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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.
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/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!
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)
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
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
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
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.