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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).
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.
What's next, Mosiac?
CKSCIII
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.
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.
That would be the Pwn3d button?
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.