Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is probably the last, dying gasp from the browser & brand that really did change the world.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If AOL laid off all the Netscape engineers, then who made this release?
Releasing new versions from beyond the grave!
I say, jones, this article sounds kind of familiar...
This is good. There is still a lot of brand recognition left with Netscape (suprisingly). Sometimes people feel happier using a newer version of a product they know (Netscape), as opposed to a product they _think_ they don't know (Mozilla / Firefox).
The release of Netscape helps in moving these people to a decent, secure browser. I think that Netscape no longer justifies the Nutscrape moniker it aquired in the later 4.x days.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That AOL charm we have all come to know and love.
alot of old baggage and memories of a ship's-wheel icon.
If a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around to hear it...
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
If a browser is available for download, and nobody downloads it, it is really released?
Netscape family is like the Griffeys of baseball, the offspring is infinitely better then the parent.
Probably some of the smartest and most capable engineers and designers in the industry, who produced probably the most famous and symbolic product of the early Internet, and all that's left is a web page of farewell messages.
It isn't hard to notice the first priority was that everyone should be fired. THEN and ONLY then was the next version of the browser considered, after all the logos were taken off the buildings and the desks moved out, of course.
I find it very interesting how the early Internet is always referred to as "dot com", as if business and the media are straining to make it a pejorative. All that creativity and CAPITALISM generated great wealth for dozens of economies. Ebay, Amazon, etc. are all publically traded, profitable companies that wouldn't exist without the Internet.
But it seems that now since the checks have all been cashed, there's no room left for the people who built it, and that's a shame.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
>VERY lightweight (11.5MB installer for Windows)
;)
compared to what? The latest Opera is 3.4 MB
There are people out there who don't trust Mozilla.
Why?
Because it isn't run by a major corporation that they will be able to sue should there be any problems.
AOL puts a face (granted, a big, ugly one that makes most Slashdotter's teeth itch) on Mozilla that is recognized by technophobes as user-friendly. Additionally, AOL gets free advertisement out of it through name placement, and gets to take credit for a high-quality product. Netscape draws the previously mentioned crowd away from the Evil Corporation Which Must Not Be Named.
Does.... not.. compute...
NS 4 was the reason I landed on Mozilla back in those rough pre 1.0 days. Anything * was better than having a crash on every other page. If I had to pick a favorite version of NS, it would have to be pre 4. *(Other than IE, I never trusted activeX, seems I was right.)Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I'm still using Firebird, because I've been too preoccupied to keep up. Wasn't there some issue with one of the names conflicting with the database system? Is it Phoenix, or has that been confused a BIOS of the same name and they're moving on to another?
Here's a thought! They just found a a previously undiscovered bird species in the Philippines, they could name it after that and beat every other software product!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Finally, a browser that can defeat reigning champs NCSA Mosaic, Arena, and Cello! *Anything* that breaks their monopoly-like dominance of the Web browser market will be welcomed!
"users mostly don't notice a change." except you have to switch themes. The address book disappears. E-mail disappears. There's some goofy xor trick to delete mail.
And somebody mods this as informative, rather than funny?
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."
>I wrote a perl script to this but it's so easy to do that I won't bother to provide it :)
Could you just scribble it in the margins of this page? Thanks, that would save alot of us about 300 years worth of pain.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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
Oh and I forgot to mention, your* tax dollars paid for this, so I hereby release it into the public domain. I hope that's not exceeding my authority but I doubt anyone will care because it's not patentable.
* If you live in the US, especially California.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm a non-technical type, and I use IE 6 exclusively. I find it laughable that people would use that Mozilla 1.7 thing when IE is clearly 4.3 better.
Though I do plan to switch to Netscape because it is, of course, 1.2 better than IE.
> Mozilla = Netscape
A message from the slashdot compiler:
Thanks a lot, you've just overwritten all the fixes in mozilla since the last AOL fork.
Next time please pay more attention and write the proper Mozilla == Netscape statement