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Communicator Is Losing The War.....
Carnage4Life writes "Here's a ZDNet article that backs up the post by Dave Whitinger..it seems corporate IT types are tired of waiting for Navigator to catch up and may begin to abandon it... Wonder where that leaves Linux users if websites start tending to be IE enabled to perform useful tasks."
I don't see that where I work. Im a web developer and the company still supports netscape. we don't want to be tied up with microsoft too much and make us vulnerable. but they are right that communicator would have to move forward to maintain their position. Otherwise we would be forced to use web technologies that only IE can use currently. Another thing that worries me is Office 2000 web conversions. These programs are popular or will be in the future. You can save them as a web document. However it won't work well under Netscape.. but of course will work fine under IE.. What if companies do that? that would be troublesome..
Now the big issue is, why? Plainly put, crappy products. Their browser is a dog, even worse than IE.
Their servers are woefully inadequate compared to the freely-available Apache, which also has captured the market for server extensions.
As much as Microsoft damaged them with questionable practices, there is no doubt Netscape helped dig their own grave.
Netscape, pretty much for the entire 4.x release
/.'s homepage) wouldn't cause browser
process, appears to be unable to release a
solid, stable browser that behaves consistently
across different color depths, and doesn't crash
regardless of what java and javascript do.
By version 4.7, you would think that they'd
figure out how to make Java work consistently,
regardless of how many times NS has crashed
during that X session. By verison 4.7, you would
think that random pieces of javascript (i.e.
what's on
crashes under some circumstances but not others.
Finally, you would think that bugs that have
been reported since 4.05 and earlier would
actually be fixed in 4.7, instead of them
just adding new features.
Right now, in terms of stability, netscape
is crap. Right now, if IE was available for
FreeBSD (either native of a Linux version),
I would probably be running it, because IE
on NT sure is a hell of a lot more stable
than Netscape on anything. I don't think IE
has better features. I don't think it has a
better interface. The only reason I care about
IE is that it has less bugs.
Right now I'd also be very very happy to be able
to pay $35 for a copy of Opera for FreeBSD.
It's small, fast, and STABLE! Yes, the most
important part of that is STABLE. Besides being
annoying, flaky software isn't user friendly.
ERROR: Null
Well, perhaps people should pay attention to what people are talking about in the talkback part of the article. Not to mention that NS5 will have the Gecko engine, so Internet Explorer will definately feel some fear ... Gecko has a rendering subroutine that is really really fast. Internet explorer still seems slow to me on the wind0z3 95 side.
I like NS because when I hit an LDAP server I get all the attributes. IE pops up it's idiotic "address book" and tries to make the server schema fit with the MS schema. Useless. Oh yeah, and when NS locks, I can kill it and restart. When IE freezes, my ^&#*^ TASK BAR is useless! Often the explorer as well! Bah.
Blar.
If you have tried a fresh install of 98 SE, with ie5 installed (and do it correctly!) you will notice that ie is an extremely stable process under the correct setup. Much better even that netscape is under windows. I have a theory... Netscape, although it used to be known for stability over IE, has since tried so hard to catch up with M$, that it sacrificed stability for features, and you end up with an unstable N. Its no fun. Netscape WILL go down. IE is for Windows, Mozilla (which i am decently faithful in) is for Linux. I am faithful that once mozilla gets rolling, netscape wont have a place in windoze or linux....
You know what? Any company that caters only to IE doesn't really deserve to be visited. They're only limiting their user base. As Linux users grow, their only real graphical browser is Netscape. Opera, Mnemonic, Gzilla... well I haven't seen anything yet. W3C's Amaya is ok, but it is quite slow.
:) Oh no, then their stock value will go down... too bad...
So, these companies base their entire websites on some stupid toy feature that only IE provides? Don't visit it.. hmm.. perhaps a boycott of all these sites and their products. A non-compatible website blacklist
As I have said before. It isn't hard to have an effective and good looking website that is compatible with most browsers. Catering to one single browser is a bad choice, but it doesn't seem like it now, just because most people are using IE. What if, suddenly a company like Opera turns up and their browser is 100x better? Uh oh....
"But we're too lazy to cater to other browsers! We want to make money now!!" Whine whine blah blah. Like it would be hard for a web design company to download netscape and lynx for a quick check. "But HTML coding is hard... we don't want to change just so the +30% who use Netscape can visit our site. Then we will actually have to work to get this feature to do something, not just rely on <crap> tag that IE has."
And with all these cell-phones and PDAs that can surf the web now, why wouldn't you want to cater to text browsers? What about blind people? These are things that these companies are not thinking about.
When stupid people design websites, this is what happens...
This situation should be no surprise for anyone. Netscape has done everything wrong since they first started.
First, they fucked up the standards. Since Netscape did not follow the standards, IETF released HTML 2.0, which was an attempt for a standard to follow Netscape. But they still managed to screw it up, thus making standard violation acceptable, and "enhancements" hard to detect.
Then they stopped enhancing the hypertext system, and instead started to play the "feature" game. The only game Microsoft knows how to play beside Monopoly. They invented the javascript language, which is so crappy Microsofts incompetent language designers could easily fuck it up without people noticing a quality loss.
They managed to write a browser which could not render pages properly. When web pages started to be IE only, there was no way to tell which browser was most to blame.
The browser source they released was so crappy that most of the pieces had to be replaced.
There's only one way to win this war:Personally, I think doing smart stuff with XML, like writing DTDs with client side graphich layout and making W3C standardize them, is a good start. Just make sure there's no way to use the DTD to affect rendering.
Personally, I think this is the Battle[tm]. If we loose, there will be no access to the web from linux. And who are gonna run linux then? Or any other OS with no IE? Noone. Not even me. And I truly hate Microsoft and thinks a lot of the people working there deserves penalties in the range from large fines to a few years in prison.
-segfault
Simple bug fix: disable java-script. Really!
:(
Every time this incredibly irritating bug has popped up for me has been due to Javascript errors. Going into Edit->Preferences->Advanced, turning off Javascript and reloading has fixed it every time.
Nowadays i just surf with Java and Javascript off. It helps with a lot of the bugs and most java(script) on the net is crap anyway
In my oppinion what browsers need is not *more* functionality loaded at start up, but less.
Let me elaborate this statement.
First off, as we all know there is a formula (at the moment I don't recall it's name) stating that for each ammount of code, there are X number of faults (bugs) in the code. As the code increases, so does the bugs.
So.. In order to minimize the bugs there are two solutions: A) Review and beta test the apps more before release, and B) use less code.
The easiest to do would be option B, while I personally think a combination of A and B would be the best.
The solution the browser makers could apply would be to start the software without and 'plug-ins', java support and other 'fancy'(cloggy) features. Just plain HTML (and perhaps image support).
This would enable the browser to start much quicker than todays'.
If the user would like to have support for additional features, then they would load dynamically (and by the user's choice in the options section, reside in memmory until app. closure for ex.).
Tip for web page software creators.
Any provider of HTML creation software should provide information that says something like: "remember, if you create a page with 'this' or 'that' feature requirement, which is not specified in the W3 standard of HTML, then you will risk loosing business, since many potential customers might not be able to access your pages or might not accept the extra load time".
Myself I remember the days when Gopher was popular, and when Mosaic arrived (and the first Netscape). These tools were great. Unfortunately they aren't of much use today since many sites will not work properly on them. (some because of newer HTML standard and most because of unneccecary extra 'enhancements' which you must have support for).
By that time it was even quicker viewing a rendom web page by using a 14Kbit modem than today's random page with MS or NS browsers and a V.90 modem.
To conclude this post (which became longer than expected), I'd just like to say: Please be aware of the *magic* second, which is a rule all developers should aim to meet (or come close to).
I just thought I'd try to sum up the general feelings of users as far as Netscape goes. I work tech support for an ISP and I think this also adresses a lot of issues that regular users run into:
1) Support the damn standards.
I want to build compliant style sheets and tables and actually have them look decent in both browsers. I don't want some wacky bug screwing with table rendering or mucking about with javascript. I want JavaScript to work without specifying which browser I'm taking into account and writing an individual subroutine for each one.
2) Let me download just the browser again.
Dear Netscape Messenger development team;
Messenger sucks.
As someone who works in tech support, I'm sick of explaining to people why there are user interface issues that crop up, why some things are displayed inline and others aren't. I honestly would rather use a 3rd party mail program than that bloated POS. On a wintel platform, follow Microsoft's lead and make the mail and new separate programs, it'll make everyone happier.
Also, nobody uses Collabra, Composer or any of the other crap that you shovel into every release. There are other programs which do the job much better. This goes for AOL IMmer too, I have ICQ thank you very much. If I want AOL IMmer, I know where to get it. A bit of an idea, take all the coders working on that crap and have them work on the main browser, finding bugs and whatnot.
A functional web browser that is under a 10 meg download wouldn't be bad.
3) Tone down the user interface.
Nobody needs a goddamned shop button. I found that I use a grand total of 4 buttons on my browser:
back, forward, stop, and refresh.
That is all, anything else is mostly useless. Nobody uses the Cool sites crap, or anything else for that matter. More features that take up room. People will invariably use the extra crap for stuff it wasn't intended to be used for, breaking the browser, leading to a call to tech support.
4) Keep bookmarks html.
This is the one thing that Navigator has done right. If I want to move bookmarks from one version to another, or one computer to another I just need to copy a file, unlike IE where I have to copy a whole directory.
5) Load time counts.
Yes, the new layout engine is fast, but that doesn't mean anything if the damn program takes 30 seconds to load. The computers that we use at work are pII-266's with 64 megs of RAM, and IE5 loads in 2 seconds, Navigator takes about 30 seconds to load. You can make all the excuses you want about IE5 being part of the OS and all that. That is beside the point, if IE can do it, so can Navigator, figure out a way. Nobody notices if a web page loads in 1.4 seconds in one browser and 1.7 in another, If the interface feels slow and clunky, that is enough to turn me off.
6) Make the interface decent.
See how smooth IE is, attempt to make Navigator look similar. Navigator is too industrial looking for most peoples tastes. This may be harder because M$ has hidden a lot of the API that IE uses (it is undocumented). Netscape can at least try to get Navigator to look close. This is a minor point, but it counts.
7) A bit controversial, but if IE has bugs, occasionally try to make the page look decent anyway.
People write bad html, tested in only IE. IE renders it the way they want it to render and that is enough. I'm not supporting bad HTML, but it is not the browser's job to become style police. There are a lot of bugs out there and a lot of sites taking advantage of those bugs. Navigator is now in a position of playing catch up. Emma in Nebraska doesn't care about HTML correctness, she cares about being able to read webpages, regardless of the platform they were designed on. Keep standards compliance, but don't be totally rigid on it. In situations where the standard is not clear, follow Microsoft's implementation of it.
I was a faithful Navigator user up until version 4. I continued to use Navigator for a while after it was released, but fewer and fewer sites looked correct and I had to switch to IE. I go over to the people working in web adesign where I work and they are constantly cussing out Navigator.
Anyone have anything else to add?
Andrew (patiently awaitng a version of Navigator that doesn't suck dead kittens through straws.)
You know what? Any company that caters only to IE doesn't really deserve to be visited. They're only limiting their user base.
Yeh, to the 90% of people who use IE...
Look, the fact is netscape dosn't suport standards correctly, unless you consider "CSS" and "Tables" and "Java 2.0" to be propritary IE features (Yes, I've had trouble with tables in netscape, each cell has the background in a table, even when the table itself has no background and its in another cell).
Economic pressure isn't going to make anyone support a POS web browser
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Unless AOL has driven the development of Navigator 5.0 to the point that it is an easy to adapt component system you won't see Navigator inside of an AOL client for quite some time. The entire 4.0-5.0 codebase for the AOL client is written to access IE for web browsing. It doesn't just launch IE as a separate program, it uses IE as it's internal web browsing technology.
Even if they stood up now and said, "6.0 will have NN as the browser" we wouldn't see the result of that for at least 12-14 months. That's a horrendously long time to wait for the tide to change.
Must software constantly change to be useful? Can't tools reach their ultimate evolutionary point and then remain constant, unchanging, and useful? I mean, no one's trying to add more functionality to 'chdir'. Why? Because it's beautiful and elegant as it is. The same goes for the C language. Let IE turn into a limping, bloated, lumbering monstrosity. Netscape is nearly perfect as it. It just needs the remaining bugs ironed out. But new features? No. That's what plug-ins are for. Leave the core Netscape alone.
Doesn't NeoPlanet send a record of every site you go to back to their tracking server?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Has anyone noticed that the mozilla releases seem to be much more stable on windows than linux? Is there some reason for this? GTK stablity? Or what?
The system uses tables for layout, and often nests tables 3 or 4 deep. Current browsers on middle-range hardware (PII 400) take on the order of 5-10 seconds to render an average page. Needless to say, this is suboptimal.
Armadillo, but still at www.gzilla.org. Looks kinda neat, but still very very young.
Likes -- about as fast as Lynx.
Dislikes -- can't display www.gzilla.org properly, trying to configure it via File | Preferences does nothing.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I disagree - the Web was designed to be a hyperlinked multimedia delivery system. That doesn't mean that it is a multi-service delivery system. Essentially, it's a resource request mechanism: you ask for a resource, the server gives it up. What the requesting client does with it is completely up to implementation. The idea of standards provides a consistant representation of what the client should do with that resource.
SMTP/POP/IMAP/NNTP were designed to provide completely different types of services. These types of transactions are not request/response based, but instead are dialog based (ie, LIST/UIDL/GET[[UIDL/GET]...] for POP3). The underlying mechanisms are completely different paradigms, therefore they should use different tools.
This is not to say that each of these services couldn't be properly delivered through the web, but that should be handled on the server side and the web interface would only be a representation of whats really going on. Sites like Hotmail and such provide email using an actual web interface - and it works fine with the standalone browser because it's request/response based.
In all, I'm basically begging the rest of the world to wake up to what the unix world realized a long time ago: 'do one thing and do it well - then connect the tools'. I've seen some great ideas in this area (OpenDoc comes to mind - great idea, absolutely shitty follow-through) end up pushed aside by the raging bloatware juggernaut. If this keeps up, there eventually won't be any applications - just 'systems'...
Culture is more than commerce
But not today. Considering the number of people that use IE, many web designers are simply testing their page against IE. If the current trend continues, you'll become a *very* small minority, one that they don't care about since the percentage doesn't substantially hurt their business.
THAT is the real danger.
--bdj
I hate the multiple document interface Opera uses. And it weirds out on CSS a lot, as well as croaking on some jscript. IE, annoying as it may be, sure is stable, looks good, and costs nothing.
Chris
PS - It is the only Microsoft product I have any appreciation for, and it took until version 5.
Netscape, while being a dog for the user Is also one for the developer as well. This is beacuse just using "standards" dosn't work at all on netscape. CSS is horribly broken, for example
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I can't help but feel we brought this on ourselves. You know, for a long time, I thought that the idea of paying for a decent browser was Unspeakable -- it was like my birthright as an American included having a stable, free (as in beer) Web browser. Now I look at the market, though, and I wonder if what we're seeing isn't just the logical extension of that expectation:
The thing is, these corporate strategies are perfectly rational reactions to a market where web browsers are regarded as economically valueless. Would you expect Netscape (a public company, don't forget) to have poured millions of dollars more into R & D for a product they would never see one cent of revenue from?
Maybe if we had voted with our dollars for the proposition that a good browser was important to us, rather than expecting one to automagically appear and get better every year, things would be different today. Maybe if, back in 1996 when it mattered, we had stepped forward and said "Yes, I'll gladly pay a fair price for a good, stable cross-platform browser," someone would be providing one today, rather than what we ended up with: one browser that's cross-platform and another that's stable. Just a thought.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
Just the kind of thinking I would expect from someone so uncreative as to steal their "name" wholesale from a TV show.
