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Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape. From the article: 'Mozilla's Usenet public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla's public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use. Most of the approximately 63 different newsgroups that began with the old moniker have now been officially abandoned.' Related: Earlier this week Netscape Communications released version 8.1 of its Netscape Browser."
Sadly, today's Netscape is just a shadow of its former self: "What's Included in the Download? Installation may include Netscape 8.1 Browser, Netscape ISP, McAfee, Rhapsody, Real Arcade and WeatherBug." Sad.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape.
Related: Earlier this week Netscape Communications released version 8.1 of its Netscape Browser."
I d'led NS 8 just to see what they'd been up too for the past 4 years and I was amazed to see it used the freakin IE engine. bizarro, no?
"Coffee is the lifeblood of champions" -Mike Ditka
Updated code from 2002 is missing for some reason. Who knows what else isn't right/secure.
There still arround, they've just become the Switzerland of the browser wars.
#include <signature.h>
The renaming of the newsgroups has been one of the failures of the mozilla projects, and has dragged on for years.
It caused problems back before even Netscape 6 was released. The newsgroups were intended for developers, but because they were called "netscape.public.mozilla.x" they would get loads of noise from people looking for help with Netscape 4. Thats died down now, or at least moved on to questions about Firefox. Having said that, I'm a fan of what Mozilla.org has done, and if the names of their newsgroups are my biggest criticism of them then they must be doing something right.
This change should also help reduce the amount of spam on the newsgroups, since they will only be accessible through the mozilla news server and google groups
This reminds me of Austin Powers...
Under the Ballmer-McBride thesis that open source is evil, Netscape is Scotty and Mozilla is Mini Me:
Netscape, you're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough!
While is sad to see Netscape fizzle away, it was the browser that took on IE and fought the good fight. Mozilla and Firefox are the next evolution in the fight against IE. There is one constant in this universe though and that is Internet Explorer :( Hopefully this stiff competition will make IE a good browser once again.
http://religiousfreaks.com/they must be poping bottles of champagne, because of this @ microsoft in redmond
IE was the browser that took on Netscape, not the other way around. All Netscape did was lose, partly because IE at the time was superior and partly because Microsoft broke the law.
Dear Audal,
:)
You seem to have a lot of drive and enthusiasm, which is obviously not finding a productive outlet, have you thought about getting some part-time work in IT? Perhaps try doing some volunteer work!
Maybe you've not yet graduated and are going through that 'difficult' stage. Girls don't seem to like you, the sporty kids bully you. We've all been there, it'll pass. The simple fact that is girls mature faster than boys.
In a few years, you'll look back on these days and laugh!
Anyway, take care.
AC.
I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...
All XPCOM interfaces start with "nsI," cross-platform support is based on the "Netscape Portable Runtime," most functions start with "NS_"...
I wonder if they have any plans to slowly transition over to "mozI" or "Moz_"? Somehow I doubt it (massive plugin breakage), but still - the remains of Netscape are still all over the code.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
You mean they now produce stunningly accurate clocks? Cool!
Netscape were the KINGS of the internet in the middle 90s.
Tons of webpages used their propritary tags, and those stupid "use netscape 2.x" tags were more common than any IE-only bias that followed later. As long as netscape had 95%+ market share, they werent nice guys in any way (or why would they have invented the blink tag, and the frame creep?)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
I realized that a piece of paper I was scribbling some notes on today had been torn out of a give-away notebook from the Netscape Internet Developer's Conference which took place almost exactly 10 years ago.
At the time, their HTLM editor had no spell checker and I was trying integrate a third-party solution for a customer. I tried to talk to some of their developer relations folk to get some help. They refused to give up the clipboard format and I didn't have the chops at the time to reverse engineer it. At that time, I told them I believed that MSFT would eventually eat their lunch, seeing as how they treated their developers pretty well.
Whether or not that was a significant contribution to their current state, the prediction worked out.
Funny how the give-aways outlast the companies.
Wasn't Netscape developed as a Mozilla killer?
Nope... Netscape was meant to be a Mosaic-killer (Mosaic + godzilla = Mozilla)
You're thinking of Mosaic, not Mozilla.
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It uses both the IE engine and the Mozilla engine, IIRC. You can switch between them.
Or you can get a similar effect in Firefox on windows using the IE Tab extension. Can be very handy.
Still using that version? :-) (I have no right to throw stones - I knw!)
Almost as bizarre as your version of English.
Netscape used to be able to charge corporations money to use their browser.
