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Netscape 6.2
lylonius writes: "Netscape today released version 6.2 of its browser based on Mozilla. Downloads for a variety of platforms and languages are available. You can also check out the release notes. This release comes off the Mozilla 0.9.4 branch, and is the third major release from Netscape using Mozilla." Kmeleon also has a release today, if you'd like your web with a little more browsing and little less AOL-promotion.
This is good for the user who doesn't know enough about Mozilla to go and download it often. This is for the person who likes to be able to go to Netscape's page, download their latest browser and just go with it. More people will get a newer Mozilla branch which is more stable and faster, which is good.
For the Slashdot community you're still better off downloading the Mozilla milestones instead of waiting for a Netscape branch every so often.
Heh, the funny thing about that whole situation is it renders perfectly in mozilla (I just tried it and it seemed to look perfect, I didn't notice any errors). But I tried it in IE on the mac's at my college and it rendered everything wrong, a lot of backgrounds were missing on things and stuff was in the wrong place.
So I think it's pretty obvious microsoft was full of it and was just banning browsers for not being microsoft.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
What the hell does ASP have to do with anything? ASP just spits out what the developer tells it - someone would still purposefully have to put in bad HTML to make a bad browser choke/slowdown.
creation science book
Is the cache in Mozilla not optimal? If you compare Moz against Opera in regard to flipping pages back and then forward, there is a huge speed advantage for Opera. Is it because Mozilla caches entire pages, and re-renders them when you hit back? I think Mozilla is as fast as any other browser in regards to rendering complex pages, but the case of flippnig back and forward is rather slow. Anynone know why?
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Mozilla *is* made by Netscape. Yes, it's open-source, but most of the major contributors are Netscape employees who're paid to work on it. They then do an occasional code freeze, fix the most obvious bugs in the frozen version, add horrible branding, and call it Netscape 6.
The Gecko engine (Mozilla's renderer) has the advantage that, unlike NS4, it makes an effort to render non-legacy HTML correctly. Ever tried persuading Netscape 4 to work with perfectly correct Cascading Stylesheets? (Yes, I even tried running the W3C validator on them. They *were* valid.) It supports just enough CSS to try to parse the stylesheet, but not enough to get it right (overlapping images and text were a common problem for me). At the moment my website uses a loading method which *should* be supported, and is supported by everything else which uses CSS (IE, Mozilla/NS6, Opera, ...), specifically to trick NS4 into rendering the no-CSS simple-but-legible version instead of its broken half-CSS.
And that's quite impressive considering that
As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code. There are also some negative interactions with the tabbed browsing feature which will need to be resolved before it can be turned on by default.
In the meantime, be glad that Netscape chose the earlier release rather than shipping something buggy, like the current state of the link (sorry "site navigation") toolbar and tabbed browsing.
Stuart.
PS Thanks to /. for adding link tags! It's great to visit sites and actually see the toolbar in use :)
There is an OS/2 port (called Warpzilla) on Hobbes. It is at the 0.95 level, just posted yesterday.
OS/2 is alive and doing well, thank-you for asking....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
My only access to a windows system is over Citrix at 256 colors, and at that color depth kmeleon/gecko looks terrible compared to IE. all the colors look washed out, and images are blurry.
Anyone know why this is? I haven't tried mozilla under windows, does it suffer from the same problem?
(mostly unrelated, gtk+ for windows doesn't work in 256 colors either, so no gtk/citrix/windows apps without paying Citrix for a 16bit color license.)
Not that I really have a desire to read MSN, but Internet Explorer for UNIX displays it perfectly, and is an order of magnitude faster than Mozilla on my Ultra 10.
I still use Mozilla, though, for ethical reasons.
Personally, I need binaries for:
* Solaris 8/x86 (!)
* Solaris 8/sparc
* NetBSD/i386
Please!
- Hubert
About five minutesbefore reading your post I noticed that Slashdot was using LINK tags. Theyare actually using more than just the ones you list.
Depending on where you are, I have seen Home, Previous, Next, Author, and Search.
iCab has included LINK support since their beginning. At first I had them turned off, now I use them more and more.
I even added them to http://www.ka.net/eudora/faqs/index.html [Eudora/Mac FAQs]
So as not to be modded off-topic, I have never liked the combined mail and news clients in the later Netscape installs. The only version of Netscape I have on my computer is the last true "Navigator" install that Netecape offered on the Mac, 4.0.8
On occasion I run a Mozilla build to see how it is. Most browsing, however, is done in iCab and, occasionally, Opera.
