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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."
Try just not putting it in at all...
"Netscape 8 to Emphasize Security"
OK, and what were they emphasizing before? Market Share?
When did THAT happen?
I thought that was one of the reasons to use Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.... cuz they DIDN'T support ActiveX... ??
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
And if you black list all those sites, how am I supposed to look at free porn anymore?
Mark
until fairly recently, most PHBs have never heard of 'firefox' or 'mozilla'. Even now, those who have do not have a clue that all three are related.
The do know the name 'netscape', however; and it's a safe, corporate-friendly name (unlike mozilla or firefox).
users designed to resist phishing schemes and ENLAR6E Y0||R PE|\||5 spam.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I.E.: Speakeasy
e fox/
Just give users an extension:
http://www.speakeasy.net/software/fir
That way, they can keep up to date with Firefox.
Now Netscape, as usual will lag in updates... which means security holes may remain, etc.
If they did an extension, users could likely update with no problems.
The decision to use blacklists with ActiveX is an unfortunate one. In an environment as fluid as the internet scam industry, there will be vastly more new sites set up than human-controlled blacklisting can stop, especially if web servers are set up on botnets of unsuspecting home XP users. Let's just hope the default rendering engine will be Gecko.
Having said that, there are a few javascript phishing techniques that work perfectly well in Firefox with Gecko...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
There's nothing funny about it really. All browsers' end goal is market share. Firefox may be arguably more secure than IE, but its focus on providing something IE lacks is just a step in its end goal of more market share. They happen to, at least for now, not be financially motivated, but market share is still what they want.
What's next, Mosiac?
CKSCIII
1) I agree with what has been said a few times: using blacklists sounds nice, but really doesn't work well. Spammers and Scammers can create new sites faster then we can blacklist old ones.
2) I still think FireFox is the way to go. Much more attention to security and features. Easier to use and less bloat.
3) This is more of a question: Does anyone have any statistics of what browsers and versions of browsers are most being used? I mean, I'd love to see that broken down by country and by versions.
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.
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.
Well... with a marketing campaign of "Focusing on Security", every security hole/bug found in it will be just that much more embarassing for them. It was that way with IE for a while with their security releases but it's happened to much that we've all become desensitized to it.
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
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
It seems to me that it would be much, much more secure to allow the user to whitelist sites they wanted to use ActiveX on. For example, Windows Update, and my stupid online paystub page.
I only have a handful of pages that I *need* ActiveX on, and the rest can go pound sand.
Solves the problems of Netscape having to maintain the lists, too.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
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?
That would be the Pwn3d button?
You do know that your talking complete rubbish don't you?
The majority of the Mozilla code was written by Netscape employees.
Now I know what you mean. You mean that all the old Netscape Communicator code was rewritten. Well, firstly, that's wrong (things like NSPR and NSS are still kicking around) and secondly, most of the code was rewritten by Netscape employees.
While Netscape may not have written any Mozilla code since July 2003 (the fact that there is no Netscape browser division kind of puts a damper on that), it doesn't mean that they didn't make huge contributions in the first five years of the Mozilla project.
Go to bonsai.mozilla.org and search for checkins by people with netscape.com email addresses if you don't believe me. Or use lxr.mozilla.org to search for files that have Netscape employees as listed contributors.
Microsoft publishes "ActiveX for Netscape", which is a normal dll plugin. It works (but is undesirable) in Firefox under Windows.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
D3D Games from websites: "Why the fuck would you want to?"
Virus scans from websites: "Why not just have them download and run the fucking executable?"
ActiveX: A virus of a solution still looking for a problem.
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.
How do you make a Direct3D game load from a web site without loading through an ActiveX control?
You don't. You use something that's actually cross-platform and isn't Windows-specific. Not all internet users run Windows (I sure don't). It's the internet, not the Wintelnet.
What about client-side apps that access the file system, such as an ActiveX virus scanner?
They shouldn't. That's not the place for such things. Convenient? Sure. Worth the price? Hell no. There are far better ways to scan for viruses than to give websites full access to every file on your computer.
An analogy would be saying that unless you leave your doors unlocked at all times, how is the cable guy going to fix your TV? Or the telephone guy fix the static on your lines? Or the furnace guy fix the boiler? Sure, we get robbed ever week... but we've GOT to leave our house unlocked for these other things.
And some of us run operating systems that don't get viruses anyhow.
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!
Um, no... why don't I just give MS my admin login while I'm at it?
today is spelling optional day.
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
D3D Games from websites: "Why the fuck would you want to?"
To advertise to children. The Kids Next Door game is based on a TV series, which is supported by TV advertising.
Virus scans from websites: "Why not just have them download and run the fucking executable?"
A downloadable version of the online virus scanner would compete with the retail version.
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