Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Netscape 9 to Undo Netscape 8 Mistakes?

Posted by Zonk on from the goin-back-in-time dept.

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?"

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is Netscape still taken serious? by Arimus · · Score: 0, Troll

    Mozilla Firefox the most used browser??? While I'd love it if that was the case IE still leads... on a few websites I can pull the stat's from IE is still around 74% with Firefox around 15%.

    Netscape lost the browser battle along time ago, Opera and then the Mozilla project putting the remaining nails in its coffin finishing off the work IE did.

    *Note* I'm not saying IE is a better browser, just when it is bundled as part of the OS its got a rather captive audience - those who know better switch to FF but those poor buggers who work for companies which force IE on their staff have no choice.

    --
    --- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
  2. Re:There's a Netscape 9? And 8? 7? 6? by tloh · · Score: 0, Troll

    ahhh...good old fashioned netscape.

    That's cute.

    as opposed to IE...who is just simply slutty. We all look down at how easily it can behave promiscuously on the web. But at the same time some of us often face a desire or need to access resources that the slut so conveniently provides. Oh, what's a faithful man to do!

    --
    Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
  3. Re:3 was the last worthwhile version. by limecat4eva · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well, yes, it's not exactly news that Gecko (and, in Firefox, the chrome surrounding it) is rather bloated and slow. If you're after speed, I'd suggest looking at Opera; if you want speed and better standards compliance than Gecko, there's KHTML/WebKit.

    Frankly, I'm not really sure what Gecko's strength is anymore, now that WebKit is open source.

    --
    comma