Slashdot Mirror
Peeking at Netscape 8
Andrew Sayers writes "It seems like Netscape 8 has hit blogland, with generally positive review at blogspot.com - although it makes the point that the IE rendering mode could hurt Firefox in the long-run, because it gives sites an excuse to stick with their old IE-only designs." Ah, remember when the release of a Netscape mattered?
with generally positive review at blogspot.com
Blogspot is not a blog. It is a blog hosting service. Please be more specific next time.
First of all, I am amazed they still bother to make Netscape. They have what, a half, perhaps one percent market share?
Secondly, Netscape or any other browser really does not matter for idiotic web masters. Those who are untalented, unskilled web masters (i.e. idiots) will continue to make garbage markup code and call it web sites, those with skill will continue to make real web pages in html / xhtml (A real web page validates, everything is just trash..)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Even 6.2 is nicer than 7.0, and any new release is a step further on the road to a horrendious browser that might be orange, black, and royal blue for its theme colors!
I agree. More competition, in most cases, fosters better products. After all who would have imagined that Firefox would have become the challenger to IE that is has today? It has been helped because of Netscape, Opera and countless others who are still trying to innovate.
Don't get me wrong, I love and use firefox, but you won't get it installed on an old PI-233 with 32MB RAM.
Internet Explorer DOES install and work on that configuration.
and then look ato rmationBar
http://minghong.dyndns.org:8080/OpenWiki/?NoIEInf
which has great IE InfoBar spoofing, including lots of localizations!
Because the way IE renders things is not documented, changes with each version (even the mac versions render things very differently to the windows version) and has not seen any new features since 2001.
Rendering in an ie-compatible way would mean taking out support for modern standards like png and css2, and replacing them with broken half-assed implementations. Also the only way to do this would be to reverse engineer ie, since there are no published standards to implement against. Reverse engineering like this could be considered illegal and nodoubt microsoft would stamp down on it.
Aside from the fact that ie is NOT designed to be a decent browser, it's NOT designed to advance the web or to benefit the users. It's sole purpose in existance was to bankrupt netscape and increase dependance on microsoft products.
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Put that another way: is there much point to using Mozilla and Firefox and Camino since they use the same engine as Netscape?
Netscape never used the Mosaic engine. It used the, er, Netscape engine, which just doesn't cut it today. It didn't cut it in 1997, which is why they started NGLayout (now known as Gecko).
Here's the code: http://lxr.mozilla.org/classic/source/. Knock yourself out. You'll find some docs at http://www.mozilla.org/classic/layout-classic/. Oh, and AOL funded the development of Gecko for five years, so you may wish to reconsider your statement.
No, they're not. Not largely anyway. Most of the people that work on the Firefox frontend (which is practically the only thing that's different from the new Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta) are not Gecko developers. And anyway, the version of Gecko you'll find in Netscape 8.0 Beta is practically identical to the one in Firefox 1.0. And Mozilla 1.7.5. And some version of Camino. And...
Really? CSS? Advanced JavaScript? PNG images? Thought not.
blogspot.com is a free hosting site for blogger.com weblogs. Saying "a review at blogspot.com" is like saying "a review at geocities.com" - it's meaningless, as anyone could have written it. If Slashdot is going to link to random bloggers, at least make it clear that the author is a random blogger as opposed to part of some semi-legitimate sounding site.
At any rate, the reviews by Danial Glazman (author of Nvu and Mozilla Composer) and Blake Ross (of the Firefox team) are far more enlightening.
Err, no. This new Netscape browser is Windows-only, so it probably isn't going to affect Firefox adoption in Linux
Besides, just about every desktop Linux user uses Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Epiphany, Galeon, or some other top-notch, secure, standards-compliant browser. Firefox adoption in Linux (or any other *nix) doesn't really matter, because just about everybody is using a really nice browser. There is almost no gain for the Mozilla organization to switch every Konqueror, Epiphany, and Galeon user to Mozilla or Firefox (Epiphany and Galeon are already Gecko-based), kind of like how Debian isn't trying to convince Gentoo or Fedora users to switch.
Things are different on the Windows side of the fence, however. Currently, IE still has a stronghold on Windows desktops. IE is literally falling apart from the seams, yet most users don't know (and don't care), even though their spyware and adware problems have multiplied over the years. However, Mozilla and Firefox are finally available for them, and the reception from users is mostly great.
As for the IE rendering inside of the new Netscape browser, I don't like the idea at all. Every single IE exploit now becomes a Netscape exploit, and we all know how buggy and insecure IE's rendering engine is. Plus, I've never had a problem opening up web pages at all with Firefox/Mozilla. If I needed to enter a site which required ActiveX, and it was important, I can always download a Firefox extension (on a Windows computer) to view the site.
Besides, we should be promoting standards. If we can switch people to Firefox, we can switch people to XHTML, CSS, Java/Perl/Python, and other standards. Developers need to learn the dangers of sticking to MS-only code (insecurity and Windows-lockin; what about the Mac and *nix users?) and learn how to change. Is it that difficult to learn XHTML, CSS, and some programming language that can do everything that ActiveX can do, without the insecurities?
I think you mean:
Netscape 1.0: Cool, if I ignore the W3C specifications, I can get an animated title!
Netscape 1.2: Shit! My titles are screwed up, I'd better fix them. Cool, I can leave off the quotes at the end of attributes and it will still work!
Netscape 2.0: Shit! My non-standard attributes have made half my page disappear, I'd better fix them. Cool, I don't have to encode ampersands any more, Netscape doesn't need them to be encoded!
Netscape 3.0: Shit! All those ampersands have broken my links, I'd better fix them. At least I can skip the semicolon at the end.
Netscape 4.0: Shit! That semicolon was needed after all. But look at the shiny <layer> elements I can use! Who cares if the W3C does things a different way?Netscape 6.0: Shit! All my carefully coded <layer>s are being completely ignored! I'd better switch to CSS. It's nice how Netscape doesn't make you serve your stylesheets as text/css. Who cares about media types anyway?
Netscape 7.0: Shit! My stylesheets are being ignored! Better fix them...
Netscape is a perfect example of why complying with the W3C specifications are a good idea. And don't think Internet Explorer doesn't have similar problems with invalid code.
. . .where I work (tech support for a major ISP), I am allowed to support netscape, but not firefox, so I recommend it as an alternative to IE.
I figure that less than 5% of the people I speak to (people who are having problems with their internet connection) are using something other than Windows + IE. Most of that 5% are Mac users (and mostly OS 8-9).
I know people use linux/mac/bsd/etc, and firefox/netscape/opera/lynx/etc, but those that do either don't use my ISP, don't have problems, don't call when they do have problems, or some combination of the above.
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