Blar.
There is only one solution to this. Adapt their technology for our own use. To do this we should divide our efforts into two camps.
1. Focus WINE development on getting IE to run on Linux.
2. Focus more efforts on the development of Mozilla.
If we can get IE running on WINE then we might be able to augment the installation of IE and eventually ship a "mini-wine" specifically for IE. My understanding is that there is an HP-UX version of IE which may make it easier to port IE to Linux the "emulator" way.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I've develop programs using MFC and I can say that there are not APIs that MS has that are not documented. That is to say all GUI APIs are all available to anyone wanteding to develop software for windows. Anyone that wants to develop any windows app has the same info that any developer at MS has. So all this crap about how MS has hidden thier APIs is total bullshit. Now I know they are not open source but the docs are all there. System calls are all documented as well.
Terribly flawed. It hurts my brain that you think this way. I'm not even going to try and explain...
Blar.
I think there was a 'beta' version of neoplanet out that used Mozilla as a backend. Of course, considering Mozilla isn't anywhere close to being done...
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I have to admit, that even at that last job I would keep IE around for compatibility testing. I had Web apps that behaved differently on IE and Netscape and when someone reported some odd behavior on IE I would try and reproduce it.
My current employer requires that I use IE for various application compatibility reasons. I suppose I could have threatened to quit over it or something, but I didn't feel that strongly about it. I still use Netscape or Mozilla where I can.
I find it hard to believe that this is only now hitting the news that employers are switching to IE in droves. I've seen this happening since IE4 came out. I've not seen a workplace that won't allow you to use IE if you choose, but I have seen ones that forbid Netscape.
Netscape 5 has slipped a bit too much. Since its purchase by AOL (only interested in increasing its service revenues, hence the "Shop" button where the "Stop" button used to be), they seem to have stopped caring about competing. All the best engineers have since left, leaving a skeleton staff.
Netscape has conceded defeat, by its actions if not by words. They are no longer a competitor to Microsoft, who now all but own the HTML standard. Like it or not, the commercial desktop world is now a one-browser environment.
Hopefully the post-judgment Microsoft won't be able to "de-commoditise" HTML too much.
Actually, I think it might not be such a bad idea if M$ were to start releasing some of it's non-OS software (including IE) for other platforms. Even though their OS sucks, they do have some neat programs, IE being one of them. As much as I hate Windows, I do sometimes miss the variety of apps that were available when I used that system.
Back when Win95 was first released (and before I found out about Linux) I used to have fun playing around with Compton's Encyclopedia, MS Encarta, and of course all the games. Now, I use Linux exclusively because it is a much more stable and robust OS, but I long for the day when there will be just as many good apps for Linux. I still need to dual boot into Windows now and then because my wife likes to use the American Greeting Create-a-Card program to make greeting cards. There is no reason why this kind of software can't one day be made available for Linux.
I am excited about the recent ruling against M$ because maybe this is the start of an era where software vendors will start taking Linux more seriously; once they realize that most people don't care what OS they're using as long as they can still use the programs they like. I predict that someday in the near future (5-10 years) M$ will lose its dominance in the OS market, but it will still retain its strengths as a software vendor. Remember, what made M$ succeed was not its superior OS but rather that it produced a plethora of software that 'normal' people could use. This will alwyas be their strength. I think they should realize, however, that their days of OS dominance are numbered.
MORE APPS FOR LINUX!
MORE APPS FOR LINUX!
Unfortunately, you and I don't count as part of the majority anymore, and we make up a smaller and smaller share of the e-commerce pie.
--bdj
A month from prime time? I doubt it.
It's anyone's guess whether Mozilla, the GNU Hurd or Xanadu will make it out the door first. Or possibly Freedows.
That's because there's no other browser, save for Lynx (which doesn't do graphics). Most distributions come with Lynx as well though.
Other than Netscape what would they use? NCSA Mosaic from about 1995 or so, which can't do tables properly? One of those hobbyist-made browsers which implements about 10% of HTML? Granted, the commercial ones could bulk-buy Opera, though it would add to the cost.
Check out:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/
-- Netscape's market share among our users has hardly dropped at all. Is it only the corporate side that's dropping it? Then again, it could be because almost 50% of our users aren't on any form of Windows.
I also don't understand how this article can claim that XML support is critical when MSIE 5's support is very buggy and full of proprietary MS extensions - for example relying heavily on the ID attribute which has no special meaning in XML. If you look at the Word 2000 "XML" output you'll see it's basically bastardized HTML 4.0, full of "html:span's" and "div's" for example. Mozilla's XML support is excellent and much more standards based. If the promise of XML turns into just another proprietary MS format that only renders correctly on MS software, the W3C has lost a major, major battle here.
Energy: time to change the picture.
What was the one thing he emphasized over and over again that MS does to uphold the Applications Barrier to Entry in favor of Windows?
That's right, winning the browser wars. If MS can kill Netscape (and Java, including Netscape's Java engine), MS will have a stranglehold on the PC market.
The OSS community needs to embrace Netscape/Mozilla or come up with an OSS alternative real quick if it values its computing freedom.
(Personally I even think Netscape is better than IE when it comes to stability. IE on Windows will crash and freeze (and in the case of Windows 9x take the OS with it) seemingly at random. My experience is that IE crashes frequently, leaving the OS in an unusable or unstable state. At least with Netscape it's pretty predictable, over time you learn what makes it crash so you can avoid it. If you run Netscape on a proper OS like Linux it can't take the OS with it so all in all you have a much more stable and predictable web viewing experience.)
Use Opera, use Lynx, use Netscape, use whatever except IE if you value your freedom!
Let webmasters know that if they require IE to view their site you will be taking your business elsewhere!
-- Gunnar
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Someone moderate it up.
You're right. Linux is ancient technology. Somewhere in the '70s, if I'm not wrong. But unfortunately, that and FreeBSD are the only useable alternatives.
Microsofts operating systems is even more dated. And the user interface is crippled. And they have done everything wrong. Everything in they're operating systems are either missing or they sucks. Personally, I think that for anything other than launching games, Windows do not work.
I don't think Linux' user interface is dated. What is dated are the current "We're still on a PDP11" development environment.
-segfault
How far are we from being able to run IE on Wine?
Has anyone given it a try? Is it doable in any sense?
An IE-on-Wine HOWTO would be good once it's viable; running a commercially supported Windows browsing environment in an emulated sandbox would be a lot better than putting up with AOL's bloated, crash-prone browser. (Netscape for UNIX has gone down the toilet as far as usability goes. So much so that at home I use NS 3, as it crashes less often.)
Using Netscape is like getting in a time machine set for 1995.. This means just one thing...IE for Linux. Hurry up already, Bill!
..of course you're gonna justify NS...its not like you can run anything else..oh wait, Lynx!
"What kind of music do you usually have here?"
"Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western."
People "designing" web pages or web sites for a specific set of browsers are utter lusers who do not understand the media they are working with. 2 digit IQs - in octal.
Either you make something for the World Wide Web, or you don't. There's no middle ground. Regardless of what Netscape and MSIE are making you believe.
-- Abigail
I have tried Opera and I didn't like it. I don't like MDI, and the last time I checked (latest version) it had problems rendering the tables on my.netscape.com. But, IIRC it doesn't support Java.
Opera already has a committed and competent full-time programming team. Much more competent than Netscape and much further along than Mozilla. It would certainly give more choices and add more browser competition.
Opera can certainly compete with IE if it only gets market share. Of course, it's not open-source. I wonder if the Stallman inspired attitude of some Linux devotees has scared Opera away from supporting Linux. I mean, they chose to support BeOS before supporting Linux!
Scott Ferguson
Scott Ferguson
Caucho Technology
IE was released by some third party company not affiliated with M$ how many of you would really have a problem with using it (besides the fact there's no Linux version)? I use IE5 in Win 98 and I use IE 4.5 in MacOS 8.6. Whenever I'm on a linux box I try not to use Netscape, it turned to shit after 3.01 INMO. When I want to browse the internet I want my browser to load up, not a software suite. WHen IE4 first came out it was trudging down the same path Navigator embarked on, it tried to make everything part of the browser and load it all up at once for you. With IE5 that philosophy has been dropped in lieu of giving you all the software but keeping the browser, email, news, ect. all separate binaries. Netscape insists that 'Communicator' come with absofreakinlutely everything you will possibly use. Besides the programming aspect, IE is much more stable than Communicator is and when I do have it crash on me I can kill the process with a tool like Wintop. When Communicator freezes it takes down the entire interface and a reboot is needed, I can usually salvage an IE crash. As soon as Netscape changed Navigator into Communicator they really screwed up their chances of winning the browser war. Netscape no longer resides on my system because it couldn't keep itself running very long. I'm not M$ fan and if I had an adequate replacement for IE5 I wouldn't use it either. I've seen nothing else comparable and I don't use half functional crap that is "a good idea". Opera has an annoying interface and lacks alot of the usability features I rarely use in IE but would miss them at inoppertune times.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What does it say that Netscape supports multiple platforms and IE does not? If Microsoft really cared about giving everyone a great browser, they'd surely port it to other platforms and gain a larger userbase -- but no, they want you to use Windows. They want the whole damn industry. Why wouldn't Linux users justify Netscape?
Simply defending/justifying Netscape does not mean I am stuck with it. I use it because I prefer it.
No FUD please. Thank you.
Given the *current* state of affairs, which I would list as:
Then, if I were M$, I would doing these things:
It's straightforward to see how this impacts the Linux community. First, we become stuck with an "outdated" browser on an operating system that isn't allowed to have IE. At the same time, all of the effort is pushing towards catching up to IE, which makes it harder to get 3rd party support for non-M$ OS's, and diminishes our ability to use the Internet.
What can be done? At this point, I'm just not sure. I spent this AM screaming at Netscape because every platform renders PostScript differently - so you get different printed output depending on *which* Netscape you use! (I expected some differences but it was as much as what you'd expect from N different browsers!)
So much for "cross-platform". I keep hearing that Mozilla will have true cross-platform support, but at this point, I have little faith in this claim. If it isn't, we can expect to have a VERY buggy release of NN5.0, which will pretty much bring down the axe (see #4 at top). "Stop Rewarding Stupidity" Bob
- It looks great under Lynx (my preferred browser).
- Light mode looks better than the garish regular mode even in graphical browsers.
Frankly, I think normal Slashdot is hideous. Light mode is definitely the way to go. Loads and renders quicker too.-- $SIGNATURE
In fact the only reason I've upgraded my copies of Netscape is to get bugfixes. It seems like there was a big increase in bugginess sometime after 4.0 shipped, but recent versions have been causing me fewer problems. 4.5 died several times a week (NT4) but 4.61 does so less than once a week. My Linuxen are on 4.71 and are pretty much OK, though they're fat and slow. And insufficiently conformant, though one is tempted to call that a feature issue.
The real problem is that Netscape never put enough effort into its browser! For one major example, they didn't invest enough to get a structure based rendering engine; the Gecko engine corresponds to stuff Microsoft did in order to ship IE4, as I recall. There was the post talking about how the IE/IIS teams (just engineering) were bigger than all Netscape. Clearly that's "enough" effort ... but I sure hope that it can be done with a LOT less effort.
The web will be lost (to everyone, not just Linux folk) if people can't actually implement a standards-conformant browser unless they have monopoly resources backing them. And I'm sadly afraid that's what's been happening at the W3C ... lots of huge specs, which MS implements at the 60%-80% level (plus proprietary features) and nobody else can afford to get even that far along.
Oops! That should be "failed to deliver a viable competitor to IE", of course.
Going through "Internet Options", I don't see Roaming Access Profiles anywhere. Is this a secret hidden IE feature, or only if you bought Win98 SE?
Here's a reason: IE 4.5/Mac doesn't render /. correctly! Netscape 4.7 is fine.
Maybe IE5.0/Mac will show up in January and fix this...and give XML/XSL/CSS2 support. Maybe.
If there aren't any standards compliant Mac browsers soon, using a Mac on-line is going to be pointless. Jobs needs to kiss Bill Gates' butt a little more...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
USG?
Netscape as a company was founded on the principle of 'giving away the razors to sell the razor blades' - they gave away the browser to interface to their line of server products. Of course its going to be buggy as all hell (we all know that, don't we :-( ).
We should applaud the Mozilla guys for not chickening out and redoing the whole mess from the ground up.
There, that's my two bits, and nobody else seemed to be saying it...
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Actually, it does tend to take down the shell as well. Remember, IE is now integral to the shell/explorer. Although, most of the time I can safely close it. (I only use it for Windows Update.)
And they are still a crappy idea.
This is one thing that the Mac has gotten right since the dawn of popular Internet usage. Stairways software developed Internet Config, which (among other useful features) lets you specify your preferred program for various protocols. Apple hired one of the Stairways people and integrated Internet Config into the OS.
So, I click on a "mailto" URL in a browser and my mail program opens up. I see an http URL in my email and it opens up in my brower of choice du jour. Other protocols are also supported, but those are the biggies.
With a couple of different extensions I can even click on a URL in any document and have it open up in the right app. There's no way this is a worse solution than repeating the same functionality poorly in multiple programs. Programs that work together are a Good Thing.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Where I work, we started out using only Netscape as the browser. Then IE got installed. Then the IT Grand Poohbah decided that IT would no longer support Netscape, just IE. The (in my view complete bullshit) reason given was that the rest of the system was M$ (NT server, WIN95 clients, M$ Office and Outlook, etc.) Netscape is still available on the desktop, but over time, as the firm intranet becomes more and more optimized for IE, the loss of functionality when using Netscape is extremely noticeable, and I get nasty Javascript error messages (so I turn it off). I continue to use Netscape because I'll be damned if I use IE, but eventually I'll have no choice. My guess is this type of thing is occurring in other shops as well, and will continue to occur in the future, irrespective of what Netscape 5.0 is like.
That's funny. What's next? Microsoft releasing its source code for Windows, so people can build the standard OS?
Netscape has always been utter crap in all aspects. Never been able to implement a standard, always bloated, severely crippled news and mail readers. Only people with time to waste would build something on top of that. And only fools would believe something useful coming out of it.
-- Abigail
Netscape was charging for commercial users until Microsoft started giving away an IE of comparable quality (I think it was IE4, because IE3 sucked far worse than any Netscape), at which point Navigator became very hard to sell. Navigator sales once represented about 40% of Netscape's revenues, so having to give it away was a major hit to their bottom line.
What is the problem with Netscape? I'm using it now,and it sure certainly seems to work okay. Earlier today I was browsing in IE5, happily it didn't crash as it is wont to, I did so only because I keep hearing complaints about how badly Netscape renders certain sites, so I visited a few of the sites that are problematic under Netscape in Linux, and I noticed several things; they were poorly designed sites that caused problems with IE5 too, or they did look better in IE5 but also looked better in Netscape 4.7 for Windows, and Opera for Windows because all their fonts were True Type fonts which I do not currently have for Linux. I also did note that IE5 seemed marginally faster than Netscape 4.7 for Linux but slower than either Opera for Windows or KFM for Linux or Netpositive for BeOS, though the latter thre have either limited or no support for Java & Javascript. I had completely given up on IE5 several months ago when I was using Windows exclusively because I found it difficult to configure compared to Netscape and Opera, and mostly because it crashed WAY too often and always brought down the whole system with it, requiring a reboot and session with scandisk and a slew of cryptic error messages. When Opera or Netscape crashed they almost always graciously terminated themselves requiring only that I restart them.
