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A First Look at Netscape 7
David_Bloom writes: "PC-WORLD has released an article giving a rundown of the just-released Preview Release 1 of Netscape 7. An especially interesting feature in this new version is tabbed browsing, which allows you to have multiple web pages open at once in one window, which you can view using a tab-based MDI."
I've used the rudimentary predecessor to tabbed browsing (Open Link in New Window...) for a while, and I loved that it helps me preserve my stream-of-consciousness while scanning the news.
I'd hoped tabbed browsing would spare me the memory overhead of having all those windows open, but it doesn't have a crucial feature; hotkey cycling through tabs.
After I open a bunch of interesting stories in new windows on Slashdot, for example, I can Ctrl-Tab between windows according to the whims of my rampant ADD.
Alt-Tab between programs, Ctrl-Tab between documents seems to be a pretty accepted convention in the Win32 environment.
Am I missing an undocumented keyboard shortcut here?
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Less a result of object oriented programming, I would hazard, and more component oriented API. MS COM objects, though hellish beasts of complexity themselves, mitigate and abstract user application complexity. The COM model is in mild competition with the markup model of XUL and XPCOM seen in Mozilla/Netscape, which makes for an interseting debacle, philosophically if not just technically.
From the article:
With AOL's powerful market presence--numbering 34 million registered users--Netscape could be poised for a comeback if it replaces IE's role for AOL users.
Well, we all know that AOL is no slouch at slipping it hard and rough to their users but even AOL isn't going to be stupid enough to try foisting a noticeably slower browser on their users. MSN's marketing would go into overdrive.
People are used to IE, most sites were designed with it in mind; AOL might be big but they aren't big enough to pull off a coup like that.
Many of you may refuse to use IE for idealogical reasons, and that's valid, but nothing can change the fact that, when it comes to the simple activity of browsing, the MS product gives a smoother user experience.
We can only hope to succeed if we recognise the competition's strengths and, in this case, MS have done a great job; that's why they get away with slippin in the proprietry stuff.
This is no surprise to me -- in fact I was just wondering as I was downloading Mozilla RC2 how long it would be before we got Netscape 7.0...
Netscape is, as has been pointed out here many times, a stripped down (perhaps dumbed-down) Mozilla... That isn't necessarily going to upset AOL for people to call it that though...
Mozilla RC2 had advanced far enough that it was making Netscape 6.22 look downright OLD... and for good reason, Netscape 6.22 was based on an older branch from Mozilla.
AOL couldn't have its thunder stolen, so they *had* to release a new Netscape. Smart business decision.
As for being dumbed-down... Well, yes, it is. Remember folks, Netscape 6.x series (and obviously 7.x now) is working toward inclusion in the AOL browser.
Can you imagine what the 13 year old kids using AOL would do to Mozilla if they found the "File A Bug" option on the QA menu??? Or how confused the 60 year old grandmas would be when they saw too many options on the preferences menu?
AOL takes a very advanced product - Mozilla - and makes it for the mass market - Netscape.
Netscape is updated less frequently so that end-users can feel comfortable without having to upgrade regularly, and Mozilla remains development oriented for those of us who must have the latest features. Nothing wrong with that at all.
That, actually, is the ideal world for browsers, if you ask me.
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
They have integrated AIM and ICQ, there was a time a year or two ago where you could sign into ICQ using an AIM client in one beta version. They don't publicly integrate them, because then they would be closer to admitting that interoperability is possible. They'd rather continue claiming that other clients are a security threat to their network.
It's a load of hooey if you ask me
- It's faster than IE, at least on my not-terribly-tweaked system.
- It looks like Mozilla everywhere else - I don't mind this since I use Windows for job-defined stuff, Mac for everything else.
- It's way more standards-compliant than anything else comparable (and more usable than Amaya).
I haven't checked out the Netscape rebrand, but I can't say I have any problem with the latest release of Mozilla. Your point 1.1 is the most convincing argument. Your point 3 may be addressed with a simple edit to your preferences file, found elsewhere in this article. I wouldn't be surprised if someone scripted that edit and published it, either. Maybe I'll do it.[|]
Care to give some actual examples? My copy of Mozilla has been great at rendering CSS for a looooong time.
As for "NN compatibility", how about STANDARDS compatibility? People need to learn to design for standards, not for browsers. Everyone will be better off in the long run. If you design soley for IE, don't call yourself a web designer. Call yourself and IE designer.
AOL didn't buy netscape purely because Mozilla is a great product, they bought it because the Netscape name has a huge amount of recognition.
So yeah, Mozilla's better... but who's heard of it? Not joe-sheep user.