I want a browser to browse, and not shop and checkmy email.
The system requirements for 6.2 are also listed at a 266 mHz 604e (something I do not think ever existed 0 they must mean a G3). That is leaving out a lot of older machines that are still out there.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
The bad thing is there's 10% of the userbase that seems to be holding out for good on Netscape 4.x -- they aren't interested in IE, they aren't interested in Netscape 6. That essentially means that modern HTML authoring will never really come into vogue, and we will be stuck in 1995 until Microsoft actually finally gets the balls to 'fork' the WWW so that their stuff only works on their platform.
Nah. Netscape 4 holdouts will find themselves left behind as more and more web shops stop caring about making their sites look good in NS4, and just worry about IE6/NS6.
This is a good thing. Netscape 4's time has passed.
No doubt, coding for IE is cheaper. As I posted in another thread, one of our clients made that decision, and now we have to rebuild the site to be Netscape friendly? Why? 10% of his "unique visitors" are Netscape, and they can't even use the site with the latest version.
If a 10% increase in profits > cost of implementing a Netscape version... well, Netscape version is coming...
Its a business decision. The IE5 version of the page is the low hanging fruit. Netscape is more of a challenge... Now if I could figure out the random Mozilla rendering problem...
Not a business problem, I'd just like to see it work under Mozilla/Netscape 6.x.
Alex
ITYM "just worry about IE6". The large but dwindling Netscape 4.x user base is what kept Web developers from saying "fuck it" and turning the Web into an IE-exclusive platform these past four years. When you have 90% of the installed base, diminishing returns dictate that to third-party developers, interoperability with your competitors' offerings will be, at best, an afterthought.
But it gets worse! When Netscape 4 finally fades into irrelevance, the MSN.com lockout will be only the beginning as non-IE users find themselves shunned from more and more sites. Content providers will rely on proprietary components to supply DRM with their content, including HTML, and again, diminishing returns will dictate the OS/client platform: IE on Windows and possibly Mac.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
That's frightening! (XP MSIE 6.0.2600)
It looks to me though that the Opera people are exploiting a specific IE bug by putting so many tabs between the open-bracket of css elements and the actual attribute.
This is actually the first page I've seen rendered poorly by XP/IE6, but then again it's only been a few days...
I'm no IE zealot, but I have been doing web development with DHTML and JavaScript for the last year, and I can say that Netscape 4 vs. IE is the problem most people are referring to when they say "Netscape isn't (as) standards-compliant (as IE)." Netscape 4 is a bloody dog for anything above DOM-level-zero -- <LAYER>, <ILAYER>, etc... Brrr... I'll pass.
Netscape 6, on the other hand, has greatly impressed me. I'm so glad the Netscape crew has acknowledged the problems of Netscape 4.x and is making a concerted effort to be standards-compliant in version 6.
If my pages look good and operate well in IE but badly in Netscape 4, it's Netscape's fault. But if they look good and operate well in IE and badly in Netscape 6, it's my fault or IE's fault.
I just wish Netscape 6 could load faster and didn't use so much much memory (both in Windows; don't know about other platforms). Someone mentioned that Mozilla 0.94 had a "turbo" option which loaded it into memory when Windows starts to give it the same speed advantage as IE. I hope that's in Netscape 6.2 and can be easily turned on by the user. That would certainly help. Can you believe that for all my complaints about it, I'm using Netscape 4.x to post this? Why? Because it's fast, and for me, it's faster than IE. I'll have to try Netscape 6.2 so I can get this clunker off the web and reduce (if only slightly) the headaches it causes developers everywhere.
I also wish Netscape hadn't changed the plug-in architecture, too, but that's not as relevant to the problems of Netscape 4.x, which largely concern its "DHTML".
Hmmm. You're working on this, and you noted a speed hit. And I want something from you that might address that speed hit. Perhaps we can help each other. Here is my suggestion: steal an idea from the Web TV guys. They had link support back in 1996 or 1997 -- what they did was look for any link tag with a "next" value for the relationship attribute, and then they pre-fetched that page during idle cycles. So the end-user visits a page, reads through it, clicks the next link, and it appears instantaneously. Damn that was a cool feature. I'd love to see it in Mozilla, and it would definitely cause a perceptual increase in speed.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &