Slashdot Mirror
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.
I hope it can pull up MSN.
:P
/*drunk.. fix later*/
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.
...however, Mozilla 0.9.5 and the nightlies afterward are already far ahead. Among other things, you get tabbed browsing, the Links toolbar, and (if you download the proper add-on) mouse gesture support.
Very, very cool.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the Release notes:
Known Problems
General
Mac OS: There is a known incompatibility between Netscape and WebFree, a Control Panel commonly used to block HTML-based ads. When using Netscape , disable WebFree.
Keyboard and Mouse Double right-clicking on a page can disable the keyboard.
Trying to visit a Microsoft owned web page may result in your computer's HCF (Halt and catch fire) instruction being called.
Ok, so I added the last one.
Everyone keeps pointing out that you're better off downloading the latest Mozilla instead. And while I tend to agree (I'm using the latest nightly build right now), my understanding is that the Netscape release adds in commercial features that aren't in Mozilla.
Does anyone care to comment on what features Netscape 6.2 offers that aren't in Mozilla?
Too bad Netscape didn't wait a few more weeks. Mozilla 0.9.5 introduced support for <link>, which rocks. I'd hoped that people would start getting introduced to this sooner rather than later. OTOH, Mozilla's support of <link> still has a few quirks (that's why it's not enabled by default right now) so maybe it's OK to wait until 6.3/0.9.6 or whatever.
If you're using 0.9.5 and haven't enabled <link> yet, do it. It's under your View menu, called "Site Navigation Bar" or something. It's pretty slick when you get to a site that uses <link> tags consistently.
Constitutionally Correct
Ghosts of dead software companies haunt us again for a few hours on All Hallow's Eve, before returning to their graves.
Kmeleon is basiclly a native win32 browser using the Gecko engine. What it's trying to be basiclly is Internet Explorer using the Gecko engine. It s VERY fast (cause it doens't use the XUL crap that slows down mozilla / netscape), and looks alot like IE. It uses IE style favorites, so all you have to do is make windows shortcuts to bookmark things. Its also got IE style draggable / customizeable toolbas, etc. Its very nice, id suggest checking it out.
already in Mozilla for a while.
Add user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true); to your prefs.js (while Netscape is not running) file and presto... no more popups.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
I would say that this speaks volumes about what sort of client platform most of their customers are using, and how the UNIX client landscape has changed recently. A few years ago, anti-Microsoft or pro-UNIX people (some one, some the other, some both) were seen running anything from HP-UX to OS/2. Netscape, accordingly, released versions of Netscape for nearly every OS. Now, these groups have condensed into the people running MacOS X and Linux. The people running something else as a client have slowly faded away, until these clients were considered a niche market. This is shown even by Slashdot, which has switched from "news for nerds" to an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site.
This bodes well for Linux and MacOS, both of which have their markets. I am seeing more people use both of them not because they have an axe to grind with Microsoft, but purely for curiosity and learning's sake.
But what of the other client platforms? Obviously, Mozilla is still being released for them, but if official, "supported" browser/office software is no longer available, will anything but Linux/MacOS/Windows as a client go away? Or has it already?
Just an interesting trend, IMHO.
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
cd /home/mozilla
/home/mozilla && rm -rf *
rm -rf *
Whoa. You realize your cron starts up in $HOME, and if that `cd` for some reason returns an error...
Try cd
rm will only run if cd returned successfully. In fact, you might want to link all those commands with ampersands; since each one is only relevant if the previous ran without errors.
Liberty in your lifetime
If you tried K-Meleon 0.1 or 0.2 and thought "gee this would be great if it actually supported cookies and had some configurable options and felt like more than a toy" then check out 0.6. Actually, it's been quite usable for a couple of releases now, and 0.6 seems as good as ever. Yes, I still use IE sometimes, but unlike my repeated attempts to wean myself to Mozilla that inevitably end in me getting sick of the poor UI response times and rendering freezes in Mozilla, I can actually get used to the snappy K-Meleon look and feel.
No, it's not perfect or bugless, and it still isn't quite as pretty or slick looking as IE, but it is nice to see how fast and responsive a Gecko based browser can be when the entire UI isn't getting rendered from XUL, and it's nice to have a real native browser alternative on Windows.
This reminds me of a troll that used to hanf around the mozilla newsgroups that in the end just made a joke of himself. I even wound up parodying him just for more laughs. The whole argument against XUL is stupid these days.
And lastly, just because it DOES use internal widgets, that does NOT mean that it can't outperform IE. Mozilla as a whole is slower than Gecko-based browsers because Mozilla DOES more than they do. The backends on Mozilla and K-Meleon and it's brethren are vastly different. It's like comparing a Yugo to an Aircraft carrier.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Actually, I would say that your management was right on. As mozilla.org says: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!. We provide no end user support.
This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only. No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.
So, if you are worried about a MS-dominated WWW, encourage people to try Netscape 6.2. Don't even mention Mozilla -- it detracts from the message. Unfortunately, lots of (normal) people took a look at the horrific 6.0PR releases and the terrible 6.0 final and need some encouragement to take another look at the releases that actually work.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
K-Meleon has come a long way. It seems pretty usable. Anybody else out there trying it?
It seems to use a lot less memory than mozilla.
Here's how I do spellchecking in *ALL* my X11 apps:
http://freefall.homeip.net/stuff/spellcheck/
Enjoy.
Personally, I need binaries for:
* Solaris 8/x86 (!)
* Solaris 8/sparc
* NetBSD/i386
Please!
- Hubert
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!
This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only . No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.
:-) You're also wrong about non-nerds. My wife uses Mozilla and is perfectly happy. People use what you give them, so long as it does the job.
I think you're lagged by 3 months or so. Mozilla is in fact now perfectly capable of being your primary browser, it delivers in all departments and seldom crashes. (The only time I don't use Mozilla now is on small memory/slow machines, and there I use Opera, except when Opera can't render the page, then I go to Mozilla, damm the speed
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.