I realize that Netscape is not perfect, their install procedure for Linux( I just installed 4.7 last weekend on both Linux and Windows from their cdrom),is among the worst I've seen and I sent them an e-mail complaining about this. I still haven't got the spell checker to work either and I've yet to get a response from them on that matter or the Lack of full Java support with Linux, but it still does more for me than any other internet browser or news or mail application I've used and does it more conveniently and reliably to boot.
I'm not a developer and can't speak to how Netscape behaves from that standpoint, but as a user I just don't see that many problems with Netscape overall, and other than the poor installation procedure the only serious problems I have with Netscape in Linux aren't Netscape's fault, they are a lack of plugins and a general over reliance on gimmicks by too many web designers, and the latter causes problems no matter which browser you use, including IE5.
For one thing, having the browser so tightly tied into the operating system often causes the whole system to lock up when the browser crashes(at least in most of my experiences).
No, it dosn't. IE5 has crashed on me about twice since I got it (comparatively, windows itself crashes about once every two days). When it did, it did not bring down the OS. In fact, it didn't even close all my browser windows. In linux terms, IE isn't a part of the 'kernel' it's part of the 'window manager', and with IE5 (unlike IE4) It dosn't even bring down windows exsplorer when it crashes.
Secondly, if the browser is compromised by an intruder, the system is more easily accessed than if the browser wasn't tied so closely to the OS.
If Any app gets compromized on windows, the intruder will have root access to everything... Netscape or IE
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This has to be moderated up.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
For instance, I worked on a site recently where the content text was double-spaced and ahd loosely typed. But netscape's style sheets implementation doesn't support character-spacing attributes. The DHTML support is also horrendous. Z-indexes are virtually ignored.
So I've basically resorted to designing all extra features for IE and making the sites just look the same in Netscape without having all the bells and whistles.
Its only one domain, after all. Also, since they were using Netscape-enterprize before, this dosn't help us Anti-microsoft people :)
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
There are, of course, some sites that also *require* ActiveX and VBScript, and those sites should be properly flamed on an individual basis.
What's the major reason most users have computers? The web. How does the increasing majority access the web? IE. Will M$ "enhance" IE so that it relies on proprietary M$ technology? Of course. Will web developers use the proprietary M$ technology on their webpages? Of course. Will M$ port IE to Linux? No. Will the average computer user be happy using a browser that can't access the "enhanced" features of many websites? No. So what do we Linux enthusiasts do to ensure that Linux becomes a viable desktop alternative? Some people have suggested coming up with a new browser. Since the majority of Windows users will have little inclination to switch what already came with their system, a new browser will be ignored by web developers because it won't have nearly the number of users as IE. So a new browser is out of the question. What about Mozilla? Mozilla will be playing catch up with IE as long as IE has the most users. If M$ addes a feature and web developers begin to use it, then Mozilla will have to add that feature as well. But now we have another problem. Why should a web developer even care that Mozilla exists if it is essentially a clone of IE? Whatever the developer writes for IE will work with Mozilla. So the only point in having Mozilla around is for all those "fringe" OS users out there that can't use IE. But what if IE begins to use features that require Windows in order to operate? M$ will do this, of course, all in the name of "integration" and "simplification". Who needs the W3C to set standards anymore? M$ will decide the standards and everyone will be forced to abide by them. It really doesn't matter if Mozilla turns out to be the greatest and most stable web browser with lots of great features. IE comes with every copy of Windows. That's what the vast majority of people will use. Goodbye Linux. It was fun while it lasted. I'm sure going to miss you.
IE5 shouldn't bring down the shell, infact IE5 is *much* more stable then IE4 was (and exsplorer, in general to)
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Oh, it's not a matter of can. M$ could make a Linux specific version of MSIE as well. And Sun a Linux specific version of Hot Java. But they are all commercial companies. Netscape compiles on a whole bunch of Unix platforms. Why on earth would they invest money in making a platform specific version, if there's no reason to think there's any gain?
-- Abigail
1. When the web was just getting popular, I installed winsock(ugh) and good 'ol mosiac. I never got mosiac to work EVER. it just crashed when trrying to load a web page.
2. I used netscape for several years. It had the usual crashes and stuff, and remember having to upgrade from 2.x to 3.x so I could go back in a web page with frames without going back too far
3. fast forward a few years later. I have to do tech support for an ISP for nEtscape 3(and eventually 4). My ghod. There were so many stumper problems that I simply could not fix at all, even with the gurus around me. The ISP I supported also supported IE after awhile, and I can't even remember taking one IE related call.
4. Netscape 4.x: I used that for a while, and had the usual crashes. big whoop. slow to load, all sorts of weird problems on occasion
5. IE 4.x and 5.x. Screw the politics over it, I LIKE the integration with the OS. This comes in handy when you do a lot of web page authoring and find yourself switching back and forth between web pages and jsut plain 'ol Explorer.
The ONLY time I use netscape 4.x is for that silly Composer program, which, I as a QA tester have found PLENTY of bugs that never were fixed, to outright simple ones(duplicate hotkeys) to completely screwy GUI problems(ever try to get your cursor into an empty frame cell? It's REAL fun).
as for choices? I wanted to install communicator just for the composer app on my old 486 laptop. Nope, sorry. I ended up copying that cheezy FrontPage Express directory over to my laptop, and it started up just fine. It didn't complain about not being 98 or having only IE 3 installed.
As for crashing in IE 4/5? The only time i remember IE crashing was when I had that stupid thirdvoice program installed. It's gone now. THe onyl complaint I have about IE 5 is sometimes when banners dont work, it doesnt let you see the rest of the web page. Hackernews.com had a broken banner, so I bring up netscape to view the site, and it worked....and then crashed of course a few minutes later.
Nope. I'm stickin to IE. It's solid for me, and very quick to load.
Netscape communicator is most embarrassing peice of software for all the free unices. Communicator is an ugly memory leaking pile of garbage in its current incarnation, and I don't see it getting better until mozilla replaces it. Perhaps if it better supported standards proposed by neutral parties such as w3c instead of trying to implement non-important "features" like smart browsing and constant advertising through redirection it wouldn't suck as bad. Another problem is how different communicator and navigator are, and how running communicator about quadruples the rate of crashes. And it does crash aplenty, while for some people it only has to be restarted when it uses up all available swap space others have more routine(as many as multiple times per day) crashes.
.png transparency?
IE would need to turn into the limping, bloated, lumbering monstrosity you suggest to bring it down to the level of the unix netscape communicator. I understand that the windows version isn't so bad, but I haven't used it more than a few times in the last few years.
And suggesting that web browsers are complete enough to no longer have to change to keep pace with web technologies is assine at best, the web is nowhere near done with its technology metamorphis -- Where is my
Sorry about the rant, but suggesting that browser developement should stop is probably offensive to people such as the members of the mozilla team(who obviously have a clue) and I though that I should defend their well directed efforts.
I'm not 100% certain on this, but back when I had a roaming IE profile, it was on an NT4 server. Basically, if you have an NT 4 domain, you can set up your profile to be a roaming one.
This is actually pretty handy, if you use a lot of different NT workstations, as it allows you to have the same desktop/start menu/Internet Explorer preferences/Outlook or Outlook Express settings/ no matter where you log in at. When I administered an NT4 domain for a while, I used this so I could easily check my e-mail regardless of where I was in the domain. It's a shame more products don't use it, it's a very handy feature.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Please, everyone, there are no hidden APIs. Period. This conspiracy stuff is what makes me hate to admit to liking Linux. Microsoft hires thousands of developers. Lots of them cycle through fairly quickly, and a lot of the ones that leave don't feel too warm and fuzzy toward MS. Do you really think that of those thouands of snarky ex-devs, not one of them would have had access to those 'hidden APIs' and disclosed them after they left? Not a single one? I'm sure they could leak them 'anonymously' to some anti-MS dev house, like Oracle or Sun, with no problem whatever. Heck, no NDA would stop them, not when the simple fact of Microsoft pursuing the ex-employee over the data would be a crippling admission of guilt. This is another stupid net myth, mindlessly parrotted by folks who really want to believe it, or who cannot be bothered to think for themselves. Just one more ludicrous conspiracy theory, an inheritor of an inglorious history stretching back from the Kennedy assassination all the way back to the trial of the Templars (actually the first historical example, and one that is still argued about several hundred years later.)
Rationally, there is no such thing as a secret when several thousand people know it. Sorry. MS is not in the business of being nice, and they do a lot of shady and ruthless things. But keeping that sort of thing secret doesn't involve shady practice, it would have to involve mind-control. And if they had that, the recent legal announcement would have been rather different...
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
That's no good ... Netscape supports plenty features that IE doesn't have, it needs to support the ones that that IE already has and Netscape doesn't. Some of these features are propietary, but many are not.
Though Netscape may never be able to fully support M$ VB script, it may, for example, enhance it's support for stylesheets and take a look @ javascript functions that only work in IE.
Please. Netscape really offends a large amount of web developers i know. If we don't want to develop pages that look cool in Netscape, who will want to use Netscape if they have a choice?
I have a very rare photograph of Houdini locking his keys in his car.
While I've always been a Netscape supporter, I must say that IE makes quite a nice file explorer. I've been using windows 2000 for a month or so and it really is quite a step up from the old windows explorer. The ability to preview images and movie/music files in the embedded media player is also a great bonus. Another interesting feature I've stumbled upon is that in Win2k ftp sites appear as regular explorer windows, dragging and dropping between your drives and a remote ftp site is now quite a cinch, and no third party is required, I can even do a chmod or relogin as another user. (Although I doubt it's able to "hammer" on a ftp site with repeated connections..also haven't tried resuming uploads/downloads) Netscape..netscape seems to be a lost cause. Besides the "Shop" button, I really haven't seen much of an upgrade since 4.5 and 4.7 ..or since 4.0 for that matter. I'm not sure where AOL is going with Netscape, my first thought was that they bought it just to kill it off, but such an idea is simply ludicrous, netscape was flopping already and wasting such a large amount of money just to kill a company would be a hard sell even to a black helicopter conspiracy theory subscriber ;) I'd like to wean myself off netscape..but it'll be hard. Once you use something for several years it's hard to pick something else up in it's place. So I guess for now I'll stick to using Netscape as my browser and IE as my file explorer..until Netscape officially dies that is ;)
There are several factors that determine which browser wins the Wars. Specifically:
However, in addition to all of the above there exist the very important factors that govern the success of any software product: features, stability, system footprint and general technical excellence. Mozilla has the upper hand here (except for stability, for the time being, but we'll have to be patient).
Who will prevail? It all depends on when we'll actually get a release of Mozilla. As JWZ said when he quit Netscape, Mozilla failed in many ways because it was grossly mishandled on the part of Netscape. Mozilla got a terrible codebase and Netscape expected thousands of hackers to dive in and fix the mess. It is interesting to find that the work got done a lot faster on the parts of Mozilla that were written from scratch (e.g. NGLayout) than anything else: Netscape's code was such complete crap it was difficult to hack, and most people didn't even bother. AFAIK, Mozilla as it exists today was almost completely written from scratch. That's how bad the code was.
What we need to do now is hold our breath and hope for a release, SOON. Netscape is planning to have the beta go live Real Soon Now (I remember they asked me for a "Developer Testimonial" back in September to include in the launch... and that was supposed to be rushed in...), which basically means that we'll have a beta some time in January, with a release some time in February or March. Amen. It's late, but it might not be too late.
What will happen then? If all goes well, ISP start bundling Mozilla with their sign-on packs, because the average ISP employee is going to drool over Mozilla. I used to work in an ISP, and I can tell you that User Friendly is not far off the mark. AOL might be bound into using IE in its software for another year, and probably have plans to continue to do so longer than that, but if the rest of the world rocks the boat one way, AOL will do the same. AOL picked IE over NS because IE could be embedded into AOL's software. Now, Netscape can do the same, and with more ease, and with smaller download times. AOL will not switch over fast, even though it owns Netscape, but I believe that unless Mozilla fails completely, it will switch soon.
Also, Mozilla will completely dominate the browser market for anyone not using Windows or MacOS within a few months. That might be a small (tiny?) percentage of the market, but it's market segment that carries a lot of weight - a lot of us are developers and have a direct influence on content creation and corporate acceptance.
What Netscape has to do is aggressively market Gecko as an alternative to MS's HTML layout component, and FAST. If they can get companies like Intuit to use Gecko, we will get more and more content developed for NS (i.e. standards-based) instead of IE.
But I think the major driving force behind browser acceptance will be content providers. As someone pointed out, Joe Webmaster might not care about standards and just preview his webpage on the latest IE, but most professional Web developers (i.e. those that work for search engines, portals and other high-traffic sites) will, and most of them are sick and tired of porting code from NS to IE and back. They'll start doing things with Mozilla that IE can't do, and then the market dynamics will pressure ISVs, IAPs, OEMs and individual users to use NS over IE.
It all hangs in the balance, but it's very important that Mozilla is released soon. We're in the final stretch - I hope it's sonner rather than later.
Give a monkey half a brain and still he's bound to fry it - Placebo
Two Years ago, QuickBooks changed their policy of using Netscape as their included Web Browser, in their Version 5.0, to IE.
Now, Intuit has released both Version 6.0 and Version 99 of Quickbooks with Microsoft Internet Explorer actually imbedded into the Quickbooks Software, and from what I hear, QuickBooks 2000 uses a seemless integration of internet and desktop software in it's operation.
Intuit has not shown signs of changing their policy again, at least not in the near future.
From what I understand, when Version 5.0 was released, Netscape had lacked several integration features that were key to Quickbooks' Online features, and the software stuck. (I do not believe that it was due to a political/economic reason.)
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
Actually if you right click that link and pick "Open in New Window" with IE (at least IE 5 which I am currently using) it renders just fine in a new browser window..Doesn't need notepad/wordpad. I think this is more of a feature than a bug. But YMMV.
are misguided. The internet is not for microsoft, microsoft did not invent it, it is not an extention for microsoft platforms. The internet is for ALL platforms, ie, platorm independent. Clueless companies / people who think the world uses microsoft and the world uses IE. Well, *they do not* - 100% of people do not use microsoft. They don't live in reality.
This just shows another example of microsoft power - it can use its power, indirectly to make people and companies alike to force other people to use windows - when they create IE only sites and when there is a demand for that site for non microsoft audience. As for the person who says "he is disappointed with mozilla"... pardon? its not even released yet, its alpha. How can you form a judgement on an incomplete piece of software? Atleast wait for its completion and then make up your mind.
Many people don't relize this, but I saw someone using AOL once.
they don't use a 'browser' it's all intigrated into AOL software. If aol were to switch to Mozilla, there customers wouldn't even know...
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
So IE supports a small subset of standards, at least you know what it is going to support. Netscape supports much less than IE, badly I might add.
The point is that someone can make a completely compliant webpage, have it display fine in IE, but have Navigator display things offset from other things, have tables with the backgrounds all wrong, etc.
Argue all you want for the web being just a way to display information, it has become more than that. In a way, web design is now an artform, something that is fun to look at and functional. It has become a way for people to create sites with impact, see http://www.gaijin.com for an example. If the web were to remain waht it initially was, then the only tag we would need would be the anchor tag.
The web is moving and evolving, and the problem is that not only does Navigator not support standards, many of the ones it does support it supports badly.
Navigator is almost a 5th generation browser, there is no reason that it should not support tables correctly. There is no defense for that. These are bugs that have not been fixed in 4 years. If M$ were to do the exact same thing, we'd hang them by the balls, but because it is Navigator we have to deal with it and design web pages that make sure Navigator doesn't shit itself. They are singlehandedly keeping the web from becoming the medium it could become.
