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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."
I thought ActiveX was an IE thing. Has that changed?
Why netscape is still beeing developed? Are they getting something out of it. I mean from the business point of view. We have Firefox, Mozilla, IE, Opera, Safari, , etc.
The only person who is capable of killing my karma, is me, do not even try to help me.
I would actually like to be able to allow certain sites to run ActiveX controls. The sad fact is quite a few sites require ActiveX to function properly, and that will probably be the case for a long time. I dislike having to use IE for those sites instead of Firefox, so selective enabling of ActiveX would be OK with me.
Oh no... it's the future.
I question whether this will hurt Firefox's forward momentum. If netscape 8 is as good as firefox, then I would see it stealing a share of the market from firefox (not IE). The part that really concerns me is that once it gets popularity, will they start putting ads and revenue generators in the browser, similar to what AOL did to their AIM client?
Don't you mean "Netscape released the first test, or "Developer Preview" version of its new browser"...
As to why they don't just use Firefox directly? Because owning the user's homepage is money and power. People hear the name "Netscape" which has a long history prior to AOL cannibalising it and they decide to download it rather than this new "firefox thing".
So, by using that name and that slightly customized/modified browser, they draw a larger group of users. And a lot of those users never get around to (or don't know how to) changing their homepage.
RTFA. It doesn't block access to the sites, but merely automatically disables, javascript, ActiveX and all the other components that could be exploited by a nasty webpage. It also flashes up a warning dialog box.
All in all, this really could shape up to be a killer feature. I'd feel a lot safer leaving my parents surfing on NS 8 with this feature enabled, than I would with Firefox, and I LOVE Firefox - I just feel that less experienced users need their hands held more, and if Netscape are willing to do that, I'll send over newbies to them.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
It isn't closed, merely narrowed. Think of this: new rogue website, not yet blacklisted, and it has an ActiveX which is designed specifically to clear out your blacklist. Bonus points for pulling this off without administrator privileges. Five clicks later, and you're ready to re-install Windows.
Stay with Firefox. It's sensibly disconnected from the #1 security weakness in Windows.
ActiveX will never go away if we encourage sites to keep using it. At any rate, only about 0.5% of sites actually *require* ActiveX to be used (in my experience). And those can usually be easily spurned for a competitor..
I can understand why some people are angry at AOL, and why all of NS's exemployee's are still peeved at them. However, from what I've read NS8 will use a tweaked version of the Gecko in Moz 1.7.5/FF1.0 and anything that might increase the marketshare of standards-based browsers is a good thing. And if AOL can use its muscle to drive even 2% of users over to Gecko, it will be a huge accomplishment.
And I think NS8 represents a challenge to IE users, not existing Firefox users. I don't see it as stealing marketshare (or even potential marketshare) from Firefox, and even if it does, its still less marketshare for IE. Netscape, if managed properly, presents another flank in the battle for desktop browsing. They are allies, people, not the enemy. Sure, they could be doing some things better, but let's give them a chance to win over some new users before we hang them out to dry.
And to those who would say that AOL should give more to the community, we shouldn't forget that they did pour a shit tonne of loot into NS/MoFo. There are plenty of reasons to be pissed at AOL/NS, but we shouldn't attack them for this.
I don't know. Do you classify the majority of Mozilla, which was written by paid Netscape developers, not Netscape code?
Have you ever written any real-world code? Just because no Netscape code is left doesn't mean that Netscape's work doesn't still make up a huge part of the project. Rewritten code leaves its mark in design, implementation, data structures, algorithms, everything. Just because the individual characters have been retyped doesn't mean squat, and the old code is still a large part of the work even if it's all gone (which, as another poster pointed out, it's not).
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Since no one uses Netscape anyway (come on, this is not a troll, it's a reality), I don't think this has effect at all on anything. I continue to be surprised that AOL has anyone at all working on a browser that they refuse to use or promote. Is it charity? Contractual? Who knows, but Netscape is a non-player, and so a non-issue in any way.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yeah, but there's another area where having ActiveX would be helpful: legacy corporate apps. We have a huge number of them. Actually, I only call them 'legacy' because I'm hoping that someday they'll be replaced with something better, but right now, we're stuck.
Our parent company has spent many millions on the development of in-house apps that depend on ActiveX. They're only just realizing their conundrum now. Because the malware problem was getting so bad, we spent a significant amount of time training our users to use a different web browser for regular internet use, and to use IE for intranet apps. I went so far as to remove all IE shortcuts, and then put shortcut links on the desktop that open those intranet sites directly in IE.
So for us, having selective ActiveX in Netscape/Firefox would be a step in the right direction. It's not the ideal solution, but if you work in IT long enough, you'll find that you can rarely implement an ideal solution anyhow. In the interest of my own mental health, I like to think of it as a challenge to my hacker-fu.
Well , I use Netscape on Linux.rather than Mozilla or FireFox. The reason?
Netscape gets all unicode fonts(like IE in XP)
and shows web pages with foreign languages like
Thai or Korean properly.
Firefox/Mozilla you need to download extra
fonts and somehow install them - something that is very poorly documented and hard to do.
Firefox was exactly what I wanted. A while ago, the options were limited to 3 bloated browsers (mozilla taking the extreme end of the spectrum), and a fast commercial one... Opera. I'd have issues installing or compiling Opera on AIX or Solaris on x86 etc, and wished there was a free Opera sourcecode somewhere.
What kills me is how in the world did companies like Netscape miss what the public wants? They made netscape communicator, a monolith for people who only wanted yahoo.com to come up faster. Next they made netscape 6, then 7, never slower or smaller. IE was competing with Opera easily since you have to purchase opera, and IE is free for the most part.
Mozilla was a joke. Period. I always thought mozilla was an org of programmers with itchy fingers who just wanted to make an OS-in-a-browser.
Someone grew brains there.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky