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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."
Am I dunk, or haven't I been using tabbed browsing in Mozilla now since version .5? ..
.. What added functionality does it provide over Mozilla 1.0/pr2 (build 2002051206) --
Could somone enlighten me on why someone would ever want to use Netscape again?
OH CRAP! Tomorrow I'm going to get the infamous "Your copy of Mozilla is so-and-so days old. Time to update!".. Can't wait!
This is based on Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 2, so it's pretty current.
Opera's had MDI browsing for quite some time. I still don't know why IE doesn't. It keeps all those popups under control.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Pop-up blocking. It's not in Netscape 7.0PR1. The other script blocking options are, though, so it was a very concious decision. However, for Joe Homeuser, Netscape is nice in that they bundle Java and Flash and some other junk that may starting off with Netscape easier. Mozilla is still for the technically advanced (Slashdot?) crowd. Netscape is for the home user who doesn't care, as long as it works. Now, how long until IE7? We all know a higher version means better!
7.0PR1 is based on Mozilla 1.0RC2. Netscape 7.0 final will be based on Mozilla 1.0 final.
Although the main netscape site doesn't yet show this, Netscape 7 PR1 can be downloaded from netscape.com already.
And although the option for disabling popups has disappeared from Netscape's preferences, so as not to harm AOL's revenues too much, adding this line to your user.js (create the file if necessary) will get you the same functionality:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
Actually, there are a number of third party programs that allow tabbed browsing using IE, some are programs that are encapselated in the IE window, others just embed the IE renderer inside themselves, this is the beauty of object oriented code.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Person writing has obviously been using Netscape (and/or IE) a bit too long. Opera is born with it.
Look a monkey!
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
But what I really want to know, is if AOL will ever wake the heck up and integrate AIM and ICQ. This may not seem relevant, but from the CNet article: Now I understand why AOL might not want to integrate with MSN, Yahoo, and the like. But they control both the software development and infrastructure for both AIM and ICQ. Is it simply due to lack of effort that they won't integrate the two? (A little off-topic yes, but since NS7 is/will be just Mozilla 1.0, the parent not really all that interesting news-wise.)
forma3
Plus, it fits in with the New! Easier! AOL! 7.0!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
While it is a native OS X application in the most basic sense of the word, it does not yet use the Aqua interface. For this functionality, check out the Chimera browser.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Yeah, that certain point was about two years ago, before Netscape 6. Where've you been?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Does it add anything to IE that The proxomitron doesn't also add? Besided skinning of course, but I run windowblinds so I don't really want them anyway.
Netscape 7.0 is Mozilla 1.0.0 after going through another round of testing. So it should be more stable and offers AIM/ICQ support and integration into Netscape.com. It probably offers a few extra enterprise level facilities such as customisation via the CCK but I don't know what else.
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.
Well, the cynic in me says that's the reason. IE isn't a browser made for users. It is a browser made for web designers and businesses. If IE would do a lot to control popups, it would annoy content providers that rely on that kind of advertising. Wouldn't be good... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I mean, come on, guys, themes have been in mozilla for a really long time now, and there's still how many included? two. (and one of them is just the old Netscape 4 look.) Oh, and if you're feeling really adventurous, you can wander out to the web, and find a whopping ten more. If you can find them; it seems as though the websites are packing up and moving once a month.
Sorry about the flame, I really like the browser. But the whole themes thing has started to look kind of silly.
314-15-9265
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.
Check out Chimera, a native MacOS X frontend for gecko: http://chimera.mozdev.org/.
It IS Cocoa, and it looks like a Cocoa app should. It's not perfect, but it definately gives OmniWeb a run for its money.
Internet Explorer has had Ctrl-Enter add a "http://www." before whatever's in the address bar and a ".com" after it.
Now, I know that's not always what you want to do, but it is often enough that it's an extremely useful shortcut key (and one that (along with the google bar) is keeping me from changing over to Mozilla on a permanent basis).
Is there a reason Mozilla can't do it?
I see about 20 new bugs are filed every day...is there a chance they'll fix most of them without introducing new ones in time for 1.0? I guess they could always go to RC3...
All you have to do is copy some DLLs from the Java directory into the Mozilla plugin directory.
Granted it is misleading when the JDK says it will install the plugin for that browser but then doesn't, but the workaround is pretty painless.
Although I often wonder why I need to do these extra steps for Flash/Shockwave/Java. I'm assuming it is up to the plugin developers to get it to work.
"More organs means more human." - Zim
You can find a XUL-Plugin for mozilla here.
I haven't tried it with NS7 jet, but it works nice with mozilla.
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. -- Linus Torvalds
MDI is that absolutely horrid UI that first became popular in windoze 3.1 where you have a single application window with several child windows inside it, each with its own size and position containing a single document.
Tabbed-browsing is 'mdi' done right. You have a single main window, easily controlled, but can have several documents open within it at once, using a slim tab bar at the top.
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.
"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
Internet Surfer was the best for me. It's not free, but most of the free ones freaked out IE on me(one was so bad I almost had to reinstall windows).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
MDI stands for "Multiple Document Interface" - a single program presenting two or more documents at the same time. You can do it with tabs, split-screen, multiple windows, ...
