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.

Comments

Re:slowness

[Sir_Real]

The perceived slowness is inversly proportional to your level of zealotry. You'd be suprised what the die hards will tolerate. ;)

why is mozilla engine so slow?

[psyclone]

Netscape 6.x, Galeon, Mozilla, etc. use the mozilla rendering engine. Is it because it's parsing poor html? If more people used the validator, would it be faster?

Re:why is mozilla engine so slow?

[BattyMan]

MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't

NO. M$ is just damned, period. They're past being able to redeem themselves by their actions, particularly in the area of Internet browsers.

OK, they could _withdraw_ Internet Exploiter from the market. That would end the sins of IE.
The Empire itself would reamin Evil.

Older version

[sidb]

If this release of Netscape is based on Mozilla .94, ad Mozilla .95 is out, why should I use the Netscape release?

K-meleon is Pathetic

[bteeter]

I thought I'd give it a try. Especially when I saw how small the download file was (less than 4MB).

I guess what I was hoping for was the lightweight, fast, and standards based Netscape that NS 6.x was supposed to be. Well, what I found out was that it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it doesn't even really work.

It failed trying to import my IE favorites. (I have more than 512 - that is a no, no in K-meleon.) Then it refused to load any pages. Oh, and it cannot figure out how to work with a proxy config file either.

Stay away. Even NS 6.2 cannot be this bad...

Take care,

Brian
--
100% Linux Based Web Hosting

the dead rise on Halloween

[peter303]

Ghosts of dead software companies haunt us again for a few hours on All Hallow's Eve, before returning to their graves.

Netscape 6.2...

[Anonymous Coward]

Question: Does it have support for switching between proxies more easily than 6.1? I hope so, because you're all going to need this ability. Here's why:

The complete story: The Slashdot Privacy Watch

An Open Letter to VA Linux Concerning Privacy on Slashdot
To whom it may concern,
It has come to our attention that Slashdot is building a detailed database of every visitor and user of Slashdot. This database includes, among other personal details, an address history which permanently records every IP address assosciated with every Slashdot user and comment for all time. We are concerned that this database is a signifigant Intellectual Property asset that may be abused in the event of a sale of Slashdot by VA Linux to a third party.

In addition, we feel that keeping a permanent and indelible record of every IP address used to post every Anonymous comment on Slashdot erases whatever hopes of anonymity that endangered or threatened users may have had. To name two examples, Chinese dissidents and corporate insiders can have no expectation of anonymously revealing civil rights violations and corporate abuse.

It is our hope that given these concerns, VA Linux or Slashdot may choose to provide an opt-out option to users, whereby users could choose not to be tracked and profiled if they so request. Some discussion has been made of a Slashdot subscription service; perhaps one revenue stream for Slashdot would be to sell Privacy Rights. For a low yearly fee, a user could purchase the right not to be tracked, profiled, and logged by IP address.

Whatever steps are taken, it is our hope that Slashdot will address the current privacy concerns in public to allay our fears and to promote open discussion.

Thanks again for creating one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and all the best.

-The Slashdot Privacy Watch Team.

Re:Netscape? no thanks.

[NutscrapeSucks]

Back in 1996, Netscape was running around touting "standards-based platforms" to their customers, but they were in fact very anti-W3C.

CSS was barely supported because Netscape had developed something proprietary called JavaScript Style Sheets (which CSS is internally transformed to). That's why NS4 ignores all CSS if you turn JavaScript off.

Netscape also developed a completely different proprietary document object model (document.layers). Which could theoretically could do cool stuff except that it crashed 90% of the time. They blew off the W3C's work on DOM, which was roughly tracked by Microsoft.

The end result of this standards split is that most of the WWW is stuck on 'common' pre-1996 standards. Ugly HTML 3.2-type markup, very little CSS, and Netscape 3 DOM-type JavaScript.

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.

Are they making it as hard as possible for...

[sphealey]

...the faithful?

I actually shelled out the 20 USD for a CD of Netscape 6.1. I even registered it.

Now 6.2 is released and (a) I get no notification (b) there is no "Netscape Update" menu pick to _find_ the update (c) it appears that instead of a differential upgrade, I have to download the whole 20 MB again.

I have been using Netscape since 1994. I _want_ to keep using Netscape. Am I missing something, or are they _trying_ to drive me to IE?
sPh