Ooooohhh, new shop button, that'll keep me coming back to Navigator.
I doubt that NN would be that much better -- even when they had virtually unlimited funds in the beginning they couldn't make a good product. Without IE, NN it wouldn't even be free -- thanks MS. I can't remeber a single version of NN that worked well, and the original code it was based on was hopeless.
The real looser in this whole battle was the company that MS bought the original version of IE from. MS didn't build the first IE from the ground up they liscensed it from (looking glass/spry??? -- can't remember anymore). What I do remember is that MS signed an agreement to pay royalties for each copy of IE they sold and then turned around and gave it away for free, really screwing the original authors.
-- The world's most ambitious and comprehensive PC game database project. http://www.mobygam
Just because Microsoft feels they can release an unstable crappy browser doesn't mean we should loose hope.
IE is not crappy, or unstable. Netscape Is the company that does that, remember? Have you used IE5? it's crashed on me Twice since september. I just downloaded m10 of mozilla, and it looks nice. I'd hardly say it's a month away from reliase though, unless it's going to follow the tradition of all netscape software, buggy as hell
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yep, I quit using linux (on my main screw-off PC) because I didnt like the browsers. These days Netscape is a crufty POS. It wasnt always this way. Back in the days of 2.0 and 3.0 Netscape ruled the roost. Right now, compared to IE 5, its not even a contest. This whole situation makes me very sad.
My first experiences with the net were with a dialup shell account on a HP-UX box. At first there was no web. Pine and trn were my friends. Later on I remember running Lynx for the first time and being blown away. Banner ads were nothing but a gleam in some twisted bastards eye, and as far as I was concerned Unix and the Internet were inseperable.
Then I started using Netscape on a Win 3.1 box over a PPP link. In a lot of ways, I liked my shell account better and kept using it for mail and news. Eventually, I moved on to Win 95 and refused to use IE until I was forced to at work. As far as Im concerned, IE was worthless until 4.0. Even then, Netscape was good enough.
Last year, I finally installed Debian 1.3. Everything worked and I was pretty happy. I upgraded to Slink, surfed the unstable tree and enjoyed myself. The software wasnt broken, except for Netscape. I tried other browsers, tried other Netscape versions and tried a Mozilla milestone build. They all sucked compared to what I was using at work- IE 5. I was tired of Netscape crashing, tired of it hosing X, and wanted point and drool. Now I have it. Granted I still use Linux for anything serious, and run it on other boxen. However, right now suffering with Windows on one box is worth it to be able to use IE.
I see the lack of a top quality browser as one of the major problems with Linux. This is not a troll, or flamebait. Its a sad confession with hope for something better.
-BW
Its karma, Kramer.
Having to use all those different tools was one of the reasons "the Web" was invented. Multi-scheme browsers predate Netscape Communications.
-- Abigail
i work at FedEx were the corporate standard browser still is Navigator. (btw: the standard webserver is Fasttrack) sure some people are using IE inside the company, but when they call the helpdesk with a IE problem they are not declined to help that person.
also i dont think we'll be changing from this policy anytime soon...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Firstly, something I have to get out of my system ...
Yes, it's my first post to Slashdot. I've been here about 18 months now, and never felt compelled to contribute before. But this discussion just makes me sick. I am in a maze of whiny little Slashdotters, all alike -- complaining about Communicator, doomsaying about Mozilla, and no-one doing anything.
So let's cover the whingers' main points.
Navigator/Communicator 4.x is buggy.
Sure it is. Basically, Communicator 4.x is built on the same basic architecture as Navigator 1.0, and has grown like topsy. It's a mess, and it's hard to debug. Which is why, earlier this year, Mozilla.org ditched the old codebase and rewrote nearly all of Mozilla from scratch.
But in the meantime, I'd much rather have a browser with several performance bugs and fewer security bugs, than the other way around.
Communicator hasn't improved since version 4.5.
Yes, that's mostly true (unless you count `Shop' buttons and the like as improvements), except that a number of bugs have been fixed since 4.5. Basically, Netscape are keeping Communicator 4.x ticking over while they work flat out on Mozilla, because Mozilla is where the future is.
Mozilla won't offer anything IE5 doesn't already have.Balls. Mozilla 5.0 will far outclass IE5's broken support for HTML 4.0, CSS1, CSS2, and XML. And Mozilla optimized builds are already faster than IE5. To quote Rick Gessner, Netscape's Director of Engineering:
But even more exciting than Mozilla's standards-compliance and performance, is the fact that it offers the building blocks for constructing any client-side Internet application you like -- using its cross-platform front end of XUL (the XML User Interface Language) and JavaScript. So not only can you change the look and feel of Mozilla, but you can alter the entire user interface, or even create your own app using the Mozilla layout engine and networking code.
Mozilla is doomed.
So if CNet and ZDNet say something often enough, it becomes true? That's sick. Sure, JWZ left. Good! Sure, Mozilla.org had to scrap a lot of their old code. Great! It's an open source project, you can't kill it, you can only delay it ...
Mozilla will be too late.And this is the bit which really annoys me. Everyone is standing around moping about how IE is taking over the world, and thinking that talking about it (in usual Slashdot fashion) is enough.
It's not.
Join the Mozilla effort. Do it now. It doesn't matter if you don't know C++. It doesn't matter if you're stuck on Windows. It doesn't matter if you only have two hours a week to spare. Just join in. Download binaries. Report bugs. Suggest enhancements.
I'd like to think that the Slashdot readership were actually interested in the future of both Linux and the Internet. I don't want Linux to be a second-class end-user operating system, simply because it doesn't have the world standard Web browser on it. And I don't want Microsoft, or any company for that matter, to control the Internet.
Do you?
[ Give up ] [ Fight back ]
-- mpt
Current stats: 2 successful Slashdot submissions, 2 Slashdot comments.
You started out fairly reasonable in this thread, but you're getting more and more insipid with each post. I estimate three beers per post. Am I close?
Lynx is no alternative for IE. Its only useful if your blind in which case you would want to put a braille machine on it or an enormous nerd with very thick glasses and skull. In all other cases people also want to view the graphical information. Netscape 4 is now at least two years old and we haven't seen it progressing. Netscape 5 is a promissing product but it will take several months to become final. When it will become final it is an unproven but still promising product. In other words it will take at least half a year for mozilla to catch on. That's a lot of time for a browser.
Jilles
IE5 is called IEXPLORE.EXE, and explorer.exe is called, well EXPLORER.EXE, They exsist in seperate memory spaces. They are seperate processes. Not linked.
However, Explorer is pretty unstable by itself (much more so then ie5 on my box, actualy). and any stray app can bring it down.
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And the exec exec exec model is, well, very dated. load run run run is more up to date. Keeps information between sessions, reduces running time and makes a lot of other stuff easier to do.
-segfault
"Use Opera, use Lynx, use Netscape, use whatever except IE if you value your freedom! Let webmasters know that if they require IE to view their site you will be taking your business elsewhere!"
Huh? Because Netscape sucks when compared to IE I should use it anyway just to spite Microsoft? Give me a break. Sorry but most of us in RL have work to do -- and having Netscape constantly crashing when it comes across some piece of code it doesn't like just isn't worth it (we wouldn't need IE to see some sites if Netscape supported the damn standards!!)
I don't know if this has changend, but for quite a while IE was the only browser with java 1.1 support, Netscape still only used 1.0. In order to even view some of the java on Sun's site, I needed to use IE.
:(
I downloaded m10 tonight, and played with it a little. Pretty crazy stuff. I'll go back to netscape right away, once they reach beta, or somthing. I can't wait.
It wasn't able to render www.public.iastate.edu/~cokere/re correctly though
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actually it is quite a bit different. Netscape is not tied in with the operating system. Even if people wanted to use NS they still have to have explorer. I bet even if you gave NS away right on the CD with windows it wouldn't make much difference because people would say "I have to have IE on my computer, why would I want 2 browsers on it?"
Until then, I guess I'll use my copy of IE which came with my computer. It isn't like that hasn't completely screwed up my computer with some unwanted download or simly lock up the computer for some untold reason. Oh, yeah, and I'll run it on my U*nx box, since it has all the market there. After all, it is focused on compatibility and standards, right?
"And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Hey, the Gimp looks nice on an X desktop. So does Mozilla (built it on my NetBSD machine awhile back, it looks fine there)
The Free Unix world does not revolve around Netscape.
That's an description of *HTTP*. HTTP isn't the same as the web, it's *part* of the web. One bases of the web is the underlaying URI/URN/URL addressing scheme. HTTP is just one of the schemes, FTP, GOPHER, NEWS, etc, are others.
SMTP/POP/IMAP/NNTP were designed to provide completely different types of services. These types of transactions are not request/response based, but instead are dialog based (ie, LIST/UIDL/GET[[UIDL/GET]...] for POP3). The underlying mechanisms are completely different paradigms, therefore they should use different tools.
Why? What does it matter? Why should a POP server care if it was called by a piece of program that has its own entry in the process table, or by a piece of program that shares its entry in the process table with a piece of program that shows bouncing gifs? You'd think the POP server behaves differently?
What matters is that the user has the choice, and if (s)he prefers to seaminglessly jump from an HTML page delivered by HTTP to a Usenet posting delivered by NNTP, more power to him/her. I prefer having a car that drives me everywhere - I wouldn't want to switch cars when entering a freeway, or for driving a gravel road.
I'm basically begging the rest of the world to wake up to what the unix world realized a long time ago: 'do one thing and do it well - then connect the tools'
That's an implementation detail. If it works fine for you, good for you. I use mutt and slrn for my email and news, but I'm not going to start an FTP client if I find a link in an HTML page that happens to use the ftp:// scheme, or use a separate gopher client.
I assume you don't inline images either, but use specialized tools for that? (One for GIFs, one of JPGs, one for PNGs....)
-- Abigail
USB support, dvd, scsi, 3d accelerators. Yep pretty ancient. Seriously, Linux was written in 1991, and has been regularly updated ever since. I wonder how much original code is still in the kernel. I also disagree that MS operating systems are dated. For a desktop system NT, and what i've used of 2000, is a pretty decent platform. Even under moderate usage it is fairly stable. It's good enough for most people. As for the PDP11 environement, well if it works why change it. I;ve got plenty of GUI tools that work with the text configuration files. Works fine.
treke
"While it is an interesting development, there's probably little cause for worry unless it
becomes a trend."
It is something of a trend, and has been for a while. But it is OK. the trend is something like this:
an idea gets some funding and a startup is born.
the startup, running on neophytes and/or directed by suits, turns up their services on NT.
the startup begins to mature, and eventually migrates off of NT.
Doesn't always work that way, but that's the trend.
How can they feel the rain but not know of the flood?
There already is a program called GNUscape Navigator. Look under software at www.gnu.org
treke
I can do the same at the Vocational Technical Center I go to, which are Windows 95 machines, but they use Novell NetWare stuff that'll do it -- this isn't the same as Roaming Access Profiles, though. With Roaming Profiles, you can store/retrieve your bookmarks/cookies/almost anything on a HTTP (with Apache module) or LDAP server. What you were referring to meant you had to be somewhere on the network.
IE supports Standard Java far better then Netscape. I couldn't even view some of the samples on Java.sun.com in Netscape, worked fine in IE though. I'm still using NS4.05 or somthing along with IE, beacuse I hear the newer versions are even worse.
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
>My favorite Netscape bug: The one where Navigator
>starts ignoring all left mouse clicks
This is THE show stopper that keeps me using IE on windows. I can't recall if I'd had the problem on Linux. Actually, I find Netscape 4.61 on Linux to be pretty stable. And replying to an email doesn't require netscape to be killed -9. I'm blown away!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Only people with time to waste would build something on top of that. And only fools would believe something useful coming out of it.
That's probably why the Mozilla team started from scratch.Use junkbuster or WebWasher and block
messenger.netscape.com
That'll fix it for ya.
You know, the solution to this whole Real Player GUID problem is an application-specific firewall. Simply don't let some apps connect to some sites on the net.
A lot of people have a lot of hope invested in communicator. However, Netscape has consistently put effort into adding features, when most of us would just be happy to see it run all day without crashing.
I think we would all put up with a few less features, if the features that we had worked reliably. I suspect that it's not just geeks who feel this way.
Whatever happened to software quality? In order to beat Microsoft, Netscape appears to be playing the same dangerous game of releasing unreliable software. Dangerous for Netscape, because nobody plays this game better than MSFT.
So I know the mozilla people are reading this: Mike, get with it, fix some more bugs. Get people off of features and onto stability.
I couldn't agree more that Netscape Communicator has become bloated and buggy. Rather than abandon Netscape, however, we should thrust our efforts into the Mozilla project. Not only will we get a high quality, open source browser, but we'll get another nice stick to beat Microsoft with.
As far as I know, the results of the project will not be "owned" per se by Netscape; this will only aid the acceptance of Mozilla as the standard WWW browser. IT staff will be punished if they adopt Internet Explorer, as it actively violated the standards that Mozilla will (hopefully) support.
My $0.02...
Clearly you haven't looked at the Wine undocumented API stuff then. The wine developers have had to reverse engineer chunks of undocumented APIs that are used by things like MS Office and IE.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
At least on the Windows platform (which is really one of the only two platforms that are relevant to this discussion), IE is faster, more stable and overall more functional. When it was first released, IE was just a pale shadow of Netscape; just a photocopied feature set. That's not the case anymore.
I have hopes for Mozilla, but I'm beginning to come around to seeing that the delays in getting a production version out are really hurting it. No matter how progressed it is, there needs to be a shipping version within, say, six months. If this is not accomplished or if that version sucks, Netscape will have lost such serious ground that it will have difficulty catching up. Already we can see that their reputation as being a quality product is being damaged.
Man, I hate saying that sort of thing; admitting that MS is better in this case makes my teeth ache.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I have found that the above goes for Wintel platform as well. If you want a *very* good, stable, product, get the stand alone version of navigator. Under windoze, I have never had nescape crash on me. I'm using netscape 4.08 and I love it. Who needs all that extra crap anyway?
Perhaps, but they are very integral. Type in C:\ in an Internet Explorer window. Familiar looking, isn't it? Type a URL in the Explorer window. Behold, it loads. That is Microsoft's defense of having IE built into the OS, that it is part of the shell and everything else. If you have heard of 98lite, which removes IE from Windows 98, its features lists having to use the Windows 95 Explorer due to the Windows 98 Explorer requiring IE.
the only thing the internet is good for is the same thing it has always been good for - email.
Netscape pretty much bites as a navigator.
It is unstable, has a hard time supporting standards for HTML/CSS, and the company seems to be too busy trying to make themselves be a little bit of every one to everything instead of releasing a stable, decent product.
As much as I hated MS's Explorer implentation on HPUX (Here...have our X libraries), it was much more stable. If they released a version for Linux I'd switch to it happily.
I don't understand these posts which say that Mozilla, in its current state, is better than IE. Everytime I try Mozilla, there are pages which work fine in both IE and NS, but which Mozilla doesn't render correctly. And Mozilla inevitably crashes after I spend any time using it.
Maybe it has something to do with procesor speed? I've read that gecko's supposed to be really fast, but mozilla runs slow as molasses on my system. (I am stuck using a POS pentium 90 though.) By itself, however, viewer.exe runs at a decent speed, so maybe slower processors can't handle rendering the "chrome" and other extras...
But I'm just guessing. Any mozilla people out there?
Ahhhh... Remember the days when a Web Browser was used for browsing the web rather than handling
:) So why is the mozilla team ignoring this request (given, the last Milestone release DID have a VERY weak standalone browser)?
every aspect of the internet experience?
