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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.

18 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. Yippee! by Darth+RadaR · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope it can pull up MSN.
    :P

    --
    /*drunk.. fix later*/
    1. Re:Yippee! by FFFish · · Score: 5, Informative

      Heh. For a kick, try opening this XHTML page in MSIE. Oh, it's a perfectly valid page: heck, it even encourages you to go validate it.

      Displays perfectly on Opera, of course. How's it look in Mozilla?

      --

      --
      Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
  2. Very nice... by Millennium · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  3. alas, not 0.9.5 by ChristTrekker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:alas, not 0.9.5 by sab39 · · Score: 5, Interesting
      The two things that 0.9.5 provided (link tag support and tabbed browsing) were probably the major reason why Netscape didn't want to use 0.9.5. They wanted stabilization and bugfixes, not new features. I for one am glad they used 0.9.4 for this very reason - the problem with 6.0 was its poor stability, and if 6.2 has a reputation for being rock-solid, that'd be great for the future perception of Netscape in general.

      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 :)

    2. Re:alas, not 0.9.5 by smcv · · Score: 5, Informative

      Use Mozilla 0.95 and you will see the wonders of the <link> tag ;-)

      Basically, they're a way for a web page author to specify related pages in a browser-independent, design-independent, extensible way, outside the main HTML of a page - think of them as "quick links" whose targets are defined by the page you're on. A long multi-page document might define Next, Previous and Contents to go to the obvious places, for instance. A website with content from many authors might define the Authors link so it goes to a list of this document's authors. A site with a specific copyright policy might link to it with the Copyright link. All of these are independent of the actual text in the HTML (they go in the <head> section) so if your browser doesn't support them, or you configure it not to, you'll never see them.

      The W3C defined the meanings of quite a few links, and the Mozilla developers have added a couple more which they felt should be there for symmetry (W3C defined First, but not Last; Mozilla looks for Last too, for symmetry, and the Mozilla team have given the W3C a very short list of extras like Last which they think should go in the next HTML spec). You can use anything you like, though (Mozilla implements this by putting any unknown ones in a submenu).

      Mozilla shows the <link>s as an extra toolbar, but there are other ways you could display them.

      The defined ones are things like Previous, Next, First, Up, Top, Help, Authors, Search and Copyright - the sort of things many web pages and documents want. (At the moment Slashdot uses Top and Search).

  4. Useful feature... by sconest · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Useful feature... by SCHecklerX · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's actually better to put stuff like this in user.js

      Here's a bonus one to change your 'internet keywords' to use the search engine of your choice:

      user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?q=");

  5. Interesting point of departure... by corky6921 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Interesting point of departure... by gorgon · · Score: 5, Informative
      I think it says more about Netscapes position and Mozilla than it does about OSs. When Netscape was the dominant browser, it made sense for them to try to have builds for any system under the Sun, since it would help them maintain marketshare. Now that they are struggling to regain markketshare, it makes more sense to focus their "official" efforts on the bigger OSs. They can let mozilla take care of the smaller OSs.

      Also, you missed at least one OSs that Netscape 6 is available - Sun. I think Netscape may have passed more of the responsibility for that build to Sun, but it is still full blown Netscape. Since Sun is the biggest Unix at this point, it makes sense that they'd still be supported

      --

      And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
      Berke Breathed
    2. Re:Interesting point of departure... by zulux · · Score: 5, Informative

      Increasingly, what oprerating system you have is becomming irelevent:

      Solaris and FreeBSD both run Linux binaries and AIX should soon http://www.exquip.com/software/ibmaix.chtml
      and HP-UX is not far behind: http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV4 7_STO48570,00.html

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  6. Re:why is mozilla engine so slow? by mgkimsal2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  7. Re:Older version by J'raxis · · Score: 5, Informative

    cd /home/mozilla
    rm -rf *

    Whoa. You realize your cron starts up in $HOME, and if that `cd` for some reason returns an error...

    Try cd /home/mozilla && rm -rf *
    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
  8. Rather than whine about Mozilla... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Informative
    I recommend those of you (and it's quite a few) who whine about Mozilla's performance check out K-Meleon. I think most of you will agree the real problem with Mozilla is not Gecko, it's the damned XUL-based Interface of Infinite Slowness +2. K-Meleon is one of the nicer attempts out there to take Gecko and wrap it in a native interface, in this case for Windows (yes, I use Win2k at work, so sue me).


    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.

    1. Re:Rather than whine about Mozilla... by GregWebb · · Score: 5, Informative

      I have to say, I really don't understand people's comments about speed. FWIW this experience is with, Windows 2000 on a P-II 128 MB, Win98 on P-II 350 and 400 (both 128 MB) and oddly behaving Duron 700 (256 MB). Nothing exactly cutting edge, in other words.

      I started playing with Mozilla 0.9.5 last week, first Mozilla build in some time. It's not quite as fast as Netscape 4.7 but way, way faster than IE5. Blows it straight out of the water. IE will sometimes take 10+ seconds to render a window, Mozilla, as long as it's been loaded into memory before like IE, is less than a second. It's faster in operation, too.

      It's not perfect - the back button has died a couple of times, while really, stupidly heavy session (20+ windows, new ones opening all the time) slowed it down a little and I've discovered today it's not too fond of mod points - but hey, neither's IE under W98. They smear all over the place, misplace themselves, eventually run out altogether and too many windows of that crashes the machine.

      Anyway. Mozilla and XUL may have been slow once (dunno, didn't use it then), but it isn't any more. Lovely and fast, really.

      --

      Greg

      (Inside a nuclear plant)
      Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!

  9. Re:netscape cares about the details... by NutscrapeSucks · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:Netscape advantages over Mozilla? by astrosmash · · Score: 5, Informative
    Does anyone care to comment on what features Netscape 6.2 offers that aren't in Mozilla?

    Netscape has a spell checker

    Netscape installs java by default However...

    Mozilla does image blocking (I'm addicted to this)

    Mozilla allows a security policy for cookies (like IE6)

    Mozilla has browser tabs

    Mozilla has the "Link" toolbar (which Slashdot now supports as of yesterday, I believe)
    That latest mozilla builds also tend to use/leak more memory than the Netscape releases. I don't know why that is, but if you like to have your browser run all day, or you need a spell checker, Netscape's probably a better choice. If you like to play with the latest browser toys, or you can't live without ad blocking, use Mozilla.

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    ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
  11. Re:Netscape? no thanks. by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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.


    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.
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