I don't know about all that, being a web designer, I prefer developing for Moz/NS6. I despise developing for NS4, but I don't particularly *like* developing for IE for a variety of reasons: disparity between Mac/Windows versions (HUGE disparities), disparity between incremental updates (I can understand huge differences between 4 and 5 and 6 ... but within that, major things shouldn't change, and they do). I could go on, but my point is simply that IE is made to drive NS out of business, nothing more. It doesn't provide any bonuses to businesses (not easier to use or anything of that sort), so it really has no point besides driving NS out of business. Once that was achieved, IE started building in features that could make them money ... integration.
Eh? Having developed a site that makes not insignificant use of CSS and DOM, I can tell you that at one point in development of the site, if you used Mozilla you could notice the difference, and that wasn't a bad thing. In the end, I used a number of hacks to make sure the site looked correct in IE, but it was a pain. And don't get me started on that awful Opera.
NS6 may have been poor in many areas, but its rendering engine got a lot more right than IE6 does now. NS7/Mozilla1.0RC2 corrects many of NS6's shortcomings and still managed to pull even further ahead of IE in its support for CSS and DOM. After all, why doesn't IE6 support fixed positioning? Konqueror 2.2.2 does for crying out loud.
IE doing something wrong is not an excuse to copy them. I applaud the Mozilla team for not following down the slippery slope.
Mozilla releases are useful for anyone that wants the latest bug fixes. I've found the last 5-8 releases to be perfectly useable and my parents both like Mozilla better because they don't have to wait 4-7 months for another updated version.
An idea I think the OSS community needs to explore in greater detail is the possibility of defeating Microsoft in its own home turf without making Linux a desktop. In public schools you'd have Mozilla, Abiword, a Win32 version of Gnumeric, etc competing with their Microsoft counterparts.
Let's face it, most people like Windows or MacOS and they aren't going to switch over to Linux. I personally happen to like Windows XP and OS X much better than KDE 3 and GNOME 1.4 as desktops (yes, I know XP/OS X are full OSs and KDE/GNOME are not). I'm using a MSDN copy of XP, but I use Mozilla for web browsing for example. Eventually when I can do things like embed tables in documents with Abiword, I'll switch to that from MS Word.
It doesn't have to be all one way or another. If it did, there wouldn't be an undeclared war between GNOME and KDE. There would be only one desktop interface for Linux users. Windows users don't have to be forced to go all Microsoft or no Microsoft. Most Windows users should have the option of running OSS alternatives to as many Microsoft products as possible... but for Windows, not just Linux/BSD.
That is the best way to help out public schools. Pay for all of their licenses for Windows so they're legal there and then help them get into OpenOffice if they feel that can replace Office without compromising any classes. Some schools may want to use Powerpoint to help students do presentations. OSS alternatives like OO have to be able to seemlessly replace Office in order for them to make the change. Home users will probably continue to use MS Office until someone gets the balls to pre-install OO, Abiword or something like that.
If people are forced to choose between all-Microsoft or no-Microsoft, if they have had success with the former, they'll most likely wholesale reject the latter right off the bat. Better the devil they know, than the one they don't. We have to change that by letting them pick and choose what to use. If Windows and OpenOffice work well for them, don't push them to go with Linux. Enough of this "the cup is half empty" attitude if people don't go completely pure OSS.
"Sorry about the flame, I really like the browser. But the whole themes thing has started to look kind of silly."
no, you've *really* missed the point here; the whole theme thing is just beginning. the language for writing themes has been under development, so if you wrote a theme for one release of Mozilla / Netscape, it would break in the next release. 90% of the point of having Mozilla 1.0 is to *freeze* this language (the APIs), and once these things are frozen people can get to work devloping *with* them
Here is a link to the css2 standard:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
When doing cross platform development, the standard is a nice starting point for development (invariably you will have to work around some difficulties in IE). You will find that mozilla/netscape (incl. ns6) is much more compliant, tho perhaps a bit unforgiving to some types of violations (don't make assumptions about which ones, when you start using mozilla hardcore, you will learn what types of mistakes it penalizes first hand). Browsers like konqi and ie are nowhere near as compliant, but they tend to ignore errors rather than refuse to process a statement (technically that is incorrect behaviour, but no point being pedantice, IE is not going to change that behaviour no matter what the standard is). In general IE is a decent to good browser, but mozilla has been better for at least 6 months (no harm in not knowing that yet, but now you've been informed, and you should alter your statements accordingly).
Btw, css3 is being developed, its not important to me yet, but you may want to look at it and at least make some notes about what it will offer and its proposed release date.
Could somone enlighten me on why someone would ever want to use Netscape again?
I think the idea that there are a lot of people out there who think Netscape is the only other browser available apart from MSIE (yes, even now) might have something to do with it. And yes, I'm talking about 56-yo Joe Bloggs down the street who just installed "The Internet (TM)". Mozilla, to him, is probably the name of some curtain manufacturer or something.