I've been saying that for a while, come to think if it, so has nearly everyone
I'm looking at the browser formerly known as Gzilla VERY seriously now (the new name escapes me). It seems like it could shape up into a nice, standards complient browser that is small and stable. Mozilla is too far gone to probably ever be a stable browser again.
Finkployd
Hrm, works here. Windows 2000 IE5, Right click -> open in new window
How will samba help us? It's just for Windows file and print sharing, or am I mistaken?
treke
Actually looked at it a second time and Word integrated itself into IE using OLE and loads it up. Funny it's faster than netscape loading up it's splash screen.
Why are all these companies seemingly looking for exuses to make their web sites incompatible with X browser--the old NS-only sites, the IE-only sites, etc.? Whatever happened to HTML being browser independant? The WWW is starting to stand for Won't Work Well.
No, we're talking about STANDARDS here. All of the technologies mentioned in the article - XML, CSS, XSL - are either current or proposed W3C recommendations. Check for yourself.
If a page written according to these guidlelines won't work well, then something's the matter with your browser. Which is exacltly why I loathe Netscape 4.x. I can write a page with perfect code (according the the w3c validator), and it will look like crap in Netscape due to it's poor CSS support. So I prefer IE. Web designers and businesses are understandably pissed that they can't use standard technology becasue Netscape breaks their pages. The solutions are design for the lowest common denominator or have browser-specific pages, which undermines the whole point of the web.
Mozilla, on the other hand, is even superior to IE in its support of web standards. So I'll admit I'm a fair-weather friend with no loyalites whatsoever - when mozilla/netscape5/whatever comes out, it will be my new favorite browser.
Lycos makes one. I haven't tried it yet, as its not available for Mac (They're "working on it"). But it looks like it might be an alternative to the other 2. And Lycos is big enough that they just might pull it off...
Reality has a liberal bias
I've used Netscape as my main browser for years. :/
:(
It's been irritating me to no end that it's become such
a bloated and unstable application.
With the current events surrounding the M$ trial, one
wonders how much better of a product Navigator would be at this time
if they'd not had to deal with M$'s embrace and corrupt
policy on html/java/javascript standards.
Seems that 90% of the time that Nav crashes on me these days
is on pages that use m$ specific Java-crud. This is
truly irritating.
If IE had been written as a competitive application, by a
company _other_ than m$, without m$'s specific
advantages as a monopoly (which I firmly belive it is), it's my opinion that Netscape Corp. never would
have sold out. In fact, I belive that it would have been a
much MUCH bigger company today and we'd have a much
better navigator because of it.
Without m$'s clout.... IE would have died a horrible, yet appropriate,
Death.
Bummer daze...
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
One of the main reasons IE works so well with the windows operating system is because both systems are made by the same company.
1. Most apps on windows aren't as horribly buggy as Netscape. Most companies can, even without access to the Windows source code, write programs that aren't horribly broken.
According to your logic, Mozilla will never be as good as IE since the Mozilla team doesn't have access to the windows source code?
2. Netscape is buggy on all platforms, even on platforms like Linux where NS has access to the source code, and can presumably make use of this to hunt down bugs.
M$'s only goal is to get people to the point where they feel there is no choice but to use IE. They will do this by adding proprietary standards/features. Once People feel there is no alternative and IE is the only choice M$ can charge as much as they want. And if people dont like IE Too Bad!!
I read a few of the "Talk Back"s on ZD and so many people support M$ even though that support will lead to their being one real browser with no competition just like windows or worse.
I think our(Linux Users) best bet would support Companies that dont break their pages for Netscape. And hope Mozilla can catch up or at least remain enough of a presence that most sites willstill be functional with it.
Jesse
We use win boxes with netscape at the school i work at, for student access as well as staff and faculty. IE presents too many maintenance and security issues. (not that windows itself plays nice)
.gov sites to require IE, while the us government is involved in a court cases with MS.
However, we do have a couple IE boxes. Why? There are government sites that we need to use for one reason or another that *require* IE. This is nothing new, its been this way for years. Pretty hypocritical for
They even have a program which can be run on binaries and automates the process....
- Sam Ruby
Of course, as you point out, the Netcenter portal was the key reason for the acquisition. I was trying to say, but failing to make it clear, that it is my belief that when you own something as valuable as Netscape Communicator, you don't generally throw it away. It still has value. Also, I believe that I had heard shortly after the acquisition that AOL fully intended to move to Navigator 5 at some point for the AOL browser component. And when they do, it *will* have a significant effect on browser share stats...no two ways about it.
Don't count on AOL to save the day.
I'm not. I'm well aware of you feelings about the Mozilla project, and I agree to an extent about the failure of the project to achieve significant goals. Nevertheless, they are going to ship something *eventually*, and when they do, it will still attract a fair amount of interest.
I guess I'm just trying to tell people that there is no reason to panic. People like to get themselves worked up into a frenzy over software "wars," and I really don't think there's any reason to do so. The Mozilla source is out there; so is the Linux source, the FreeBSD source, the OpenBSD source, and the Xscreensaver source (:-)). It's not going away; there will be a significant number of people who wish to use it for the forseeable future, so it can be maintained.
There's just no reason to panic...at least not now, in my opinion.
Thanks for responding, BTW!
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
I know how boring it is to work on a platform where no reasonable browser is available. I used a copy of Netscape 2 for DEC-Unix on a Linux/Alpha machine.
Many sites around started to use version 3 and version 4 browser features. And there was just no browser available on Linux/Alpha that did support it.
Well, I have Netscape in Linux crash on me at least once a day, and it's the one that came with my distro (Mandrake). In fact, I even upgraded to the "stable" version, but that hasn't helped at all.
Linux programmers can adapt Netscape to work with IE enabled pages. The open source allows us to do that. Further there are other open source browser initiatives like geko that can be made IE enabled.
IE is a windows-only product. Netscape is cross-platform. Developing and maintaining a cross-platform product is far more complicated than supporting just one OS. By doing it, Netscape respects the internet and the web as a whole instead of just making cash of corporate policies.
Netscape is for now the only reasonable browser choice for many alternative OSes. Instead of complaining, thank them for supporting your OS and go help the Mozilla project.
Sounds like COM in Windows. I can specify
,anyone?)
what program is going to handle a specific
URL (via it's interface, TweakUI, or the registry).
I can even add my own protocols
(biteme://
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
The average person on the street is the common argument. The APOTS doesn't care about Linux. The APOTS doesn't care about Mozilla/standards. The APOTS loves Microsoft products and uses them because they "work". The APOTS could give a shit. I prefer to take a shit.
I did here's a link to the site.
View it in Netscape Communicator 4.7 it looks like the product of a night of drugs, booze and bad code. Look at it in IE 5 and besides a spacing problem it looks fine.
Since the page is completely standards compliant and IE shows it better than Netscape this means that IE is the more standards compliant browser.
This is more obvious to anyone who has tried to create a website and expected that because something is in the standards it should look fine in Netscape, sadly this is not so.My homepage looks fine in IE but Netscape acts really funky about certain things so I ended up having to sniff browsers to decide what pages to show people.
I loved Netscape when I first got on the Web and hated IE. Slowly but surely IE drew level with Netscape and now (as much as I hate to admit it) IE is a better product. Even without the useful and timesaving features like Auto form filling (I fill forms every other day online and it's great that now each form has a memory of the things I've typed in it...no more constantly retyping my address at MapQuest every time I need directions) or Auto Password fill (use with care) IE5 is more standards compliant and thus is a better than Communicator 4.7 .
We need to help Mozilla. If we fail, we will lose the war.
Bad Command Or File Name
It's very important that netscape/mozilla hold on to a significant chunk of the market--say half or so. Otherwise, if IE is really the only browser, then it's only a matter of time before visual basic crap will start sneaking into the average website, locking everyone into the Win32 platform.
I don't know what causes this bug, but I get it occasionally as well. This is how I fix it: when it crashes, close all Netscapes and then hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, and you'll notice that Netscape is still running. Select it and hit End Task -- you'll probably have to do it several times for it to die, though.
Because just like the problem of Linux users accessing files / folders on NT servers and vice versa (the problem solved by SAMBA), Linux programmers will figure ways around the new IE features.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Why does everyone assume that a Netscape user only uses Netscape because it is the only other choice? I use Netscape because I like it better. I think it is faster than IE. I don't care what anyone says. My dad uses Netscape and doesn't like IE either. I simply prefer it, believe it or not.
I've been to a site where it dumped me because I was using IE with Windows. He objected MS's practices, and I guess that was his way of striking back. It was sorta humourous though, as the site I was trying to see was about how bad MS was. Isn't it sorta beating a dead horse when you can't even reach the people you are trying to persuade? :-)
Mozilla is the most standards-compliant browser you can get.
2) Let me download just the browser again.
Messenger is actually much improved in Mozilla. For example, you finally get to have multiple POP3 accounts. If you really don't want it, I suspect that somebody if not Netscape will release a browser-only version. It is open-source, after all. (BTW: Collabra hasn't been part of Communicator for a LONG time...which makes me think you haven't seen the Messenger overhaul in 4.5) As for size, my last Mozilla download was under 5MB, and that's with all the debug tools and everything. No Java VM though, but even with that Mozilla/Netscape 5 will definitely be under 10MB.
3) Tone down the user interface.
Mozilla has EXACTLY this... the only toolbar buttons are Back,Forward,Stop,Reload. They're integrated into the address bar, too, which means less space taken up by the toolbars and more for the actual browser.
4) Keep bookmarks html.
It's still there, don't worry.
5) Load time counts.
This is not quite at 2 seconds, but it is at 10 and being worked on. In addition to Mozilla, I'm also running 4.7 now, which usually takes 10 seconds on a PII-350. 30 seconds, even if it is a slower computer, seems HIGHLY exaggerated. IE5 takes about 5 seconds.
6) Make the interface decent.
Download any Mozilla nightly build dated after 26 October, and you'll see a beautiful new skin that is completely unique and quite beautiful. Plus Mozilla has skin support, so you can make it look like whatever you want (there's already an IE4 skin).
7) A bit controversial, but if IE has bugs, occasionally try to make the page look decent anyway.
I'm not 100% sure as to the current status of this, though there was talk of a "compatability mode" at one point. I know that every standard that was not clear was checked out to make sure Mozilla does it the right way. As well, I believe that most content developers will choose to follow the standards: they'd rather do that now, but no released browser supports them correctly Netscape 5 will change that.
I strongly recommend that you check the latest nightly build of Mozilla. Not quite fiished, but I think you'll be very impressed. Beta 1 is just a little over a month away.
Right. And they are already done. Did IE has XUL? What's their answer to MyNetscape?
But more seriously, what is need is much simpler: to ship soon. Mozilla is already a great browser. Everybody is waiting for Netscape 5 to erode market share back from IE.
often to promote Linux at trade shows. For the last 3 years Netscape was the only program you'd see at trade shows. It's in every screenshot. It's the only program dual headed X is demonstrated on. We haven't had anything as flashy to demonstrate Linux on since Netscape. Losing Netscape would definitely put us back a few years.
Personally, the problem with Netscape right now is that Netscape Communicator 4.7 is just too bloated and unstable for its own good.
:-(
Netscape should just forget about including RealPlayer G2 and AOL Instant Messenger and just install the browser suite ONLY.
Also, Netscape's development team cannot compete against just the excellent Microsoft "usability" lab, where much of the features of Internet Explorer were refined.
The problems with Netscape are as follows:
1. The current web browser renders pages in a number of cases 25% slower than IE 5.0.
2. The Collabra and Messenger modules are overkill and unintuitive to use compared to Outlook Express 5.0. In fact, I consider Outlook Express 5.0 to be one of the BEST email programs out there; only the Professional version of Eudora is better.
3. The bookmarking of favorite pages and checking on the history of sites visited recently is FAR better under IE 5.0.
4. IE 5.0 can be easily configured so it doesn't tie in to the MSN home page; meanwhile, it appears that Communicator 4.7 wants you to do a lot of functions through the Netcenter page, and there's NO way around it.
There is much hope that Communicator 5.0 (which will incorporate the Mozilla open source code) will be much improved. I REALLY hope that the Netscape coders have carefully looked at how Internet Explorer 5.0 functions and come up with something better.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
This article manages to take good news (Netscape 5 is poised to debut officially) and turn it into impending destruction of the world as we know it. "The release date slipped. So it looks like Netscape is doomed doomed doomed." I guess you still can't get fired for buying Microsoft. But... consider the source: ZDNet, Microsoft's faithful lapdog.
As a web author and user, the new version of Netscape may be well worth the wait. I have heard only good things about Gecko, the rendering engine. If Netscape 5 supports HTML 4.0 better and more completely than MSIE, I will be a very happy camper.
Penfield Jackson proves it!!!
The judge in his 'Findings of Fact' proves in 206 pages exactly why IE is even in the picture. Without illegal means, which cover a gamut of angles that it takes a mathemmatician to count, IE would not even be on the radar screen.
With the evidence brought forth in that document, I just don't care what IE is like. I consider it and Microsoft evil. And the judge has proven it.
For most users, the difference between IE and NS is negligible anyway. Even in corporations, where I work, web pages must or should be written to allow that older versions of browsers might be used. Upgrading 20,000 user for instance, is not a perfect process.
And if corporate web pages are used on the internet, you can guarantee that a lot of users are using older browsers.
So I think the point that IE might be perceived to be ahead in some way [but gotten illegally] is a moot point if you look at reality.
The only fair thing as far as the court goes and IE/Netscape/Other brosers go is to give Microsoft a penalty. Ten yards back like in football.
I'd do a number of things. Probably just take IE away from Microsoft completely, and not let them bundle any browser. Force the freeze of IE in versions and features. Allow only for bug fixes and fixing of security holes. If browsers are bundled, let them be bundled by including a CD with a choice of competing browsers, but not include IE. Make IE cost some real money [at least $30-40] while others are free or lesser cost.
What you are arguing here is that IE got ahead. But the real point is that is was done illegally, and there should be a heavy penalty and compensation for the victims, which include Netscape, Opera, etc, and the consumer.
I do *NOT* think that that should be the end of the punishment handed to Microsoft either. Only just one tiny aspect. It does not cover the damage done to other software and companies like DRDOS, OS/2, Apple Mac, Novell, Lotus [Smartsuite and Notes], Wordperfect, Corel, Java, Sun, and many many more.
Though it is prone to crashes (especially the Win95/98 version), Netscape still has a lot of supporters out there, and won't be dissapearing any time soon. I think that Netscape 5, once it finally gets released, will become the standard web browser on most internet appliances, and will once again regain lost ground on the Windows platforms.
A few months ago I pointed my roommate to the Mozilla page and instructed him to give it a download. His words; "Hey, this is pretty cool." Mozilla rocks. It kicks the pants off IE. If proxies worked I'd use it as my primary browser; it's more stable than Netscape 4.x.
Let me say XML namespaces. Why bother being part of a standards group and actually help write the standards and then fail to implement them properly in IE5. XSL is another technology that is not implemented correctly.
I rather have a company not supporting a standard than a bastardization of a standard.
For one thing, having the browser so tightly tied into the operating system often causes the whole system to lock up when the browser crashes(at least in most of my experiences). Secondly, if the browser is compromised by an intruder, the system is more easily accessed than if the browser wasn't tied so closely to the OS.
My opinion is that it's better to have a seperate browser and operating system because it doesn't cause complete system failures when it crashes and it's not as easy to comprimise the whole system by attacking the browser(like that old IE 3.0something exploit).
I hope that IE has a lot of reason to fear when this new version of Netscape comes out.... because, as cheesy as this may sound, I love Netscape, and I don't use IE unless I absolutely have to (not all of the Windoz computers on this campus have zip drives so I can run Netscape).
