Netscape 7.0 is Out

MrJones was one of many many users to submit that Netscape has released Navigator 7.0 unto the world. With their dwindling market share, it'll be interesting to see what affect this has on internet users. But here's hoping it makes a dent.

Comments

6, 6.1, 7?

[n-baxley]

Why the quick jump to version 7? Is it just to match AOL v.7 or some other strange reason that my small non-marketing brain can't figure out?

Re:6, 6.1, 7?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Frankly, it might be better if they just skipped that altogether, and renamed the product. Half the comments on here are people trashing the product just because it's named, "Netscape".

Please, AOLTW, switch to NS from IE for AOL..

[iamsure]

Please,

As a webdesigner, a web game developer, and as an internet user, please for the love of God, start the browser war back up.

When we have competition, at a scale over 20% for the browser, we will FINALLY see standards begin to matter!

AOL needs to:

- Aggressively work with computer makers to ship NS as the default browser in place of IE. More power to them if they also get AOL on it.

- Aggressively work to woo corporations to using Netscape again. Thats where Netscape was immensely powerful before, and where they can be again!

- Replace AOL's IE rendering engine with NS. They began with a closed beta, continued to Compuserve, moved it to AOL 4 Macs, now they need to do it on ALL of AOL.

With that, we may see a reverse in the tides. ANYTHING short of all of that, and it will be just a ripple.

PLEEEEEASE AOL, NS7 *IS READY*!

Re:Please, AOLTW, switch to NS from IE for AOL..

[goldspider]

An interesting editorial, especially since these all are the exact same things (essentially) that put IE on most desktops: making deals with software vendors and aggressively (and intrusively) push their product down the throats of its potential user base.

If NS/Mozilla is going to win this "browser war", they'll have to do it by creating a better product (which I believe they are on track to do). More "aggressive" marketing will only embitter people as MS has done with its omnipresent IE.

Re:Please, AOLTW, switch to NS from IE for AOL..

[havoc-]

Really? I'd imagine these 'clueless' users would call the bank in question rather than AOL, and the conversation would go something like:

"What browser are you using?"

"Uhmm... the new AOL"

"Right, uhm, okay, we'll have to fix it then"

Note, though, that I'm not an American :)

Re:Please, AOLTW, switch to NS from IE for AOL..

[Anonymous Coward]

A good number of online banking and credit card websites (CapitalOne, for instance) won't even let you log into your account unless you're using IE. This would result in AOL getting tons of calls from clueless users.

If AOL were swift, they would have NS7 display the refusal text in a frame which says ``Your brower is working properly. The webpage you wished to access is not working properly. Please call the party responsible for the web page.''

This would take some fancy work to parse every page, or every page which was redirected, and it would generate some false positives, but it would also generate a lot of calls to IE-chauvinist banks, and then a lot of calls to those banks' webmasters from bank vice-presidents, and the calls would run somthing like this:

VP: A customer says our website is broken.
WM: It works fine for us!
VP: Mrs. Besserwisser says if she can't use AOL with her account, she'll switch banks! I don't CARE if it works for you! MAKE IT WORK FOR HER! click.

My Mozilla story

[SquadBoy]

many people hate Netscape what with the AOL stuff the ads etc etc. But just about everyday here at work I convert someone to Mozilla and/or show them some way in which it is better than IE. This has gotten to the point where next week I have a meeting with our MIS department to implement Mozilla in addition to IE as a standard. The moral of the story start using it and when people have a problem with IE test using Mozilla many times it will work and people will start to use it and love it. Also the whole blocking popup thing is a good way to sell people on it. :)

Re:Steroptypical response

[SquadBoy]

My experience has been just the oposite. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=38925&cid=4165 421

Re:Mozilla needs to be advertised!

[SquadBoy]

Or do what I do. Use it at work, test with it. I've had *many* cases where it is faster and/or better than IE. Show people the popup blocking. Show people the pretty themes. Most of the company I work at (~400 people) use Mozilla at least some of the time and a good chunk of those use it almost all the time. Word of mouth works great for Mozilla because it *really* is better in many ways.

Mozilla is not a good browser

[rppp01]

I downloaded it today (before this was posted) and ran it. Mozilla 1.1 that is. It wasn't slow, but it was ugly and didn't seem to want to render pages with any type of regularity.

So I tossed it off and went back to Opera. No fuss, no muss, no big issues. Opera just works. And when I get my home system back up and running, Linux will be running Opera as well.

I've used Mozilla off and on since M12 or something like that, and never liked how it felt or handled. Netscape 4.x was ok for me, but not Mozilla. But that's just one opinion on the land of trolls and thoughtful posters.

No more roaming access

[Orp]

It appears they've removed roaming access from Netscape. This allowed for remote storage of bookmarks on a properly configured server (via http) so that you always had the same bookmarks regardless of what machine you were running on. Maybe they dropped it because the implementation they were using was bad, but for me it was a nearly invaluable service. Anyone know if some sort of similar service is in store for future versions of netscape or mozilla?

Re:Shouldn't do that

[hey you, it's me]

Yes. I realize that, and believe me, I've tried to get some of these sites to change that behavior. Most of the time they just don't care. They figure it would cost them too much to have it fixed by the developer, or they think that just because you don't run IE you must be some sort of anti-MS zealot (or maybe I'm just paranoid).

I'd leave my user agent as Mozilla 5, but then I'd have to shut down Mozilla to set the user agent every time I suspected a descrimination problem. I suppose they should really add a user-agent selector in Mozilla.

Re:Can we harass the CapitalOne's???

[cswiii]

I posted the e-mail I sent to capital one, to the mozilla bug in question. Indeed, I did cancel my Capital One card -- I found a much, much better fixed rate somewhere else, anyway. I encourage you, and others, to do the same.

In case bugzilla gobbles up the slashdot link, cut and paste from here:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id =89853# c16 ..oh yeah, and remove the spaces in the URL that slashdot adds.

Re:NS Communicator 4.8?

[juhehe]

They (Sun & Netscape) are working on Netscape 4.x series becouse Sun needs at least one browser that works with their iPlanet server software.

It seems that 4.79 and 4.80 are the only ones that work in this context. Instead of Sun making a compatible server, they decided to fill the server with loads of JavaScript and *afterwards* make browsers that work with it. That just got to need some balls to do.

I'd be soon out of web business if my work wouldn't work with Win98&IE.

Let's see if NS7 is any different than NS7PR1 and Moz1.1 in respect to the otherwise very handy looking iPlanet.

Re:CNet Review - "Don't switch browsers"

[linderdm]

Its funny that their review of IE 6 scored the same as Netscape 7, 7 out of 10. It is funny to read the review because it pretty much says what the Netscape 7 review says, but for IE. "Don't switch if you like Netscape", "No startling improvements or features", etc. What I would like to see is an update to the IE 6 review that makes new comparisons to NS 7 instead of 6.1 and see what he thinks then. His review of Netscape 7 just didn't do that.

Re:Stability?

[satanami69]

I used to run into the same problem with long log out times when something crashed on Win2k. Ive found that having a backup administrator was very useful. Instead of logging out, you lock the workstation. Then when it gives you the message that only user or and admin, log in as the other admin and it'll quickly log you out without hurting anything.