AOL Releases Netscape Beta, Based on Firefox

An anonymous reader writes "Netscape has released their new prototype browser for Windows based on Firefox 0.9.3. The prototype's development was outsourced to Mercurial Communications and includes several Netscape specific extensions. The biggest difference from Firefox, however, is the ability to switch to the Internet Explorer rendering engine from within the browser using an IE ActiveX control. The browser is currently available for a limited download."

Comments

Also

[Anonymous Coward]

There are screenshots and comments over at Planet Mozilla.

Re:Also

[RevAaron]

Why in the sam hill would I want to 'switch to internet explorer rendering'?

These days it is very rare that I'd need to view a page in IE, but it happens once in a while for me. For that, I use an extension for FF that lets me right click and say "open in IE." *shrug* Some folks may run into this problem more, and if this is done well, you could just pop into IE and view that page, then move on, keeping your tabs in the same window, etc.

Re:Also

[ptlis]

Say i'm developing a webpage, it validates with the W3C validator and I want to make sure it renders correctly in IE as well as gecko based browsers; this would mean I could load the page up in Netscape, view it with the gecko rendering engine, followed by IE. I'd then modify the CSS so that it renders reasonably in IE then switch back to gecko to ensure it still works correctly with it. This would mean less clutter for me when testing on Windows as it means I don't need Firefox & multiple instances of IE on my taskbar; instead there'd just be Netscape containing a bunch of tabs.

I hate any form of excess clutter in my desktop environment/window manager.

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install the Tab Browser Extension for Firefox. It supports moveable tabs, saving tabs when you close, multiple rows of tabs, etc. Firefox lacks them because not everyone wants them, and they're available with a simple extension download for those that do.

Re:Also

[tvadakia]

Try the Tabbrowser Extensions (http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_tabextensions.html. en) extension for Firefox. Beats anything even Avant can fassion. Enjoy IE free browsing.

Re:Also

[Rick the Red]

Yippie-skippie! Thanks.

Re:Also

[wfmcwalter]

It doesn't make much, if any, difference to slashdotters like you and I. But to AOL it's potentially a very big deal indeed. It'd be foolish to infer too much about AOL's internal thinking from one technology offering (particularly about a company so prone to factionalism as AOL) but this might imply that at least some part of the company is maneuvering for a firefox-based AOL client to be the standard.

I think it's likely AOL would like to move to a Firefox client, as there are several real business advantages for them, including

• They bear the brunt of the support-call cost for a subscriber's entire PC (particularly for viruses, spyware, pagejacking, and increasingly fraud). Moving their userbase away from IE would surely save them a fair amount of this, and that's real dollars and cents.
• No-one wants their business to be dependant on Microsoft, particularly folks like AOL who are locked in competition with MS on a variety of fronts. The more they can extricate themselves from said dependency the safer they'll feel, and even a partial extrication today is better than none, and can be a stepping stone to dumping MS altogether. That's no wide-eyed open-source idealism, it's cold hard corporate survivalism.
• For a vertically-integrated provider like AOL, firefoxes UI framework and ease of extension makes for an attractive platform.

The fly in the ointment for them is website compatibility. Sure, most sites do indeed work fine, but there's a sufficiently large number that don't to make AOL switching untenable. A number of the folks I've successfully switched to firefox have migrated back, particularly because either their bank, airline, or corporate portal have been IE only.

Now, AOL has a full list of the sites their customers visit, and can easily compile a list of the major ones that need IE. They can build this list into an integrated firefox-IE browser, so that it switches to IE for those "legacy mode" sites seemlessly. That may well be what this netscape is - a test version of a "smart-switching" AOL client.

If they wanted to (although I can't see as much business case for them to want to) AOL could then put pressure on those sites that don't work with firefox to fix their issues. THey can threaten to start popping up little windows saying "legacy mode support", "backward-compatibility mode", or "old-style technology mode", a mark of Cain the site in question would rather avoid.

