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Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy

Posted by Zonk on from the you-can-never-go-home-again dept.

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."

3 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Includes by someguy456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Finally by thelem · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  3. Breathing by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.