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."

Comments

I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then...

[_xeno_]

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.

Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then...

[Pneuma ROCKS]

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.

Funny...

[mark0]

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.

Netscape's still around

[NorbrookC]

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.