The idea has been around for ages (emacs, for instance). The MDI initialism appeared in the late 80's courtesy of the late IBM/Microsoft GUI alliance.
But of course I want to refute the individual lies and misinformation too, just because you are an insufferable moron:
AOL isn't going to be stupid enough to try foisting a noticeably slower browser on their users
Mozilla RC2 pops up from a cold start (hasn't been run before) in about 4 seconds on my machine. IE takes -- guess what? -- about 4 seconds from a cold start too. And that's not using Quickstart, which would've boosted Mozilla's performance.
People are used to IE, most sites were designed with it in mind
I'm sure you mean that "web pages won't render unless you use IE." That's pure BS. I always install Mozilla or derivatives (e.g., Netscape) for machines I support and not once has a page failed to render. Oh wait, by "most sites" you must mean MSN.
nothing can change the fact that, when it comes to the simple activity of browsing, the MS product gives a smoother user experience.
What the blazing hell does "smoother" mean? Both Opera and Mozilla provide what is clearly a superior browsing experience. Maybe by "smoother" you mean "more apt to get hacked by a malicious script" or "capable of having your bookmarks, start menu, desktop, and registry tampered with by web sites with questionable motives."
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Undoubtably MathML support is there because it is in Mozilla. Between Mozilla, Netscape, and IE (with MathPlayer), all of the major browsers will support MathML. That together with support from math programs such as Mathematica, it really looks like MathML will finally become real this year.
There's a conference on MathML at the end of June this year. Leslie Lamport (LaTeX fame) and Roger Sidje (who did the MathML support in Mozilla) are among the invited speakers.
Well, Mozilla has been doing it for some time now. Not that this is a big surprise. Guess where most of NS7 code comes from ?
Galeon (which I use) also has tab browsing.
morcego
I use a Mac with OSX and a PC with win 98 and win2000. I use IE5 and Moz1rc2 on the Mac and IE5.5 and Moz1rc2 on the PC. The result is similar - IE simply crashes more often on both platforms. I don't know why or if I installed something wrong but they do. IE is also noticably slower on Mac OSX and it is about equal on Win. The amount of security bugy in IE worries me, and while Moz has also had some, it's a long shot from some of the bad security bugs in IE.
Therefore by default I use Moz.
Another one I've tried is Crazy Browser , which is very similar to Netcaptor but is free. I've also found that it's buggier than Netcaptor. Crazy Browser also offers ad and pop-up filtering.
In Mozilla, Ctrl-Page Up Ctrl-Page Down switch between tabs. Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right are reserved for something else on cross-platform applications, IIRC.
TANSTAAFL
Just configure your internet search to use google, type stuff in your URL bar, and tab to the 'search google for ...' in the drop down list.
That's the problem - on Windows, anyway... when you follow the install process, get the JRE, etc. etc. if you follow the instructions TO THE LETTER it doesn't work.
Now, maybe there's nothing 'wrong' with Mozilla - maybe it's the documentation, maybe it's a Sun problem, I don't know. Fact is, it just doesn't work right.
Mozilla is not slower on my box then IE is. It has a slightly, and I mean slightly longer initial startup time, which is amazing since the core of IE is already loaded before I click its icon.
MS hasn't done a great job at all. Their browser is a sieve chock full of security holes, and so tightly integrated into the OS, many of those holes are frighteningly dangerous.
They chased netscape for the first 3 versions, then passed them on the fourth version, drove them out of business with bundling, and haven't really done squat with their browser since then. Is IE6 really that much different than IE4? Hardly. Talk about stagnation...but that is what happens when you have no competition to worry about.
Well, you could save yourself a byte if you spelled "Hello" right.
Sorry ... had to. :-)
I think I'll skip out on Netscape 7.0.
30 megabyte download?! That's way too big for my own good taste even if you have broadband. I'd rather AOL provide the standard Mozilla 1.0.0 browser (when that's released) and let end users pick and choose their own plugins.
Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 2 is very nice, but when you add in all that AOL bloatware, no thanks.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
If you have a lot of programs trying to display data, MDI makes a lot of sense. It allows you to have logical groups of windows, rather than just a collapsed "every instance of that hwnd" in the taskbar. I have one Mozilla window for work research, one for gaming, one for reading news, etc. Each has its own entry in my Gnome tasklist applet, and each has its family of tabs inside. This also makes it easy to move my "webwork" windows(s) to another desktop, allowing me to make the next logical extension to MDI: multiple virtual desktops, each one focused on a specific goal.
:)
However, I think it'll be a few years before you see that on the MacOS/Win32 side. MS frobbed with MDI, which is a good idea that their guidelines and API were poorly written for (thus leading to bad app design). The "collapsing taskbar" entry thing is a band-aid (TM) over not having virtual desktops and smart MDI.
However, until we see people who have computers that are on and have work open in many different areas for months at a time, I don't think MS will know much about the "UI scalabitily" issue to actually do something useful about it.
Of course, that doesn't bother me because I use these features *now* in Gnome with IceWM and Mozilla
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.