly I think it was a positive thing. We may have had a browser sooner otherwise, but I don't think it'd be a good idea in the long term

Question 2 is much easier to answer. Code. Forgetting the Browser product itself, Mozilla.org has made available Bugzilla and Bonsai. Components such as Network Security Services (which is being leveraged in Ximians Evolution I believe).

As a grand experiment even Mozillas 'mistakes' are valuable as they can be learnt from.

Try SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

I have SuSE 7.1 and the installer ran fine. I've been pounding away at Netscape 6.1 all day on this machine and so far, so good. No crashes, hangs, or other wierdnesses. This new browser seems to be quite stable and quick performing thus far.

Re:No it's not...

[jesser]

Does that mean Konq doesn't send referrers across servers?

In what way is 6.1 "better" than 4.x?!?!

[BlueTT]

I downloaded 6.1 for Linux last night, and on complex pages it takes literally 2X as long to load the page as 4.78 does. That's not what I consider "better." Why don't I run Mozilla? SSL, Shockwave, these ring a bell with anyone?