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Netscape 6.2

Posted by michael on from the apparently-unaware-that-browsers-wars-are-over dept.

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.

4 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. Re:slowness by Sir_Real · · Score: 2, Troll

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

  2. the dead rise on Halloween by peter303 · · Score: 3, Troll

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

  3. Re:Netscape? no thanks. by NutscrapeSucks · · Score: 2, Troll

    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.

    --
    Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
  4. Are they making it as hard as possible for... by sphealey · · Score: 2, Troll

    ...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