Slashdot Mirror
Firefox-Based Netscape 8 Beta Goes Live
pigmelon writes "According to BetaNews, 'America Online's Netscape team has opened its doors to the public, releasing the first beta of the revived Netscape Web browser. (screenshot) Based upon Firefox, Netscape version 8 focuses on security and user privacy, and supports rendering with both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser engines.' Before downloading the beta, remember that it uses Firefox 1.0, which contains some vulnerabilities."
Unfortunately you can't install extensions cause they all say they don't support Netscape.
One thing caught my eyes is the merged top menu bars, so the page title and file menu options are on the same line now.
Is there such plug-in for FireFox?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Jesus, that screenshot is like the browser version of my grandfather's "retirement shirts". Except, only if he lived inside Spencer's Gifts, and was a science fiction drama from 1963, and had ADD. And rabies.
What is the advantage of a separate browser? Why not make an AOL theme for firefox, drape it with AOL extentions/plugins and just use firefox?
What's so wrong with using standart window captions, buttons and so on? There's a reason for that: consistency ammong applications.
Leave themes and eye candy for the OS level, and obey it if present; but please, not a single application should implement it's own custom UI controls, that's just wrong.
Holy crap! That has to be the worst browser interface I've ever seen. Awful color scheme, buttons everywhere, three different input bars (one for searching, one for addresses, and one for "shopping"?; worse, the most important bar, the address bar, is too small to show even the domain portion of a normal URL, and is not in a properly prominent position), funky menu positioning (by putting the menu in the title bar, I suppose you can no longer grab that part of the bar to drag the window), etc. Netscape really needs to invest in some competent UI designers ASAP.
Ok, so who's the brainiac that figured it would be a good idea to take a screenshot with a "Microsoft is making progress" headline/news item?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Slashdot misrendering actually happens MORE under Firefox 1.0.1 than on 1.0 - at least on my home PC. Kind of disturbing. It doesn't seem to happen at all at work (heh heh) using Mozilla 1.7.5. For what it's worth, slashdot seems to render properly, but the browser's interface is amazingly, astoundingly ugly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just when you think the Internet can't get any uglier or more difficult to use we get another browser with piss-poor interface.
/love/ the way they use completley non-standard UI elements throughout and the grace us with the standard windows scroll bar on the right.
Why the heck do I need the weather below my address bar?
Why is the menu bar over by the close/minimize/maximize widgets (don't miss click the help menu or your window will vanish to the task bar)?
I
I think i'll leave my family/neighbors/girlfriend with Firefox or Mozilla thank-you. They may not be the perfect interface but they're an order of magnitude more useful than this monstrosity.
And no, it doesn't run on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or anything but Windows. I guess that's a good thing in this case.
Someone please explain to me why, if you knew of the existance of Firefox 1.0 (or 1.0.1 now), you would still choose to download a bastardized version of it from Netscape?
Let's be honest. You're going to get the same rendering engine (at least for the most part, probably with more problems though) but with a bloated skin, no theme support, no extension support, and the Netscape icon.
I think it's totally worth it, ha.
Yes! Let's mirror the download page and not the file itself ;)
Download
it's on netscrape bandwidth so it should fare just fine.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
One of the higherups where I work sent an email a couple months ago out complaining about this or that vulnerability in IE. He finished the email with "I guess that's just one more reason I should be using Netscape." Not Mozilla, not Firefox, but Netscape. Switching to Netscape is something I told him to do. In 1995. Ten years later, not only hasn't he switched yet, but he still thinks the only choice is between IE and Nutscrape. I don't think most computer users pay that much attention to new software (though Firefox and Mozilla are hardly new) nor to the technical aspects of software (the claim that Firefox and Netscape are both based on Mozilla will be met with a blank stare, followed by, "so I should use Netscape, and I'll be secure, right?" (and then followed by continued use of IE, because finding and downloading a new browser is still too much to deal with).
1) Netscape releases source to Netscape browser, which by that point really sucks.
2) This source spawns Mozilla, which becomes pretty good.
3) This source spawns Firefox, which becomes even better (and actually popular)
4) Firefox gets used as the basis for a new Netscape browser, which (if the screenshot is any indication) really sucks...
There is no "5) Profit!".
The sad thing is that a lot-- and I mean a lot-- of users (particularly Windows-only folks, which is still 90+% of the population) think that the only two browsers out there are IE and Netscape. When I say "I don't use IE", I sometimes get a response like "So you use Netscape?"
Netscape's name-brand recognition among the great uneducated masses of Internet users might actually convince millions of otherwise-competent people to use this abomination.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
the problem is a bug in firefox. it not caused by slashdots fucked up html code. you can get the same display bug on a fully valid html document. they have examples in the bugzilla. and it's already fixed in cvs.
Erik Dalén
No, no, no, you got it all wrong. Not all Windows users are going to accept that crappy interface.
That's what AOL-brained people will like. They're willing to take crappy software from anyone, as long as it comes with flashy buttons and a "Me Too!" auto-posting button, too.
Use Slashfix, and never worry about slashdot rendering errors again.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Netscape's name-brand recognition among the great uneducated masses of Internet users might actually convince millions of otherwise-competent people to use this abomination.
The old Netscape might have been junk. This new Netscape might also be junk. But who the heck cares? You don't need to like the smell of manure to appreciate roses at the flower shop.
Netscape's decision once upon a time to release the source code gave us an excellent browser. The license for that browser is such that anybody can take it and release their own abomination, so if Netscape itself wants to do that, more power to them.
However, I think that the general attitude on
Isn't this really an open source success story? "If you open the source code to your product, other developers will extend it and improve it in ways that you couldn't dream of (let alone afford), and you will be free to incorporate these improvements back into your product!". Isn't this the return on investment that the OSS community talks about?
If we're talking about the same uneducated mass of Internet users that were convinced to use IE because of Microsoft's brand recognition, isn't that a good thing?