Kudos to Netscape, whatever they do. (Preferable, however, release that new browser, and make it _good_).
Insert mind here.
Here's a listing of features that IE supports but that Netscape doesn't. http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/ie.html
Not only is Navigator losing, apache seems to be sliding. Check out http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ to see Netcraft's chart. Microsoft had at big 2.78 percent increase last month. It seems as if Netscape servers are holding their own, so there is one bright spot for the former "Microsoft Killer".
Create new features where they make sense , I say .
If Netscape couldn't win the browser war then maybe the open source community is the only developement environment that can wage that kind of campaign successfully .
We need ot beat them at their own game , me thinks .
Your Squire
squireson
Hello? AOL owns Netscape. Do you think they are going to just let that investment go to waste? Of course not! AOL is going to replace IE with Netscape in their client; it's just a matter of time.
Then, we will see the resurgence of Netscape...and just how much AOL skews the browser usage numbers.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Ok, I must have been too tired to get that the first time around. I certainly hope linux gets a good browser. I'll be looking forward to seeing a good browser under Linux, I personally don't like netscape. Any recommendations?
treke
You know... i love netscape. I really do. But, i hate it when it crashes my )(*&^ OS at work (NT... no choice...) as i go to /.
Sad thing is... it hasn't gotten better in the year+ of updates!
That what this was posted with.
There are only 2 real reasons why you'd use Netscape on a mac or win platform.
1. I'm so anti-MS I'd rather use an abacus!
2. Security.
Not that Netscape is bulletproof, but look at IE's trackrecord in the past few months. Something like a dozen exploits, most of which do a lot more than just crash your system. So I patiently wait for 5.0 because I don't need the headache of some exploit trashing my system and I don't want to support a company so lax on security.
Heh, I got a kick out of the guy who lists one of IE's strong points as frequent security patches. If these are the 'experts' I'm glad I disagree.
Who are they kidding ? 90% of the people that I know who have computers don't use IE .
about 30 - 35% use Netscape .
Heck , I know people who are using Netscape 3.0
and get pretty hacked when they encounter a website that doesn't look right .
They do not go through the trouble of downloading
a new browser . The five million downloads for IE 5 were mainly disgruntled IE users .
Your ?Squire
suqireson
Except you have people who cannot for their lifes spend 5 seconds turning off sending HTML emails...
:)
No browser should be set to send HTML emails by default, if the stupid user is too stupid to switch it off, he/her is too stupid to be needing the fancy stuff.
All those people who design bloated, image-ladden web sites with pointless Java programs obviously have not actually used the net much. People usually bitch about sites being too slow to load and don't have the stuff they were looking for, they don't stay away from a site with the information they want simply because it's not fancy-looking enough.
Speaking from personal experience, there were several occasions when I turned away from an online shopping place half way through an order because the damned thing loaded so slowly that my patience started running out and had the time to realise I might not want to buy the stuff just yet...
Longer loading time = more time to reverse an impulse buy
Keeping things a bit on topic: maybe with the dominance of IE we might finally be rid of that Netscape spawn of evil - the blink tag!
Okay, long shot...but if the f*cking French can get into Rugby World Cup final, stranger things can happen.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
... like browsing well-crafted content? maybe i'm being backward here, but but basic support for HTML, and on a good day, stylesheets, is what *i* find useful. :)
if your web site requires flash, shockwave, or javascript, and does not degrade gracefully, you've definately lost _my_ eyeballs.
Interesting thought.... IE is stable ONLY because MS has a competitor. Other MS products are not as stable because there is no competiton...
--
Time is on my side
I had a place that wanted a similar configuration which I was able to convince into using Squid+smb auth... (another place is using squid + PAM, with a PAM smb auth module authenticating off an NT server), and has allowed keeping the browsers as they are....
so yes... it is possible to install a squid proxy server that authenticates off an NT server....
MUCH cheaper in licencing costs...
--
Time is on my side
if a crappy app (Netscape) can take it down then there is no difference between Linux and Windows.
How can netscape crash X? Anyone have any examples of how netscape crashes X11? For me, debian potato on an i686 netscape 4.7 crashes about twice a day (much better than 4.61), but has never caused X to die. I simply have to kill off the netscape processes, remove that stupid lock file and run netscape again whenever it crashes.
Netscape sucks, but it has never screwed up X for me. In fact no program ever has, even when unexpected events occurred (excluding UnrealTournament which sometimes freezes while glide is accessing the monitor/keyboard, although according to 'ps' X is still very much alive).
Your viewpoint would be a shade more convincing if you made references to facts in the opinion that are verifiably wrong.
D
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No matter how many times I read complaints about Netscape 4.x vs. IE x.x and how many people proclaim IE to be less buggy, I still don't believe it. I seriously max Netscape to it's limits, and tend to run into Win 9X crashes more often than Netscape problems. Also, seing as how IE 5.x was incorporated into the 2nd edition 98 coding, wouldn't that make it a wee bit more bloatware -ish than Netscape. Only say 300+mb for a web browser? Come on! Now if we could just finish Mozilla overnight...
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
They may understand the medium, but they are coding for most of their target market. This is the nub of the argument.
IE5 is currently the best browser available. People will code for IE5 specific features. Other browsers on other platforms will not support these. Therefore other platforms will not be able to compete with win* when it comes to viewing the web.
ipso facto, quid pro quo, non illegitimi carborundum, win* becomes the only viable 'OS' with which to view the web.
Those who use lynx, maya, opera, mozilla are viewed in the same way as stone axe users at the start of the iron age.
dave "ugh"
In Windows, I used to browse with only Netscape browsers and scoffed at those who used IE. But after experiencing my zillionth netscape bug, I tried IE 4. It was faster, more stable, and integrated more cleanly into the Windows environment. I've been using it ever since. In Linux, I end up either using Lynx or not surfing at all. Communicator is, I dare say, *worse* under Linux. My favorite Netscape bug: The one where Navigator starts ignoring all left mouse clicks. It's been there for a _long_, long time.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
No reason to panic yet.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
I think the 70 thousand great windows applications that exist are a good enough example. Ever read MSDN? Sure maybe there is some obscure function in a DLL which noone ever uses...and which isn't mentioned in official documentations...but who cares? It can't be that important if all this software is out there without needing to use it.
Why would MS close their APIs? Their OS exists cause of 3rd party software...yeesh.
Try being a windows programmer and read msdn (msdn.microsoft.com) before you crap on.
"I have not seen a shred of proof..." - what a load of hogwash
Apparently, the static pages are served by NT and the perl scripts by Apache/Solaris.
I'm currently using the most recent nightly build of mozilla. And in case you haven't used it lately, it's about a month from being ready for prime-time.
.gov is starting to turn agains microsoft, and so are MANY of the people who are tired of their insecure, unstable, expensive crappy OS's. let's just name a few, HP, IBM, DELL, SUN, AOL, and you can always look to the current prices of Redhat and Cobalt for more inspiration. Those are HUGE comanies, who are very very tired of being raped my Microsoft.
.sig
The thing that most don't understand is that mozilla is a great browser, and like all great things it takes a while to got it coded. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will mozilla be. Just because Microsoft feels they can release an unstable crappy browser doesn't mean we should loose hope.
The
AOL owns Netscape, and will be using the fruits of mozilla as soon as it stableizes.
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
matisse:~$ cat
I too hate to say it, but I've decided that IE 4.5 is better on the Mac side as well. It's a processor hog, it doesn't always render things right, and it has lots of quirky bugs, but it is fast and stable compared with NN. Loading a cached page is much faster, and it renders the page as it's being loaded. IE is the only Microsoft product I've used, but I have to give them credit for doing a decent job with it. I really hope Netscape 5 can win me back.
IE4 was pretty good...
However IE5 is excellent. I have been using it since the beginning of the year and have yet to crash the browser.
With IE4 I was able to crash the browser by trying to scroll the window down while it was rendering certain webpages.
After using IE5 you will seriously question why anybody continues to use the buggy Netscape.
I'm posting this from the latest nightly Mozilla. It is pretty smooth and startin gto look polished. I can't log into hotmail and I think that is because it doesn't have SSL or maybe just SSL proxy (I'm going through a proxy). This is a VAST improvement over M10.
Actually, At NYu we have tested both system out extenssively. Netscape is actually more stable than IE, has a smaller foot print, is more secure.
Without the ability to force feed it's browser, it still holds a whopping 41 percent of the market. The integration of IE into Windows is a danger to the local network, and IE simply has more bugs.
The damn thing can't even handle simple smooth graphics loading on large Web Pages. It screws up form inputs, it cause General Protection Faults. It just really is inferior.
The purpose of a web browser is to surf the net. Once it is integrated, it becomes in secure and buggy.
If you want integration, forget the browser, USE X WINDOWS
Miscosfot doesn't have X. So what choice do they have besides integrating IE into the desktop.
Ruben I Safir
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Try www.mnemonic.org
It's code is marvellously clear, (not like Mozilla's spaghetti mess) since it was conceived as an open-source GPL project from the ground up.
(although their C++ formatting rules make more sense than the GNU official ones...)
They're also keen to get MathML up and running early on - so it's likely to be popular with scientists and engineers.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The answer is to simply run NetPositive.....of course that means you'll also have to be running BeOS :^)
And to the moderators....NO! This isn't a f*cking troll or flamebait! Believe it or not, there are other OSes out there besides Linux and Windows. FWIW, Netscape 4.61 cooks on OS/2 Warp 4!
What the hell are you talking about? Did you even read the thread you're replying to?
There isn't a single person in this thread defending Microsoft.
(I hope you're glad you posted anonymous)
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Actually, At NYU we have tested both system out extensively. Netscape is actually more stable than IE, has a smaller foot print, is more secure.
Without the ability to force feed it's browser, it still holds a whopping 41 percent of the market. The integration of IE into Windows is a danger to the local network, and IE simply has more bugs.
The damn thing can't even handle simple smooth graphics loading on large Web Pages. It screws up form inputs, it cause General Protection Faults. It just really is inferior.
The purpose of a web browser is to surf the net. Once it is integrated, it becomes in secure and buggy.
If you want integration, forget the browser, USE X WINDOWS
Miscosfot doesn't have X. So what choice do they have besides integrating IE into the desktop.
Ruben I Safir
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Uhm, yeah, sure. Lots of companies have "MSIE users" as their target market. Just like all those companies who have "people driving in a black sedan" as their target market.
-- Abigail
There doesn't seem to be much mention here that AOL owns Netscape. It is in AOL's best interest to make Netscape as pervasive a browser as possible. It will accomplish this by make Netscape Navigator its core web browser. With the uncertainty of M$'s future in coming months/years, it is only a further catalyst for AOL to switch its core browser to Navigator. Thats millions of accounts that will be using Navigator instead of IE.
The battle might have been lost, but the war is far from over. Navigator has one hell of an ally: AOL.
To summarize: $150 billion in market capital. 'Nuff said.
Execute? [Y/N] _
The web should, no *must* be browser independent. It should be standards dependent. If it makes a difference what web browser you use, then someone has abused the web.
I use IE now, because it is the newest Windows browser. I use it in the same way I'd buy a 99 Ford model car because Chevy hadn't released a new model for 2 years to make their 2000 models irresistable. Driving a Ford this year shouldn't prevent me from replacing it with a Chevy next year. And likewise, I should be able to pop out IE 5 and pop in Mozilla without noticing a difference in functionality.
If I do, then the one that's not standards compliant is *wrong* and will be disposed of as quickly as possible. I think that a lot of other people/companies think the same way.
And as you mentioned, if they don't, then they are the ones that are losing. If I am not able to buy a ticket for Northwest online because they aren't out to serve *me*, well, then there are plenty of other airlines to go to.
-Brent--
Opera supports Java, with a plugin.
Wouldn't it be great if all browsers used the same Java VM?
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END OF LINE
I maintain a small network with 13 Windows computers. I never bother to install Netscape. With IE you get it right out of the box. I can do things faster and therefor save my employer time.
Sure Netscape is just as good if not better then IE. And it doesn't have any of the terrible security of IE. (ActiveX anyone?) But it's just not as easy.
I don't support Microsoft on much, heck I use Linux/Netscape exclusivly at home, but I think they made things much easier/faster by including IE with Windows.
Look at all of the Linux distributions. Notice how all of them (other then Debian) install Netscape? It's not much different then Microsoft including IE with Windows.
i've seen posts on this thread saying that netscape's server is losing to apache and IIS. Which is true, and some people say that netscape should release more stable software which is also good, but what I can't understand is if netscape doesn't make any money off of its browser, why would they devote so much time to make it less buggy when they should be working on their server product?
The way for Linux programmers to work around the new IE "features" is to pitch in and make Communicator 5.0 a better browser than IE. That way web developers won't even bother straying from the standards. Playing catchup is a good way to lose.
All this discussion of new features of IE is missing the point. Microsoft broke the law in forcing IE on the public. The giving away of Internet Explorer at no cost, in of itself, is an act prohibited by a Monopoly by the Sherman Anti-Trust act. Everyone who has ever taken a single Business course knows this. The selling of a product at a loss for the purpose of bankrupting an competing firm who could not match the loses, and to force them out of business, is the very definition of an ilegal business practice.
r =innovate&stmailaddress4=NY197&stmailaddre ss5=NY142&stmailaddress6=NY005&stmailaddress7=NY17 9&stmailaddress8=NY024&mailaddress0=ny11 &mailaddress1=ny09&mailaddress2=nysr&mailaddress3= nyjr&message=&comptype=fedstate&_state=n y
The further thrusting of the Browser on the public through forced installation with the Windows, AOL, etc, is further illegal activity.
The Web Browsing Software is for Browsing the Web. Linux really has nothing to worry about. IE is a trememndous securiy risk. IBM, Oracle and others are using JAVA to make sure that their applications are cross platform. Linux and Unix have FAR MORE POWERFUL interface for integrated networking applications. This application is the X windowing system. With tk ported to windows, and with Java available, anyone with any insite will use X tools and Broadway Joe to deliver apps over the Net. Netscape only needs to work as a browser. As a Browser it is more secure, does a better job of downloading pages and graphics, and has LESS bugs than IE in these core usages.
BTW - MS has provided a nice place to let your views be known to you Elected officials on these issues.
See:
http://legislators.com/
My sample letter went like this:
I have watched the monopolistic manuvers of Microsfot for many years now. It's obvious that they are breaking the Sherman Anti-Trust act routinely. They have no intention of ever competeing fairly in the market. They released Internet Explorer at no charge, robbing Netscape of fairly earned revenues and forced it on the public against it's will. Now it has integrated it into the propriety office suite software and is threatening the Internets ability to remain a standardized communication device.
Do anything you can to break up Microsoft today.
http://legislators.com/cgi-bin/ms_compose.pl?di
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Er.. I think MathML already works in mozilla (if you set the correct options during compile.) It was a good example of how extendable Mozilla's layout engine is. As future extentions are added to the browser world, the new Netscape should allow for far quicker/cleaner extentions. That is one of the main reasons for rewriting it.
I think that's what Mozilla is.
I work for Enterprise Rent-A-Car and we hve 35,000 employees and our IT staff deploy only IE to all the PCs in the company. We do not allow software that's not in the standards folder \\fscorp00\images\niche Netscape is not in the niche. IE is faster, can view more websites, and is all arround a better browser.
At one time, that argument worked, and well. That's why for a number of years web designers went to
great pains to ensure that webpages were well-tested on both browsers.
But not today. Considering the number of people that use IE, many web designers are simply testing their page against IE. If the current trend continues, you'll become a *very* small minority, one that they don't care about since the percentage doesn't substantially hurt their business.
