Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember that mystical feeling of the early days when people used paragraphs.