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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."

15 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Includes by storem · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I briefly browsed around the browser's website, and was please to see it still holds an archive of most Netscape releases since 4.7x

    http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/download/archive.j sp

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  2. I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... by _xeno_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... by Pneuma+ROCKS · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...

      That's a massive job, even if done slowly. I don't think it'll happen, specially because it would mean constantly breaking pending patches and blocking access to different groups of files at given times. It would also break common code between other Mozilla and Mozilla-related technologies, like Seamonkey or Camino. It's good that bugs fixed on one app can be easily migrated to the other. I think the ns is there to stay, just like the Kung Fu Death Grip and such. It doesn't do much harm, anyway. A little annoyance to developers.

      --
      Favorite quote: "
    2. Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... by Guy+Harris · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...

      Probably not, for the reasons stated, just as I don't expect another company to get rid of its "NS" prefix in its code to sever itself from that code's history.

    3. Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... by HeroreV · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unless "NS" is an acronym for "namespace." Although I think you're probably trying to make a joke.

    4. Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... by SharpFang · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, both ways. The application of the "ns" extension is the same in both cases: to separate entries/functions from the standard namespace. So while most likely the w3c suffix means "namespace", and the prefix in Mozilla originates from NetScape, the conclusion would be Mozilla should abandon its Netscapish NS prefix and replace it with something like... NameSpace, short: NS?

      Simply change the way you read it...

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  3. Funny... by mark0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Times have changed. by dot_bull · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Except MS invented nothing like a browser. They bought SpyGlass, hired ex-NeXT developer Chris Franklin to work it over and created IE. Just to set the record straight, as if anyone gives a hoot.

  5. Re:Times have changed. by imsabbel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft didnt need monopolistic tactics to defeat netscape.
    with the later 3.x versions, and especially with the evil 4.x ones, Netscape Navigator managed to evolve into a PIG of browser.

    He used to have netscape installed on 64Mbyte machines in the university datacenter, and people BEGGED the admins to allow the use of IE5, just because netscape 4.73 was slow, and when it wasnt slow, it was buggy, or crashed, or swapped around like crazy.

    It took the mozilla developers 2+years plus a complete change of the rendering engine to somehow salvage the trainwreck netscape navigator had become.

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  6. Netscape's still around by NorbrookC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Netscape by petermgreen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  8. In other news.... by sillybilly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  9. More bad naming structure by mccalli · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Probably too late for this to be read by many now, but sticking a top-level hierarchy as your organisation name is just pure nomenclenture. I agree that many others have done it, but I level this charge at them as well.

    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

    1. Re:More bad naming structure by AndroidCat · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Old old news. Not only does that naming convention for organization hierarchy groups predate the Start button, it almost certainly predates Windows too.

      It's done when the organization (companies, universities, etc) needs to be authoritative (or even authoritarian) about the various sub-groups under their hierarchy, and doesn't want to have to go through the Big-8 process for creating a new group every time they suddenly need a mozilla.plug-ins.bustamove or something.

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  10. Re:Includes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Hehe, I had a laugh the other day. I was poking around my old cdroms and found a single .tar.gz on a cdrom, a backup of 1 of my old machines from 2002! Had a blast getting it to run in a virutal machine under vmware. Redhat 6.0, Hedwig :) Totally custom though. I even got that latest 2.2 kernel rolling just for fun once it was up.

    What was funny is that I fired up Netscape, hit my my company's Citrix secure gateway, and it handled the new ssl certificate from Thawte no problem, insalled without a hitch! This while everyday at work we are getting calls from IE 6.whatever users having difficutly getting their browser to "trust" the certificate issuer. Hehe. Now 2002 isnt that old, but I think even then I was "hangin on" to RH 6.0, so it probably as circa 2000 browser at least. I even took a screen shot to poke fun at my co-workers :)