No sane company would want to loose even 10% of their market if the only advantage was "it use a new cool-looking feature in IE" Their game isn't using the latest html oddities, it is selling their stuff, plain and simple.
ROFL!!!
IE: this is SHITE - it crashes all the time
NS/MOZ: this is GREAT, apart from the fact it crashes all the time.
friends of mine are dumping icq for msn messenger even though messenger has waaaay less features... etc
kinda like the beginnings of ie all over again...
icq vs. messenger = netscape vs. ie ?
instant messenger incompatibility might put another stranglehold on desktop-web-linux...
an even tougher one than ie-proprietary functions...
ONE WORD | Lynx |
yes yes YES!
Finally!! Someone that has a brain! These points are exactly the things I have been going on about sonce forever!
Netscape are really happy when they find a happy new feature to put into their piece of shit, but the fact is that they cannot make a product that simply acts normal, as the user would expect any normal windows program to act. No they have to do things their way and make everything totally the opposite from established standards. Or occasionally just totally random!
And this also applies to the 'non-UI' things, such as the HTML and Java parsing. I never really used Netscape so when I found out that Netscape wasnt rendering my site correctly all I could do was put up a neat little note on the front page telling Netscape weenies to get a real browser because I dont have the time for working out what the hell its problem is! I've heard that stylesheets arent loaded properly...so what can I say, if netscape cant even do that right theres no telling what happens with Java!
The other major thing is that they have a bloody bloated piece of total SHIT! Do you really need to have all that shit in there? Its like they think bigger is better or something! I'm not too cetrain but last time I looked there was no option for a 'lite' version or anything. Its becoming equivelant to the emacs of the browser world! The fact is people prefer to mix and match specialised programs for their needs, rather than use one big pile of shit with the various capability incorporated just for the sake of saying 'we have this feature'!
Usually, this is a problem with a corrupt .Sent.summary file in your nsmail directory. Remove the file and it will be rebuilt automagicly when you send mail again.
.< FOLDER>.summary files. Rebuilding these files will _usually_ fix Netscape Messenger problems. In our corporate environment we are using Netscape on HP-UX, and I see this almost every day. The easiest way to fix mail problems is to delete all of the .summary files, and let them rebuild when Messenger is restarted. It may take a little while depending on the speed of your box and how big your folders are.
Most crashes related to Netscape on *NIX (WHILE READING MAIL) can be contributed to corrupt
YMMV
I've been meaning to try IE for HP-UX, but haven't had the time. Although it pains me to say it as I have been using Netscape since the 1.2 days, Communicator is the most unstable application that we have running on our machines to date.
Ahhhh... Remember the days when a Web Browser was used for browsing the web rather than handling every aspect of the internet experience? If I recall, the stability of Netscape started seriously slipping when it started doing mail/news/development. Well, the first couple of iterations of Java and JavaScript were a little flakey, but hey, you'd expect that from new features.
I've found that Navigator Standalone runs much more stably on my Mac than any version of IE. The only thing I can see in IE that I like more than Navigator is dynamic rendering of pages (man, I HATE waiting for these nested comments wrapped in one huge table to load on /.) - not really that much though...
If only Netscape(AOL) would focus on making Web Browsers rather than slapping a shoddy email client (I already have one that works well), a crummy newsreader (got one of those too, thanks) and a composer (that's what text editors are for - ok, I'm a purist ;) into the works. All it seems to accomplish is increase the complexity of the project and suck valuable resources away from the real goal of a Web Browser: Browsing the web!
Culture is more than commerce
This is true. However, if you consider that this is the LAST thing that Microsoft needs right now, in the light of the recent developments in the Anti-Trust lawsuit, I'm not really sure what to believe. If this didn't come from ZD, I could easily see this as reverse-FUD aimed at making MS look like big olde monopolizers.
True, but how most ofpeople/companies out there *know* what is *the standard*? What most of them *percieve* to be a standard is what they are used to seeing, not what W3C writes in some obscure manual/policy/standard, but what MSIE *shows* them to be a standard. Things like loose HTML syntax, marquee tag, poor compliange with CSS1 and tons of other small nifty feature none seems to use, but still being in use nonetheless.
It is exactly these small nifty-and-not-as-much-so things that really start getting in a way, costing Netscape the war. One could not put it better than Dave Whitinger (re-phrased): why do I as a Joe-random-user should not enjoy Web as much as my friend next door? And this includes all aspects of it: I want Shockwave, I want DHTML, I want my links to react to my pointer hovering over them! Yeah, I may not know DHTML from an animated GIF but why should I? And I do want it to be stable--the time is almost gone when we could just slap "Windows is not stable enough" and be done with the argument.
Truth and an important fact is that we doneed Mozilla to succede. Personal computing now is not a standalone desktop in an attic: Linux (or any other *nix) needsa rock-solid browser, maybe even morethan multiple desktop environments and window managers.
If we fail we willloose the war
--AP
Likewise, I use Navigator Standalone on the Mac. I didn't used to- I used iCab, but was forced to stop because their betas expired and the new betas went through impossible bugridden phases. I went back to Navigator 4 and have been staying with that ever since.
Maybe the government should just _seize_ IE and make it the Government Issue Web Browser for All that so many people seem to desperately want. I could cope with that, but it's no good letting any commercial entity have that kind of power. At least the government is obligated to pretend to look after its citizens. I won't _touch_ IE unless it's nationalized. I don't care if they dumped so many billions of dollars of work into it that it sucks less than Netscape. People need to understand the control implications behind handing anybody the total control of the Net.
There should be no guessing when the HTML is broken.
Um, where was any form of argument in that?
you are obviously an idiotic vb junkie
Um, yeah I know VB well, but I also know C++ and Java (java equally well).
Just wait till microsoft decides to expand its services division, you'll see firsthand yourself then
explain.
In case you would like to find out beforehand, try researching!
Uh, what are the reasons for you thinking that?
*Offtopic*
Come to my house buddy, my cat's litter box needs cleaning.
By what I understood from the article, the webmasters' problem was not inability to use IE's specific tags, but NS not supporting many standard features from the WWW Consortium such as XML and the like. These features were developed to be used, and not beind able to use them because NS doesn't support them is IMO more than justifiably annoying.
I really do hope Mozilla will solve the problem.
What annoys me is that my Mac browsers ignore *different* bad HTML to the same versions on Windows. For example, IE 4.5 on the Mac barfs with the nested tables in /. but IE 4.5 on NT ignores the bad coding. 3 240&mode=thread
>>>>
Here is a summary of the information that Doctor HTML has learned about your Web page:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/07/191
* There were 212 table structure problems found.
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In an interview a little while ago in response to questions about competition from cheap and free office Suites on Linux that could make Linux a viable alternative to Windows Bill Gates said that Linux would never fully catch on because of a the difficulty of writing browser software.
He then gave the impression that writing software like Word and Excel was going far better and was easier than writing a modern browser.
I remember thinking this was odd because it meant that this meant they were spending as much or more resources making Office 2000 as they were on the (at the time) unreleased IE 5. Especially since they gave away IE 5 and charged for the Office Suite...so I thought he was full of shit.
Now reconsidering the landscape it seems Satan was right. We have Star Office, teX, and several other products that can give each tool in Office 2000 a run for its money but we don't have a browser. We must do something about this...
Let's join Mozilla, let's fight the IE only webmasters, let's inform the uninformed and most importantly remember if we fail, we will lose the war.
Bad Command Or File Name
Unfortunately, many coders would rather program something glamorous such as an operating system or game.
There's also the issue of the code being in a mess when it was released. It is always likely to be more difficult to turn an existing closed source program into a viable open source one.
As far as servers go, Apache and Netscape are neck and neck, usually running on Sun Solaris machines followed by Linux. IIS on NT doesn't even take home 10% of that market... unless you believe the Microsoft press releases.
First of all, did anyone actually read the article before chanting "wait for Mozilla" or talking about boycotting companies that design MSIE-only web pages?
Several of the people being quoted are talking about using a browser either as a front end to a corporate intranet (where standardizing on one browser is feasible), or an application system using XML. It has nothing to do with corporations designing MSIE-only web pages for the internet.
I'm not saying IE is the better browser, or that Mozilla will not beat the pants off of it when it's done, or that I won't use Mozilla when it's done, but it's not done and that is the big reason why these corporate intranet / XML-based applications are using MSIE.
Sure, you can tell me to submit bug reports or fix bugs myself -- despite the fact that I've not been able to get Mozilla to work yet, be it on my Win95 machine at work, my Power Mac at home, or compiling it myseslf on the Linux/PPC partition at home, when I do I'll document every bug I can find -- but are you trying to say the same thing to Burlington Coat Factory? Their IT people probably have better things to do.
Jay (=
There are waaaay more intranet sites and web applications being built than there are public internet sites. So when a corporation wants to build a web application (which more and more are doing instead of normal VB forms apps), they have a choice - be left with a fairly anemic app to support Netscape and MS, or go with IE and have all of the ui that they want (not talking ActiveX here, but DHTML). Unless they have an anti-MS bigot with the powere to scuttle, they will go with the IE-optimised version every time.
If there were something better, it would be used.
Unfortunately, many coders would rather program something glamorous such as an operating system or game. Something that will get them instant fame. Unfortunately we are not looking at where the real development of the internet is and has gone. Therefore we should all download Mozilla, report bugs and suggest patches. Come on you dolts we do it for everything else.
But no, browsers need to be totally free, as in we need to be lazy about it.
Sad huh?
You brought up that there is a big difference between Communicator and Navigator. I've been wondering about that for a long time. What is the difference? At first, I thought it was just the suite, but Navigator comes with the suite too.
I would love to know, thanks
Neoplanet is actually doing something very interesting:
They are planning on embedding both browsers into their product, and letting users switch between them at will. They are also dedicating programming resources to helping the Mozilla project.
Check out these links:
Neoplanet Press Release
Download the Neoplanet 5.0 Gecko technology preview
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Think about how many AOL users have, and will continue to have, IE installed.
Do you really think AOL wants to make their customers install a *second* browser? And I'm sure they don't want to deal with the customer support headaches that would create.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
MS got the IE codebase from the same place netscape got theirs: UIUC & NCSA. I still remember when Netscape was called Mosaic communications and their browser was called "Mosaic" and was comparatively kick ass. Apparently Netscape Corp. and their programmers could design and code their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm not a big MSIE fan myself, but you can easily switch off the smooth scrolling - I think it's in the preferences / advanced tab. One of about 1,000,000 options, but it's there, and once you find it, the irritating smooth scroll goes away.
I still pine for Netscape 3, which had a way better interface than Netscape 4. In fact, NS 4 stuck me as a bit of a copy of the then-current version of IE, which is exactly what I didn't want in a browser.
Generally, I won't use IE simply due to the symbolism - I hate Microsoft's junkware, and using IE proclaims to the world: "I use Microsoft's junkware, I'm a MS clone guy". So I only use IE to test my own web pages, and occasionally when I've found some sites that I need to access that don't work with NS.
Before using IE, I recommend you read Judge Jackson's findings of fact in the MS antitrust case. Made me sick to my stomach. Do I want to do what those bastards want me to?
NO!
D
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The MDI is the first thing I liked about Opera. Then I found all the customizations. It's fast, flexible, and efficient.
Netscape is okay except for the Java pages that crash it occasionally. MSIE is okay except when it crashes the OS goes down with it.
Opera only lacks Java support, which is not important for me.
Most of the features I see in sites requiring recent browsers simply aren't worth it. I want useful, interesting information, not little programs that pop up and do useless things.
Personally, I look at my site in all browsers I can get, and if it doesn't look right, I tweak it until it's OK. I'm certainly not going to want to exclude someone just because his idea of the best browser is different from mine.
D
----
I can think of a few mis-implementations of the open standards that you tout that your MSIE so faithfully implements. However, I'll spare the drudgery of listing them and instead say this:
MSIE sucks. Netscape sucks.
We need something better. Period.
Mozilla was Microsoft's master stroke. Not only has it failed to deliver a viable competitor to Netscape, it has also kept any other open source browser project from gaining critical mass.
(posting a day late. Will anyone read this?)
There was a recent report (dunno where) which suggested that in two years' time, desktop PCs will not be the most common way of accessing the Internet, with the large number of set-top-box systems on their way.
For example, now I have a Dreamcast, if I just want to check a web page quickly, and I happen to be downstairs, I'll use the DC rather than leave the comfort of my living room.
The DC browser lacks a whole lot of features, which in one way is a shame -- but one positive aspect is that a large population of (potentially money-spending) internet users, stuck with basic HTML renderers and not much else, might encourage content providers to tone down their reliance on obscure plugins.
There's *very little* of real worth that can't be accomplished using a browser something akin to Netscape 2, and the fancy stuff goes on at the server side. That's what made the Web so nice in the first place.
--
I'm certainly believe that with all my heart. And I think that when Mozilla is released we'll have it. And I think it won't be as big a problem to get people to use Mozilla as you think.
Microsoft will be prevented from forcing IE on OEM's and IAP's. We'll see more of them using Mozilla as their browser, that'll result in more people writing real web pages. And life will be good.
Well, I can dream...
-Brent--
I have always designed my web pages to work with all browsers. And Netscape has always been my browser of choice, because it was the best. Though it lacks nifty features like IE's rebars, I really like the Netscape Communicator 4.x interface. I find bookmark handling in particular easier to deal with in Netscape than in IE.
Unfortunately, Netscape dropped the ball, and stopped improving their browser engine after Communicator 4.0 was released in June 1997. Though it wasn't standards-compliant then, I fully expected Netscape to remedy that as soon as possible. They never did. In fact, I've never even heard them say that they were working on full HTML 4.0 support.
Instead, Netscape has wasted time with side projects, first trying to push (no pun intended) its ill-fated Netcaster client, then its portal site, and then all kinds of useless junk like AOL Instant Messenger and the Shop button.
Meanwhile, Microsoft wasn't just relying on bundling IE with every conceivable piece of Windows software. IE4 was released with a solid lead over Netscape in HTML and CSS support. While Netscape's ill-named SmartUpdate was and still is broken and difficult to use, IE4 introduced Windows Update, which makes installations, upgrades, and add-ons a snap.
Now IE5 is the undisputed best web browser. Under the hood, it is so far superior to any other browser that there is no contest. To initiate an exodus from IE, Mozilla will have to be fully compliant with HTML, CSS2, XML, and be amazing to boot. And it will need to be released soon.
As for Netscape, I am resigned to its crushing defeat. Over a year ago, it was already clear that it lost the browser war. People have waited patiently since 1997, but there is still no sign that Netscape 5 is forthcoming, let alone any indication that it will be as good as IE5.
Unless there is a dramatic reversal in this situation, I think you can expect to see more and more Netscape holdouts give up and start writing web pages to today's standards, whether Navigator can deal with them or not. I am unhappy about this state of affairs, but that's just the way it is. Netscape stood still while the world kept on turning.
Uh-huh.
Look, OK, let's just agree a truce. You wait patiently for erm, I dunno let's say Windows 2000, and I'll wait patiently for Mozilla. Neither of us will bitch about 'vapourware' or anything else. Everything will be much more friendly, and we can start to be more positive about things. OK?
Only it doesn't really work like that, does it? You really want me to be nice to you because Mozilla is an open source project, and so it's just so much more important for it to be solid as a rock before it's released, and blah blah blah. And probably you don't give a rat's arse about Windows 2000, OK whatever but that's not my point.
