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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.