But most of all it's an option. In business, an option is an advantage even if you don't take it - in this case it's a great stick with which to beat Microsoft in future negociations. So it's a smart move to make, and a scary (for MS) technology for them to have - it's what MS fears the most, a smooth migration path away from MS.

Perfect Name for a Ripoff Artist

[mfh]

The prototype's development was outsourced to Mercurial Communications and includes...

That's the perfect name for a company hired to knock-off the Firefox browser:

Mercurial:
Having the characteristics of eloquence, shrewdness, swiftness, and thievishness attributed to the god Mercury.

Re:Perfect Name for a Ripoff Artist

[ADRA]

Hey hey, lets not be too hateful to AOL. They did support the Mozilla development environment for a good many years for like 0 profit. Lets not jump on their a$$es for doing something completely legal and in my eyes, ethical & moral.

If ANYTHING is used to offset the IE juggernaut, then so be it. I don't have a problem with the dual HTML engine technique since many people DO need activex support, at least once and a while.

Re:Perfect Name for a Ripoff Artist

[ADRA]

" ALLOWS YOU TO EXECUTE CODE FROM THE BROWSER YOU ARE COMPETITING WITH?"

This is how Microsoft has won basically every battle it faced in the 90's anyways. IE supported NS extensions, Windows supports Novell, UNIX. Word supports Corel, etc..

Don't you get the game yet? If given the option of Netscape X and IE, you'd choose Netscape X because it can do everything IE does, PLUS Firefox built-in features. If you want to start weaning ppl off IE, its better to attack with a good migration plan.

Re:Perfect Name for a Ripoff Artist

[Jugalator]

They did support the Mozilla development environment for a good many years for like 0 profit

Actually did far more than that...

They donated $2 million to the Mozilla Foundation to get them going and willingly donated the mozilla.org domain name, the Mozilla-related trademarks, and related equipment such as the mozilla.org servers, to Mozilla Foundation. They was obliged to do none of this, just having purchased Netscape and got all this along with them.

See also this story.

Re:Perfect Name for a Ripoff Artist

[MC Negro]

This is how Microsoft has won basically every battle it faced in the 90's anyways. IE supported NS extensions, Windows supports Novell, UNIX. Word supports Corel, etc..

Don't you get the game yet? If given the option of Netscape X and IE, you'd choose Netscape X because it can do everything IE does, PLUS Firefox built-in features. If you want to start weaning ppl off IE, its better to attack with a good migration plan.

Preach it, brother! Just look at emacs - recent iterations have included not only vi, but Internet Explorer, FireFox, Mosaic and the complete AmigaOS, just to ensure extra compatbility.

*ducks*

Yet at the same time...

[the_mighty_$]

...they are beta testing a new IE based browser.

Switch to IE rendering?

[dextroz]

That's like saying: it's got the ability to piss it's pants when it lacks a toilet!

Bored at Work

[Skyshadow]

Forgive me, first thing that popped into my head. I'm bored.

Morpheus: Microsoft is our enemy, Firefox, but when you're on the internet, you look around. What do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still IE users. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to switch to a browser that doesn't come included on their desktop when they bring their computers home from Best Buy and pop in the "2000 Free Hours!" AOL CD. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on Microsoft that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me Firefox, or were you looking at the woman surfing the hot lesbo porn?
Firefox: I was...
Morpheus: Look again.
Woman has turned into Bill Gates, introducing new "standard" to break non-IE browsers.
Morpheus: Freeze it!
Firefox: What is it?
Morpheus: IE-only standards. That means that anyone we haven't converted over is potential audience for crappy sites who only QA against IE. On the internet, you see this everywhere. We have survived by being standards-based, by working to be compatible. But these false "standards" are the gatekeepers.
Firefox: Whoa.
Morpheus: I won't lie to you, Firefox. Every single company or product that has stood their ground, everyone who was fought Microsoft has been crushed or aquired. But where they have failed, you will succeed.
Firefox: Why?
Morpheus: I saw Microsoft crush Netscape's market share. Men have come up with fantastic innovations only to find them incompatible or MS copies already included in the next version of Windows. Yet their programs are still based on factory-style programming and decisions made by pointy-hairs. Because of that, they will never be as secure or as functional as you can be.
Firefox: What are you trying to tell me, that I can block pop-ups?
Morpheus: I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.

