Netscape 9 to Undo Netscape 8 Mistakes?

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that Netscape 9 has been announced. The most interesting thing is how they seem to be re-evaluating many of the decisions they made with Netscape 8. Netscape 9 will be developed in-house (Netscape 8 was outsourced) and it will be available for Windows, OSX, and Linux (Netscape 8 was Windows only). Although Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, the company is also considering resuming support for Netscape 7.2, the last suite version with an email client and Web page editor. It remains to be seen whether Netscape will reverse the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko but given that there's no IE for OS X or Linux, here's hoping. After a series of substandard releases, could Netscape be on the verge of making of a version of their browser that enhances the awesomeness of Firefox, rather than distracts from it?"

Comments

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[networkBoy]

First couple days of the month for one of my sites...

Windows 202 72.4 %
        Linux 37 13.2 %
        Unknown 35 12.5 %
        Macintosh 4 1.4 %
        GNU 1 0.3 %

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
          Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
        Firefox No 127 45.5 %
        MS Internet Explorer No 91 32.6 %
        Unknown ? 34 12.1 %
        Konqueror No 10 3.5 %
        Opera No 8 2.8 %
        Mozilla No 6 2.1 %
        Safari No 2 0.7 %
        Wget Looks like it's likely to be firefox on windows for the most common...

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[larry bagina]

He didn't say Firefox was the most used browser, he said it was "more used" than Netscape.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[networkBoy]

Foo, replying to myself, more stats (the gripe-site in sig), for 2007YTD, I'm betting that most of the hits come from ./ :-)

Operating Systems Hits Percent
        Windows 7339 80.2 %
        Linux 1059 11.5 %
        Macintosh 554 6 %
        Unknown 188 2 %

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
          Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
        Firefox No 6061 66.3 %
        MS Internet Explorer No 1945 21.2 %
        Mozilla No 356 3.8 %
        Safari No 315 3.4 %
        Opera No 260 2.8 %
        Konqueror No 76 0.8 %
        Unknown ? 63 0.6 %
        Netscape No 30 0.3 %
        Camino No 25 0.2 %
        Galeon No 6 0 %
          Others 3 0 %

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[limecat4eva]

www.pimpmysafari.com

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Maian]

You got 2 things wrong:

1. Netscape 4 didn't use Gecko. At all. It was built on top of Netscape 3. The first Netscape to use Gecko was Netscape 6 (they skipped version 5 as a marketing ploy).
2. Gecko supports CSS. Netscape 3 doesn't. Want to try viewing /. in Netscape 3? Be my guest. Now the old /. - that's a different story :)

Re:3 was the last worthwhile version.

[Tumbleweed]

I want a sodding web browser.

Well, if it's a sodding web browser you want, I can highly recommend IE7. It definitely ups the sod factor significantly.

I wonder if someone could come up with a Navigator 3 theme for Firefox that would configure the interface to the (vastly superior) Navigator 3 interface. That'd be nice. I'd keep CSS though, if I were you (although I'd make sure minimum font size and override web author colours was turned on).

As far as speed goes, I think most people would be SHOCKED at how much faster the Web experience is if you have a caching name server running on your machine. Seriously - the biggest speedup you'll probably ever see.

Re:There's a Netscape 9? And 8? 7? 6?

[Greg Lindahl]

Um, there's still a big market for Fortran compilers... and F2003 has lots of "modern" features, so it's not really living in the past.

Re:Is Netscape still taken serious?

[Professor_UNIX]

Personally, I'm happy with Firefox 1.5.something. Tried 2.0, it screwed my bookmarks, various other things.

You must be doing something screwy with your bookmarks. I've got hundreds of bookmarks organized into folders and had zero problems going from 1.5 to 2.0. It disabled a couple of oddball extensions I had but fired right up.

Re:What is the point?

[christopherfinke]

What will NS9 that Firefox, maybe with one or two extensions installed, cannot do?

For starters, improvements to the core of the browser. If we only wanted Netscape to be Firefox with a few extensions, we would have already released it as Firefox with a few extensions. I'm not at liberty to discuss here what else there will be, but I do blog a progress update/feature teaser every Tuesday at the Netscape blog.

One thing I can guarantee: Netscape 9 will not force you to supply a zipcode when you install it. That's one Netscape 8 mistake it will definitely undo.

Christopher Finke
Dev lead for Netscape 9

Netscape 9 Was Supposed To Be So Much More...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but the unilateral decisions of Jason Calacanis and the "New Netscape" team destroyed that, along with a thriving Netscape portal, and caused the company to lose insane numbers of viewers in the process. The new browser would have been built in-house, utilizing Gecko and AOL's slick new Boxely UI framework. It was designed as a suite of tightly integrated communication, sharing, and storage tools. Instead, it's going to be a Firefox clone aimed at Netscape.com.

Because of Calacanis' bad decisions, hundreds of people at AOL's Columbus, OH campus lost their writing, editing, design, development, and management jobs. The aforementioned loss of portal viewership has also cost AOL (with its new advertising-heavy revenue model, mind you) untold amounts of money. The "New Netscape" is, and has always been, a colossal mistake -- a "me too" effort on a grand scale.

Jason Calacanis is gone. Jon Miller, his idol and strong supporter, has been "warmly" shown the door. AOL now needs some serious focus and innovation to gain audience, not more halfhearted "Web 2.0" efforts that nobody is going to use.