When Microsoft gave away IE for free, it cut off Netscape's revenue source. I blame the downfall in software quality on Netscape's inability to find a new revenue stream.
Or to put it another way... even if they implemented roaming profiles, you'd still be paying Microsoft and not paying Netscape.
They are still around? They dont really fit into the "browser wars" at all.
Actually they do. Even though they're not the browser anymore, they're still involved - If you're using Bugzilla, that's a Netscape product - and it's in Firefox. Netscape is a Mozilla-based product right now, and Mozilla only exists because Netscape opened its source.
Netscape is a case study in how to fritter away a brand. It wasn't that long ago in real time that Netscape had THE browser and THE portal. Then they tried to release "do everything" browser packages, networking systems, and a whole slew of other things which they really botched. AOL buying them didn't help in the least, since AOL didn't have a clue as to what to do with them. About the only thing they did right was to release their code base, and that was more an act of desperation than anything else. It took a long time for Mozilla to straighten out the mess. Now it's finally looking much better, and FireFox and Thunderbird are what Netscape should have been.
netscape 7 was essentially a screwed about with version of mozilla with various advertising type crap added (not banner adds but things like popping up its own search sidebar whenever you used google)
i dunno about netscape 8 but i hear it uses the IE rendering engine by default.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Uh, wrong. I used Netscape 7 for years. The only thing I can think of that could be what you're talking about is the sidebar displaying the links when you do a google search. That's in Mozilla too, if I'm not mistaken. They did have a Netscape search thing, but that was different and easily avoided. Sure, Netscape 7 had a lot of extra junk in it, but it did have more polish than Mozilla - NS 7 still had developers working on it, and they spent a lot of time killing bugs. If they had stuck with the Suite instead of moving to the terrible, terrible piece of software that is NS 8, I'd still be using it. As it is, I'm relatively happy with Firefox, even though it seems slower and hogs more memory.
Oh, and NS 8 only uses Trident by default for some sites that they specify in a list to use it on. Supposed to increase compatibility. I'm not a big fan of it, though.
Why consider the prefix to be an annoyance?
Because on the Mac OS X platform, NS meaning Netscape conflicts with NS meaning NextStep.
Bullshit.. I remember that mystical feeling of the early days of surfing the net, in a library, way back in 1994, with Nescape 1.0. Yahoo was a neat place, had a lot of categories, while it was young, run by two hillbillies as a startup, there was Webcrawler as a search engine, then Altavista later a little better (nothing as good as google though that showed up in 1999, or ICQ in 97), and even Ebay was around. Back in 94 forget looking at the library catalog index to find a book, walk to the shelf, when you could just sit down at the same computer and just have the answers right at your fingertips. And you could have all that from home, via a SLIP dialup, with Trumpet Winsock/Win3.1, manual logins! Yay! And all this came alive because of Netscape - gopher, news, ftp, telnet and such have fallen mostly by the wayside, and http became the major dominant force of the internet, all because of netscape making it so accessible. Microsoft had no clue, was just simply left in the dust, they thought of the internet and www as you think of gopher or ftp these days - insignificant user experience, clumsy and frustrating to use, and who needs it anyway? Netscape, riding on NCSA's Mosaic's back, proved it differently. Netscape 2.0 had neat javascript (plus bundled news and especially email) - who would have thought an C-like syntax is masterable by the masses, when average joe needs either cobol or basic? Then holy cow, Netscape 3.0 with java! Yahoo games, chess, card games, pool, it all rocked! Secure sandbox too! Good old days when the web used to be secure, unlike the activex junk today, plus all the downloadable instant messenger backdoors and spyware 'innovations' that happened since then. Or blogging, you no longer have to go to the confession booth to repent your sins, you can put it all in writing online! Be honest please, and personal! Gee, what progress since then to please you the customer! Back then Netscape 3.0 was miles ahead of IE 3.0, even though by 4.0 you could feel the pressure lowering on the company to stop doing what it was doing, including sabotagelike deliberate crappy work - 4.0 was pretty much crap compared to the revolution 3.0 was, dhtml was a mess compared to the perfection that secure java applets were. If netscape were allowed to flourish, I believe the whole computing experience would be different today - I can't tell what they would have invented, but I'm sure it would have been more nice stuff - for instance you could be having an online desktop, with wordprocessors and all your needs, from any-isp service provider at a low cost, all you need is hardware, boot via some free bios program, log on from anywhere in the world to your service provider, and there you go, at 10bux a month everything included, connection, software, everyting, if there is enough competition, because netscape didn't try to hog the market, they didn't try to be yet another AOL and "everything goes through me" service provider, but they let local isp's live too. Today even if you had such an webmail service type of world, it would be only 3 players - yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Barrier of entry humongous. What about local ISP's, mom and pop shops? Talk about an information economy where there are only 2 players and the rest of the population is excluded, can only be p4wns. Unfortunately there were powerful forces vested in the current monopolistic desktop model. After Netscape was exterminated, what has happened? Nothing! We're just milking the same old cash cows from way back 1993, Win31 + MS Office + some database on the network somewhere, all with a new face slapped on it, and ok, some stability improvements, but with all those trillions invested, you better get some stability, and even so I dont' think the customer is getting a fair return. Why innovate if the money is flowing in, why be stupid and undercut yourself, why lower the cost of computing, and have everyone better off when that means making yourself worse off? Of course you won't. And most importantly, don't let the market turn into a competitive place where there a
You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?
IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience. Others, having failed to learn from Netscape's demise that it's not possible to do business on M$, have improved IE with pop-up blocking "toolbars" but IE itself is about three generations behind every other major browser. Compare it to KDE's excellent desktop integration, and you realize that M$ is never going to catch up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
At the risk of being badly modded, I agree, and I even wonder, why do they still bother with developping their browser? Nobody cares about it anymore. Netscape Communicator was at its best at 4.x.
You just got troll'd!
It sounds like this topic was certainly before your time!
As far back as I can remember, Netscape profiles could be shared across Unix machines using NFS, and I presume the windows counterpart also worked the same. File locking was in place to prevent the profile being trashed. And then in version 4.5 (October 1998), Netscape allowed the profile, including calanders, to be stored on a central server using Internet protocols. It was not until many years later that Exchange offered the same level of functionality for Windows workstations, and Internet Explorer still does not natively allow Favourites to be retrieved over the Internet.
I was as much a Netscape loyalist as anyone, but IE 5.x blew away Netscape 4.x in terms of features and stability. That time between Netscape 4.x and Mozilla betas was rough.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I d'led NS 8 just to see what they'd been up too for the past 4 years and I was amazed to see it used the freakin IE engine.
I don't know where you got that idea, but Netscape still uses Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox rendering engine).
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
If IE is a universal constant, than the age of the universe must be about 15 years or so. Now that would give the Creationists something to talk about. :P
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
You're partly right. NS8 uses both Gecko and IE's engine and you can toggle between the two.
that is really there for National Socialist. They're trying to tell you something...
Should be comp.mozilla, not top-level Mozilla. There's also a comp.infosystems.www hierarchy, which would seem a better place.
Think of the typical Windows Start menu, and what a mess it is because companies keep sticking their name in it rather than the name of the product or anything tied to the product's purpose. Usenet has gone the same way unfortunately.
Cheers,
Ian
Its best at 4.x!
Netscape 4.x was evil, unless you disabled JavaScript. 3.x was better. In fact, Netscape 4.x was so bad it made me use IE4.
And the best chocolate too.
Do not read this
The last vestiges won't be removed until they move the "Preferences" form under "Edit" in the file menu in the linux version, to under "Tools" like in the other OS versions. I have never understood this inconsistency between OS versions.
The whole integrating into Windows 98 sped things way up though.
Mozilla has been ahead of IE for almost 5 years now, and you don't see a similar reversal of Microsoft's fortunes.
Matter of fact I used to disable JavaScript. Back then it hardly even had any use besides to piss you off with pop-ups. I just remembered that not only I used to disable JavaScript, but also images. lol, my 75 MHz computer with the 33.6 modem was suffering so much.
You just got troll'd!
"Nazi gold."
No, they hold an annual rendering engine forum called WebDAVos, to which all the bigwigs go, feel big and bewigged.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
nobody outside of the so-called geek culture gives a fuck about usenet
OH look! the september that never ended!! lets keep an information applicance out of the hands of the stupid plebians!
At least go for the oldest version they have available: 3.04.
Or the newest version that will run on 16-bit Windows 3.1: 4.08.
Anyone know the last version to run on a 68000 based Mac?
Anyone have a copy of Mozilla from before it was called Netscape?
Support SETI@home
http://sillydog.org/narchive is one place for starters.
http://home.netscape.com/download/archive and http://home.netscape.com/download/archive.html are the older locations that used to go back to version 2.02, but most of the links no longer seem to work since the last time I checked....