It's interesting to note that most people I've heard talking about the Win2000 beta say it's already a good solid product. Whereas I tried Mozilla M10 and it crashed *constantly*. I do not have the necessary net access to check out releases more often, and I'm sure many of the issues are being addressed. But as far as I can see, if it's going to be solid before it comes out, it's not going to come out very soon. And if it's not solid, it's going to be laughed off the face of the net.
According to netcraft, Apache has 54% market share, IIS 25%, and Netscape 7%.
If I've gotta use IE for something, I use NeoPlanet. Its flashy. And it kinda makes me feel like I'm not really using IE (even though weblogs will pick it up as an IE hit).
I don't think it's just because the larger IE user base that many web site creators test their sites in IE.
They simply test against IE because it's their favorite browser and therefore the browser they're developing for.
The reason why they like IE? Because it supports more CSS and DHTML and thatalike and renders their pages like they want them to. Netscape, on the other hand, lacks descent implementations of those things.
But, since Netscape 5 will support almost all recent standards, I think this will change. Many web developers are not against supporting multiple browsers, they're just so bored with the fact that whatever they do, IE and Netscape won't render their CSS code and so on the same way or even close. So they lose interest in Netscape, and primarily focus on IE, leaving Netscape users in the dust.
So I think that when a standards-compliant and standards-uptodate Netscape comes, web developers will start to test against Netscape more often, maybe even developing primarily for Netscape 5 and testing in IE.
Web developers are no evil, they just hate tools or programs that simply won't make their work work. On the other hand, Netscape 5 could become the web developers' new best friend.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What got me from the /. post was the last line about websites being IE enabled for useful tasks. My company (a large consulting firm that will remain anonymous) has already taken this step. Access to the company intranet is restricted to clients using IE, and this trend seems to be spilling over into other areas as well.
I have to agree with other posts that the level of innovation included in each new Navigator release is pretty pathetic. I used to download and install each new version with glee a few years ago, but lately there seems to be nothing in the new versions that even slightly interests me.
IE, on the other hand, seems to continue pushing forward. Browsing certain sights is a completely different experience using the features IE has implemented, while with Navigator the pages look, well, as boring and static as they would have with the HTML 2.0 spec.
Like everyone else, I think I'm hoping Mozilla can be the cure to this problem. The layout engine *is* fantastic, and as someone else has said, if they can get the program to load anywhere near as fast as IE does, it'll be a big blow to IE.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
wookin' pa nub in all the wrong pwaces
If microsoft had never made IE netscape would still be the piece of crap it is today.
With IE at least Netscape made an attempt to improve their product...but becuase they had such a munted source base, they couldn't do it.
IE is successful not only cause of microsoft tactics. It's successful simply cause it's better. That's the hard truth I'm afraid.
At Uni, they still use Netscape (refuse to use IE) because they're strictly a Unix only, Non microsoft department. It's pretty sad to watch netscape crumble all the workstations.
It's not a completely URL-based operating system. Explorer.exe was hacked to give you URL access.
Try using a DOS shell. It's not only NOT URL based, it's still fucking NETBIOS based. Lan Manager anyone?
New Technology my hairy ass.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
that's exactly what I hate about Opera too.
They better not implement MDI for the Mac and Linux versions - oh, I'll probably run Moz anyway.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Spyglass owned Mosaic at the time, (or at least the part that MS bought from them for IE) and they're still around, doing disgustingly well. Supposedly, there's very little of the original Spyglass-owned code left in IE.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A lot of people have made some interesting "what if" statements about IE vs. Navigator - but I think that the most important factor in Navigator's decline and Netscape's demise was the fact that MS gave IE away. If MS remained in the same price range, or even charged what it cost to develop (kind of an oxymoron for software, because it can be copied at no cost), Netscape would still be around, and Navigator would be a far, far better browser than it is today, and IE would probably be much more standards compliant. However, the internet would probably have about 20% of the users it has now.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
While it's probably true that there are no *hidden* APIs that give Microsoft's applications developers some secret advantage over ISVs, there IS another very significant factor.
Ask anyone who has spend any amount of time developing apps for Windows, and they'll tell you that the documentation sucks. This could be on purpose, or by accident, but quite often, you'll use an API that doesn't behave as documented, and there are "tricks" that developers learn about these API, but with each update of MFC, these behaviors change.
Now, obviously, the company that produces the API, has a significant advantage in that their developers are far more intimate with the funny behaviors of API. Now, either Microsoft doesn't document these things well on purpose, or Microsoft just doesn't put as much effort into the documentation as they do the code (the same criticism can be made of many Open Source projects). In either case, folks OUTSIDE of Microsoft, developing applications with MSVC++, are going to have a harder time of things. If something doesn't behave right, it's a call to developer support - hopefully a constructive answer? But for the Microsoft employee, it's: "hey, why did it do THIS?" "go ask Jimmy, he wrote the API" "OIC!".
In effect, you have "secret APIs", which is probably why this myth has persisted and spread like it has. Now, there DEFINATELY was a "secret API" kind of technique used at some point (trial of Caldera vs. Microsoft: MS used code to check to see if Windows was installed on top of DR-DOS, and if it was, would error out with some wierd FUDly message - this trial was just recently ruled to go to jury). But as you said, this sort of thing could not possibly be widespread, because people talk.
But these ex-Microsoft employees can leave the company, maybe some are torqued-off, but they'll just chuckle at how badly documented MFC is, and we have to chalk it up to ineptitude, rather than malice.
Now, there was some talk about the remedy for Microsoft being FORCING them to open their source code and document all the "secret APIs", but in reality, we're talking about ineptitude here. How do you legally force someone to "do something right" when they're incapable. I think that getting down to this level in the courtroom would be tedious indeed. And with 140+ million LOC, it's not something I would expect ANY legal system could get through in my lifetime, so I don't expect to ever see it.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
http://help.netscape.com/kb/cons umer/981014-6.html
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
wonders how much better of a product Navigator would be at this time if they'd not had to deal with M$'s embrace and corrupt policy on html/java/javascript standards.
What? Netscape invented embrace-and-extend HTML. Take a look at the the whole layers thing in Netscape 4 -- entirely not standards compliant. To some extent, MS has been just going from the Netscape playbook, but generally IE is far closer to the standards than Netscape is currently.
If IE had been written as a competitive application, by a company _other_ than m$, without m$'s specific advantages as a monopoly (which I firmly belive it is), it's my opinion that Netscape Corp. never would have sold out.
Here you are probably right -- At one time it was reported that Microsoft had more employees in it's IE and IIS groups than Netscape had employeed in total (and Netscape was developing mail, directory, and groupware servers also). Microsoft realized no direct profits from that move - it was only done to ship a superior product for free than Netscape was shipping for a price.
Is IE a better product than Netscape? It'd had better be, since more resources were poured into it.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
yes, all we need is another sloppy parser. Who needs a standardized language for webpages anyway? W3C are just a bunch of whiners, it were better if there were no standards other than those set by microsoft.
//rdj
PS. this post may not have been entirely serious..
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
"IE surpassed Communicator because there are fewer bugs, a better development staff behind IE, tighter integration with Microsoft products, frequent free upgrades and security patches," said David Howell, director of IS at PED Manufacturing Ltd., an Oregon City, Ore., maker of castings for medical implants and aerospace components. I totally agree with this guy. Since Enterprise Rent-A-Car switched to IE 2 years ago, we have had a much better browser. Our clients/staff/customers are much happier now that we have switched to a browser that supports ALL WEB technologies.
We have switched entirely from an all-Netscape shop to an all-IE shop in the last month. Nutscrape has gone all too unstable in it's latest releases to use anymore, so we're switching all our users to IE. And, guess what, as much as I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, there's one thing to be said for IE 5. It's more stable, it's faster and it's much more usable than Netscape. And yes, I hate myself for supporting Micro$oft, so cut off the flak already. Now if MS could only bring it's other products up to par with IE 5...
well.. IE accepting bad HTML.. I'd hardly call that a plus.. in fact, I call it a big big minus. Why? .no more crossplatform web..
It is at the moment the most used browser. For all the consumer cares, the page that they can see using IE, won't display or won't display properly on netscape or another browser, so this MUST be a problem in the browser. They are right ofcourse.. it's a problem with IE. IE breeds bad HTML. non-compliant HTML. So with what do we get stuck? a web full of bad HTML, only usable for IE. guess which company would like that . .
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I have IE set to run in a separate process (I think it's in options/advanced). The few times it's crashed in the past few months it hasn't brought down the OS with it. Sure, it'll take up more resources but not any more than running Netscape.
Despite all those little alarms going off in my head to ignore this, it's sadly happening, and in my immediate world. Upon arriving back at school this year, I found they finally got the T1 connection up, and the machines have - Internet Explorer 5. I assist in the computer labs and was going to protest this decision, then it occured to me - why bother.
... propiterary API's that aren't being shared or whatnot), but Netscape sucks big time on the machines. Crashes left and right, renders like a drunk slug, and takes way too long to load. Meanwhile IE 5 somehow manages to perform efficently on the machines.
/etc/junkbuster/cookiefile, I simply add the site to the "Trusted Sites" zone. Nice. I also spend the time to marvel at the faster more intelligent rendering engine IE seems to have, the nice smooth scrolling, and all the other little things.
The machines are 486/133's (how sad I know), and they simply don't cut the mustard when it comes to using Netscape. I don't know why (ok I _probably_ know why
I then arrived back at the technical school I goto, to the newly arrived Pentium III's. How odd, we had Netscape last year, suddenly IE's our browser this year. I installed Netscape for a project about a month later and boy, was I surprised. There I was on a state of the art new spiffy Gateway machine, and Netscape's performance was still horrid. IE 5 wins again.
I am (was?) a devout Netscape user. IE had never seen the light of day on my machine. I've used Netscape from version 2.02 to 4.61. My computer dual boots Windows 98 (I just can't kick the games, doh!) and Linux. While in Windows after playing a game, I was using a webpage that required a browser with some of the new specs (HTTP 1.1 or whatnot, I forget exactly.) "Netscape 4.61 or Internet Explorer 4 required". Well, I only have Netscape 4.07 in Windows installed because I don't really use the internet in there. Let's see, I obviously need one of these browsers. I have a 56K modem, do I wait an hour and a half to download Netscape 4.7, or hm, is that "Includes Internet Explorer" I see on that CD there?
I install IE 5. After what seemed about 5 reboots, and about 20 minutes later I'm in Windows on the internet. Boy, this thing just FEELS better then Netscape. I use Internet Junkbuster in Linux for cookie filtering (call me paranoid?), and misc other utilites to customize my browsing. Well I'll be damned, Internet Explorers got all these nice customized "Security Settings" per website you can use. No longer do I have to open up my
Fast forward, two weeks later. Sitting in Linux I am, curious on the status of Mozilla. I download Mozilla M10. An excellent work so far, and I look forward to using the final version. The only problem here? IE 5, with what seems to me has almost all the features of Mozilla I'm looking for is out now. Mozilla M20, Gecko, Netscape 5 - whatever it may be called, doesn't look like it's coming anytime soon. While I can certainly wait a few months, my schools obviously can't. And that means IT departments everywhere probably won't. With Linux comes the need for a browser that can perform well. While we all love lynx, it just won't work in corporate settings. Opera looks promising, but it's not here yet, and everyones become too jaded and used to a "Free" browser anyways.
This is not intended as flamebait or whatnot, I'm simply telling the tragic story of how myself, a Linux geek, Netscape loving guy, has unwillingly come to accept IE.
Hrm... I kind of rushed off the original message... let me see if I can explain in a little more detail:
IT staff will be punished if they adopt Internet Explorer, as it actively violates the standards that Mozilla will (hopefully) support...
I was syntatically off the mark here. I don't mean to imply that Internet Explorer breaks all the W3 standards, or that Netscape supports them all. I'm merely expressing a hope that a created from scratch, open source browser project will give the users some clout when it comes time to draft out standards. Have you ever noticed that Microsoft "played key roles" in the development of CSS, XML, and other supposed "standards"? Is it that surprising that they are fully implemented in Internet Explorer?
Nevermind the fact that Internet Explorer has bastardized (I know, someone else said this... but I like the word) standards and even forced some of their own so-called standards upon users. Microsoft polluted Java with the "Windows Foundation Classes", called VBscript a "standard" client-side scripting solution (only to back off and use it only in ASP), and told WWW developers to use those nifty new ActiveX controls that tie entire WWW sites to Win32. It was around this time that they started declaring COM as an "open standard". They made a big deal about COM on Solaris, which is now nowhere to be found.
Now, I'm not excusing Netscape in any way. Netscape has failed to support even standards that Microsoft has nothing to do with, and is looking more every day like a huge conglomoration of useless third-party software. Just take a look at the specs for the Wintel Communicator 4.7: It includes AOL Instant Messanger, RealPlayer, Winamp, Betnik something-or-other... It seems they've reved the product for the past year only by tacking new gadgets on.
What I hope can happen, is that the Mozilla project can distance themselves enough from the Netscape/AOL marketing mess to produce a worthy graphical open-source browser, something I've yet to see (correct me if I'm wrong). Netscape/AOL can use it if they want to, but the free software community can guide it toward goals that aren't necessarily world domination of Netscape's Netcenter portal.
I'm not an open-source bigot, in fact I'm using quite a bit of Microsoft software right now. I just think that we could all benefit from having an open-source browser that is at least detached from the motives of a company. (Refer to the article on the Opera site on why "free" is never really "free").
Rant mode disengaged.
If a company wants to put up an IE only website,
they just won't get any money from me.
It's that simple.
If it won't run in lynx,kfm,or netscape too bad for them.
When you have the entire communicator bin being run there is alot more code being loaded and never used unless you use the mail client or news reader. Since many people actually use the stripped down navigator binary, the communicator bin doesn't have near the bugtesting and even when one is found it takes longer to isolate it due to the bigger application being ran.
I don't know if i'm responding too late for you to be reading this, but unless the mail client or newsreader are critical to you, never install netscape-communicator, it is of much lower quality, especially on less common OSs freebsd(in my experience) even moreso than linux.
PS - It is the only Microsoft product I have any appreciation for, and it took until version 5.
Conversely, it only took Netscape 4 versions for people to hate it...
Wiwi
--
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Granted that MSIE is a big hairy dog that poops on windows's kernel.. Don't get me wrong here, BUT.
I think it is a very powerful feature to have a completely URL-based operating system. This may allow a user to access *any* file on the internet available through a supported protocol just like it's right here. One of the advantages may be an option to remotely install a program -- Just go to their website, run the installation script from there, and let your high-speed internet connection do the rest. No need to bother with downloading the install file, forgetting where you put it, etc etc. I thoroughly believe in the abstraction layer, and reading the contents of any file anywhere all in the same way sounds very good to me.
That aside, I think it sucks that those features would bring down the OS when used.
-S
This was posted with Mozilla M11 nightly for 11-07-99.
There are two issues:
1) Who has produced the better browser?
2) Do we want MS to set the "standards" on the Web?
It seems to be that IE 5 is arguably better. I suspect this is partly because it supports XML (which is what the article was talking about), perhaps partly because MS "cheated" with some of its APIs (maybe, maybe not, but it would be typical MS), and partly because Netscape just plain old dropped the ball.
On the other hand, we know that MS's style is to try to lock customers into its product line and make it difficult for them to get out of it. Do we really want MS to do this on the web? I don't think so. So, I'd say the webmasters ought to try to insure that Netscape, lousy as it is, is still a usuable option for their sites, just to keep MS at least somewhat at bay. If you don't like what I just said, I'm sorry. I can't say that I like it, either.
Hopefully, Netscape or Mozilla will catch up, or the DOJ will put MS in a position where they can't use IE to advance a monopoly.
Your Servant, B. Baggins