Netscape 7.2 To Be Released August 3rd

Following up a story from May, linux2004 writes "for those who thought Netscape was dead after firing all their staff and spinning Mozilla off into a non-profit foundation, then think again. It was announced a while back that Netscape would continue releases of their browser suite and now the release date has been confirmed as August 3rd as a free download or by buying a CD. I don't think it'll take the attention away from Firefox but will be a decent upgrade for those using Netscape 7.1. The 7.2 release will be based on Mozilla 1.7 and will probably have the usual Netscape additions."

Comments

Oh man!

[Doomie]

Unbelievable:

Netspace is not dead!
Doom III is out!

And both of them on the same day... Crazy... This must be some conspiracy against slashdot users :)

An open-source warning?

[mccalli]

OK, I'm mostly pro-open source but this one is interesting. What happened here is that a company had a product, fired the staff developing that product, and then still released a new version utilising the continuing free labour of those who it had put out of a job.

Bit of a cautionary tale perhaps?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Glad to hear it

[will_die]

Had that problem with firefox then got user agent switcher and use that when I need to lie about my brower type.
You can mess around with the message that is send, so for instance you can report that you are internet explorer running on a commodore-64.

Re:Does anybody take them seriously anymore?

[Patik]

Yes. Most people have never heard of Mozilla but they have used Netscape. It's good that Netscape keeps making releases because it keeps the amount of gecko-based browsers up, which impacts how web designers develop their sites. Most people also don't care about corporate politics or whether a product is free or Free.

here's "why netscape"

[ChristTrekker]

Corporate execs are more comfortable with a known brand name. Even though Mozilla (and FF, Camino, K-Meleon, etc) are based on the same code, they are not "Netscape". When execs are made aware of the faults and deficiencies of IE, they may think "I wish it was still like the old days, when we could at least choose between IE and Netscape." Lo and behold, here's Netscape 7.2. If you mention Opera or Firefox to them, you'd get blank stares.

Also, some of these execs want an all-in-one solution, not a perceived patchwork of FF+TB+whatever to meet basic internet needs.

Plus, "Mozilla" sounds like something only a geek could love. "Netscape" sounds like a polished product, like the marketing team actually spent more than 5 seconds to think of it. That's important to execs.