Re:Bored at Work

[crashnbur]

Am I the only one wondering why a budding young web browser with huge potential is talking to a peer-to-peer file-sharing client?

Netscape is ruining the purpose of FireFox.

[garcia]

I always thought that Firefox was meant to streamline the webbrowsing experience? The first thing that I noticed when installing the browser is that it asked for my zipcode for weather reports. Ugh, no thanks, 90210 here I come. It also asks for a reboot after install. For what? What do I need to reboot after an install of a webbrowser for? What are they installing?

It defaults to ONE ugly screen with a tab opened, a headlines ticker going, a "money" ticker going, and the menu bar on the opposite side of the window than I am used to. There's a "new tab" option on the left side of the browsing area instead of leaving the main tab open there. You think new users are going to like this? I don't.

At least I don't see any AOL icons installed to my desktop or my favorites (yet). They might come after a restart though.

It's nice to see the backing of AOL/Netscape on Firefox. People might recognize those two names before Firefox and they might switch. Especially if it can render the IE-only pages 100%.

Re:Netscape is ruining the purpose of FireFox.

[narcc]

I wonder what people in Beverly Hills use for their fake zip code...

Two Words: Name Recognition

[DaHat]

For the non geek, there are only two web browsers, Microsoft and Netscape. One comes with Windows and is easy... the other has grown to suck more and more over the years. No matter how good Firefox, Opera or any others may be, they don't have the name recognition that Netscape still has.

I would expect that a major Netscape release like this with a Firefox backend will do a lot to draw the non tech folks who continue to use IE because they think it is their only option.

Re:Two Words: Name Recognition

[mkro]

For the non geek, there are only two web browsers, Microsoft and Netscape.

I work at a helpdesk. Among the non-geek, there are two web browsers: "Internet" and "Internet Explorer". Both groups recognise it by the blue "e" icon.

Sabotage

[poohsuntzu]

Anyone thought about it? Tinfoil hats on, it would explain why such a bizarr move was pulled in the first place.

1. Take the firefox build of one of the worst milestones possible.

2. Allow it to use the IE Rendering Engine

3. When it breaks, runs slow, has the same bugs as IE, blame it on the firefox base code.

4. The users of the new netscape browser will think that firefox (that browser everyone keeps talking about) is just as bad as IE.

5. IE users stay IE users, even netscape users because now they don't feel there is any reason to use firefox if it breaks all the time.

6. ????

7. Profit!!!

User interface disaster

[jkujawa]

Screen Shot"

That is undoubtedly one of the worst UI disasters I've ever seen. Just looking at it makes my eyes hurt. The horrible choice in colors, the business, the unreadability of text due to gradients and poor color and font choices, and that's just looking at a static image. From the looks of it, I wouldn't be surprised if half the widgets were animated.

It's like ... perfect awfulness. If a skilled and pissed-off user interface designer sat down to purposely design something as user-hostile as possible, I don't think he'd come up with something this bad.

Ye gods.

OK... Gonna make myself majorly unpopular

[fozzmeister]

but the Moz/FF stronghold is geeks, we need to get it on non-geek platforms. I've told my dad, my friends, everyone to switch to FF, but I always say "if you have problems on such and such a site go back to IE for that one alone". not being able to use the site which is your bank, or do your weekly competition with the Times (this is my Dad) is not acceptable to the end user. Get them on FF as much as possible, but if its all or nothing with them, you'll prob get nothing.

For this reason I do broadly support the IE switching option, providing its like a button "Switch To IE" that would always render that (page/domain) in IE. Similar to the way "Allow Poppups works. This would solve the major problem of "I use IE because I often visit XYZ and FF doesn't support it".

Saying that a universal "Switch to IE rendering" option is going to be more damaging than helpful to FF.