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Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security
wikinerd writes "Netscape is building Netscape 8 which will include several anti-phishing enhancements and will emphasize security. Netscape obtains blacklists of scam and spam sites which will be denied access to ActiveX and cookies. RSS capabilities will also be included in Netscape 8, which will be released on 17 February."
The new Netscape lets you choose between the gecko engine or IE's engine to render any page. You can have a few tabs open rendered by gecko, and a few tabs by IE, at the same time.
The grapevine says that AOL is currently having a few issues with people not being able to connect from AOL to other networks which AOL has blocked. So bad, in fact, that this is the last straw for many of their customers.
....then again, I could be completely wrong......
Some people I know think that AOL is using their netscape brand as an attempt to divert their operations onto a brand with not such a long history in customer complaints.
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A while ago.
Nescape 7.1 (or maybe it was 7.2) came with the Mozilla ActiveX plugin preinstalled, although it was whitelisted to allow only the Windows Media Player ActiveX control.
The Netscape 8 betas however can use either the Gecko or Trident (WinIE) engines for rendering web pages. If the user decides to use trident for viewing a web page that tab is marked as "low security" (little red or yellow sphere in the top right corner of the tab) IIRC.
If I remember correctly, Netscape is going to have a "view as in IE" option which uses the IE rendering engine instead of Gecko. That would probably bring in all ActiveX stuff.
No. None of these are based off Netscape.
... it was a lot better than 6.0.
Netscape 4 was the last Netscape that stood from the orignial lineage.
Netscape 5 was begun and the source released. The Mozilla open-source project was formed. They took a look at the Netscape 5 source, and gave up on it, deciding to start over. Although the Mozilla "suite" was made to work/look like Netscape, it was new code.
Mozilla was developed for a while. The first public release was "M3" (I used it). Later on they changed from "M"(ilestone) releases to version numbers. I think it was version 0.6 that Netscape then used as the basis for Netscape 6.0 (which flopped). We saw a Netscape 6.1 later, based upon a later release of Mozilla (0.9.2)
Netscape 7 was based upon Mozilla 1.0.1, a much better (recent) version of Mozilla. The current version of Netscape, 7.2, is based upon Mozilla 1.7.2.
Firefox is based upon Mozilla, not Netscape.
There have so far been no Netscape browsers based upon Firefox. Netscape 8 will be the first.
It's present in the community previews.
I've been using NS for years and there really isn't anything in Firefox that isn't already in NS. The Profile Manager in NS7.2 works much better, plugins work better and it's generally more solid. The trade off is that it's a little slower than Firefox. I tested out FF on my family and they couldn't really detect any difference in behavior from Netscape7.2.
NS4.72-4.78 were the reference standards for years and were the coding baseine for a great deal of web apps. There was no NS5 and NS6 was shit. Admittedly it was slow buggy crap. NS7.1 was a huge improvment and NS7.2 was a polished version of that. It's got all the biggies that FF has; tabbed browsing, popup blockers, profiles.
Too bad you and Speakeasy don't say what the MySpeakeasy.XPI does.
Nobody in their right mind who reads slashdot would install stuff blindly.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Browser Family Tree
In the begining there was NCSA and its child mosaic, and all was good, but Marc got greedy and formed Netscape 1.0 from Mosaic and made lots of money
And lo, BillG had released windows 4.0 to the world, known as 95, but it had not a browser, so it purchased spyglass, who had built another browser based on mosaic, this abomination was internet explorer 1 and it sucked
And internet explorer 2 sucked as well, but 3 was a decent browser that had basic support for CSS and what we call ActiveX today
Netscape 2 and 3 were giants, but Netscape 4 and IE 4 were of equal strength, and then AOL purchased Netscape.
Netscape began to decline as it fell behind, IE5 and 5.5 were much faster the 4.5 and 4.7 of netscape, but there was a new day dawning, AOL saw fit to release the preliminary code of Netscape 5 to the world.
But this code did suck very much, so the mozilla foundation, with help of many netscape employees began writing a browser essentially from scratch
this took time and IE got faster, but people started using its holes to exploit windows boxes around the globe
And lo Mozilla starting releasing builds, called milestones, and some were good and some were evil, but they became stronger, until netscape took one of the milestones and released netscape 6.
And it was good, but people had forgotten about netscape, so they ignored it
And mozilla worked on until it released 1.0 and people celebrated
And Netscape released 7.0, which was Mozilla 1.0 with some of the features turned off, and some people switched fleeing the pestilence following internet explorer.
And mozilla toiled away until 1.4, and netscape took of this and released netscape 7.1
Now some in the mozilla community wanted to build a new browser that was lighter than Mozilla, ready to do battle with Microsoft, and they called themselves phoenix, but the could not use that name due to copyright
So they changed their name to firebird, but they could not use that name either
So they settled on firefox, but as they kept changing their name, they were releasing very good web browsers
And mozilla kept working until 1.7 came, and netscape released 7.2, and firefox synced their trunk to the mozilla 1.7 branch.
And development began quickly on firefox, through 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9, until 1.0 came, and 20 million downloaded it.
AOL saw the favor firefox had with the people and coveted it, so they made a beta based on Firefox, and it was ok.
And now Netscape is poined to release netscape 8 which is really Firefox 1.0, but mozilla is still working on 1.8 and IE is going nowhere.
Corrections and additions apprecitated, especially for Opera's, Safari's, and Konquerer's lineages
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Based on the interface I saw in the preview version, it might be better if they concentrated on not sucking first.
The "Netscape Browser Preview" had the most God-awful UI I've seen in a desktop app in a long, long time. It was like they went out of their way to avoid learning the big lesson from the success of Firefox (which was keep it simple, stupid), preferring instead to chrome it up six ways to Sunday.
They even pushed the menu bar over to the right side of the screen -- in complete defiance of the way every other app does it. Who goes to look for "File", "Edit", etc. over there? Nobody. So there's years of muscle memory that you have to un-learn to be productive with the thing.
Their ActiveX "solution" sounds similar. Why go to all the trouble of keeping blacklists, etc. when there is a much simpler and easier for users to understand solution at hand -- just leave ActiveX out of the default install altogether, and offer it as a plugin. Users who need ActiveX for vertical apps are also likely to have sysadmins handy to keep their network secure, so installing a plugin is no big deal. Everybody else, why do they need ActiveX? The only ActiveX control I've seen in mainstream use in years is FilePlanet's download manager, and they offer standard downloads for the ActiveX-challenged, too, so you could ditch ActiveX without too much pain there as well.
Somebody put a silver bullet in the zombie corpse of Netscape already before it embarrasses its legacy any further...
Read my blog.