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Netscape 7.2 Released
scottfi writes "America Online has just released Netscape 7.2. Based on Mozilla 1.7, this latest version features better popup blocking, vCard support, an improved junk mail algorithm, better standards support, performance enhancements and several hundred other bug fixes. It also includes patches for recent security vulnerabilities. It is a little over a year since AOL shut down the Netscape browser division, laid off or reassigned the remaining engineers and withdrew from the day to day running of mozilla.org. At the time, they said that new versions of Netscape were unlikely. Earlier this year, they changed their minds and announced Netscape 7.2. More details about Netscape 7.2 are available at Netscape Browser Central, together with download links."
I say, jones, this article sounds kind of familiar...
I believe it has AOL Instant Messenger intregration and the Mail component can check your AOL mailbox directly.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
However, it's VERY lightweight (11.5MB installer for Windows)
I just grabbed the full version (what NS calls the 'offline installer'):
The Win32 installation .exe weighs in at ~24MB
The Linux/686 installation tar.gz is ~16MB.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
A lot of "Internet Explorer only" sites are going to break as people download XP Service Pack 2. With ActiveX disabled by default, sites that depend on substandard proprietary techniques might finally die.
One hopes that Microsoft follows through and removes ActiveX and other idiocies from their web-page building tools.
-- Rich
- - -
"The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick."
Most of the people who built Netscape, who were there from the old Mosaic days, left a long time ago, and many of them are fabulously wealthy. Neither Marc Andreessen nor Jim Clarke particularly need to work in the future to support themselves, and jwz took his money and is doing a semi-business/semi-hobby sort of thing by running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco (just to pick three examples).
And even to the people there at the end, AOL was quite helpful. First of all, they vastly overpaid for Netscape, since they were sold it on the basis partly that they could use it as an embedded browser for he AOL client, while technically Mozilla was always too bloated and un-modular to do that well (maybe just now it's starting to get to the point where that'd be possible, but it wasn't when they bought it, or even a year or two after they bought it). Once they realized it wasn't much use to them, they didn't even just say "well, fuck you guys": they transitioned it to a new Mozilla.org foundation, and became the single largest donor (by far) to that non-profit foundation, giving them all the equipment they had previously been using (webservers, test build machines, file servers, etc.) and $2m cash.
All in all I don't think AOL are really the evil ones here. You don't see any other major companies donating $2m cash to mozilla.org.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Easy - ad revenue. Have you tried using the latest Netscape release? It's horrid - I'd rather use IE. Ofcourse, I use Mozilla which is simply Netscape without all the junk ads and it's more on the cutting edge since Netscape simply rebrands Mozilla, and that obviously takes time to do - so by downloading the latest Mozilla, you're getting a better browser.