Slashdot Mirror
First Peek at Netscape Navigator 9
lisah writes "Netscape released a beta version of Navigator 9 (Linux.com shares corporate overlordship with Slashdot) today that includes several new components while giving some old ones the boot. This release will no longer ship with mail or composer but does have URL correction, a pre-populated RSS feed menu, and a neat clipboard in the browser's sidebar that will hold links to websites you want to visit again but not necessarily bookmark."
"For those who remember the Netscape Navigator suite, it's lost a little weight -- Navigator no longer includes mail or HTML composer components, just a souped-up Firefox build with a number of features that integrate with the Netscape.com portal."
I'm glad to hear it's been slimmed down, but really, is integration with the Netscape.com portal a big feature?
I wonder if Netscape still have the brand power to draw in old skool internet users to use their product once again if it turns out to be a good alternative to IE/FF/Opera/etc...
I first started using Netscape back in 95 and used it for years till IE5 came out. After that I just got stuck with IE and used Opera here and there but I always had Netscape in the back on my mind. Hey its its based on FF and works good I'd switch to it just because it was my first browser.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Netscape confirms it.
I think the correct way to phrase that question is:
WHAT IS AOL????
It's basically a re branded version of Firefox 2.0...
From About: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5pre) Gecko/20070604 Firefox/2.0.0.4 Navigator/9.0b1
NetWho? Is that some sort of Mozilla knockoff?
Netscape 4.x is what killed Netscape. Maybe the early 4.0 versions were acceptable, I really can't remember, but by around 4.5 it was a bloated, slow, buggy browser. Netscape 4.x is what made Internet Explorer popular. IE 5 was a breath of fresh air compared with Netscape 4. (Personally, I think that IE 4 was also many times better than NS 4, but that's a different argument. It's really unarguable that IE 5 was superior, though.)
Now some people might cry out that IE is a security nightmare and that no one should choose it over Netscape for that reason, but NS 4 was also a security nightmare. It was, simply, a worse browser than IE 5. It was in the NS 4 days that I switched to IE, and it was because IE was simply a better browser.
Netscape died in the 4.x days, when the browser became a large, slow, and bloated piece of crap. Compared with Netscape 4, IE was a fast, light, agile browser with many more features and provided a much better experience. As someone writing webapps around the Netscape 4.5/IE 5 days, I can say that IE provided a much nicer platform to write webapps for.
That changed around the release of Mozilla 1.0; but around the time of Netscape 4.5, IE was simply the better browser while Netscape was simply no longer improving their browser.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Didn't Netscape drop mail and composer a while back? Let's see...
From Netscape's Browser FAQ (emphasize is mine):
If I recall correctly, Netscape 7 was based on the Mozilla suite (now known as SeaMonkey) and included those components, and with version 8, they based it on Firefox (which never included mail and composer) and went back to calling it "Navigator".
You'd think that "journalists" might research their stories a little bit.
How many people actually have commented on this article already without actually downloading and trying the product?
Let's all give it a good shot first before making some quick judgments. Sure it may just be a branded Firefox, but it also may have some great uses. Maybe this is a browser that may be the recommended browser for your aunts and uncles when they get a new system? Who knows.. Let's at least give it a shot before shooting it and leaving it for dead.
h
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
What is AOL?
It's the company that makes Winamp. They used to make free backup diskettes that you had to reformat before using. They sent hundreds of millions of them around for free by attaching them to anything that moved. I used to have to peel them off my car each night when I got home from work. Later, they got into the landfill business by making and distributing hundreds of millions of non re-writeable CD's.
Believe it or not, at one point AOL actually had a low-cost connection service that they branded as "Netscape." They were convinced that they should be able to get something out of the brand name, even if they were practically ignoring the browser and didn't own the server (IIRC, Netscape sold their server division to Sun before AOL bought them), so they were slapping it on anything they could think of.
The Seamonkey suite is the ongoing project of the original Mozilla Suite. It has the functionality of Netscape 7 (plus some) as well as the updated support of the rendering engine from Firefox 2 and other security updates. (see the news release for more info.
Disclosure: I have been running Mozilla suite and now Seamonkey since about 1999.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot.
It's a bit more complicated than that:
Old Netscape --> Mozilla
Mozilla --> Netscape 6-7 (at the time, Moz was Netscape's testbed)
Mozilla --> Firefox
Firefox --> Netscape 8+
But yes, as far as I'm concerned, the name may have gone one way, but the core of what Netscape signified ended up as Firefox.
Why not use SeaMonkey instead? It's from the same code base as Netscape 7.2 with all kinds of new features and bug fixes, and (most significantly) many years of security vulnerability fixes. It also has menus on the left side, a print button, and mail and composer.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Though I agree that Netscape 4.x was bad in all the ways you say - the major reason IE became popular was because it was installed on most people's desktops as an icon called "The Internet".
You can simplify things a lot by focusing your testing on engines, rather than browsers.
For instance, Firefox 2, SeaMonkey, 1.2, Camino 1.5 and Netscape 9 all use the same major version of Gecko. Unless you're dealing with something controlled by the UI -- extensions, for instance, or the search box on the toolbar -- they're going to treat your code more or less the same. You'll start seeing bigger differences in screen size and platform.
-and-
B) From the "What's new" page on Netscape 9:
That being said, I don't see anything in Netscape that I want that isn't already in Firefox.