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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."
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
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.
"While is sad to see Netscape fizzle away, it was the browser that took on IE and fought the good fight."
You don't really believe that Microsoft invented the web browser, do you? When Netscape was born, Bill Gates didn't even think the internet was particularly important. And Netscape was just building on the university-developed NCSA Mosaic browser.
Back in the mid-90s, Netscape was THE dominant browser. But it got stagnant as the corporation tried to figure out how to make money off of it. Meanwhile, Microsoft built a browser that was comparable in quality (neither one was great), and used it's monopolistic position - combined with some rather unethical tactics - to grab users away from Netscape.
#DeleteChrome
Wasn't Netscape developed as a Mozilla killer?
Nope... Netscape was meant to be a Mosaic-killer (Mosaic + godzilla = Mozilla)
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.
Correct if you mean 'Mozilla the foundation'. The Mozilla suite is dead and will see no further development by the Mozilla foundation. It's now an independent community project called Seamonkey. If I read the news groups correctly the team is substanitally the same one responsible for the old suite. See: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ The best bet is one of the nightly build releases under the 'contrib' branch of the trunk tree. Gecko/20060116 SeaMonkey/1.0b is working well for me.
Just to be fair IE 5 of course was always conviently preloaded into memory even if you weren't using it...
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
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.
Well, that's true, but let's not forget that Netscape's REAL business was Enterprise server software. The rise of Apache had a lot more to do with Netscape's poor finances than the rise of IE did.
In conclusion:
+ Netscape browser gets beat down by IE
+ Netscape web server loses against Apache and IIS
+ Netscape groupware gets squeezed off the map by MS Exchange and IBM Notes
+ Netscape application server (Kiva) gets overwhelmed by Java stuff like BEA and WebSphere
Endgame: Netscape ends up a as a lame portal company.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Try an LXR search. Generally speaking, kungFuDeathGrip is used (as Pneuma ROCKS guessed) to ensure that reference counts are kept above 0 during a code path. A good example is in libpr0n, where the comment kind of explains what they're doing.
In XPCOM (and COM), objects have reference counts. When the reference count reaches 0, the object is destroyed. The reference count is incremented any time a block of code takes a reference to the object, and is decremented whenever a block of code releases that reference.
Occasionally there are places where the reference count is potentially 1, and a certain function call may reduce it to 0 (thereby destroying the object) before the object is really ready to be destroyed. In that case, the Mozilla codebase grabs a kungFuDeathGrip on the object (increasing the ref count by 1) until it's really safe to release the object.
Generally speaking this occurs when an object (event source) makes a callback on another object with a refcount of 1 (event handler), and the event handler removes itself from the event source - reducing its refcount to 0. However, if the event handler isn't complete yet (still has some cleanup), then they need to grab a kungFuDeathGrip to ensure that the object isn't destroyed before it's ready to be destroyed.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
There was a *very* long period where IE was the *only* browsing experience worth using. IE4 vs. Netscape 4, you could still just about justify using Netscape. As soon as IE5 came out, there was no comparison. And a working, stable, non-processor-hogging version of Mozilla was still 2-3 years in the future.
Grab.
Posted anonymously, simply because I dont need the karma.
Having worked at Netscape during the 'browser wars', you are wrong and the other posted was correct.
Netscape actually did testing for open statndards. It was the company mantra. was the one exception to that rule, and if scuttlebutt is to be believed, it was put in while a proposal for standardization, and it wasn't included (thank god, how annoying), they just never removed the functionality.
Everything was standard, a NNTP news server, a POP3/IMAP4 Mail server, HTTP/HTTP Web server, LDAP directory server.
What tags are you talking about, exactly?
The Enterprise server (HTTP/HTTPS) was even tested against IE to make sure things worked well.
The only history distortion I see if yours. Your claims simply arent true. Prove me wrong, I'd love to me enlightened on the issue. I worked with all of these products, and joined Netscape to fight Microsoft (well, and the fact it was cool as hell to work there).
Netescapee.