Submitted by “Netscape is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Netscape Navigator 9.0 Beta 1. The release is now available for download from browser.netscape.com for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some of Navigator 9’s new features are listed here; for a complete list, see What’s New in Netscape Navigator 9? at browser.netscape.com.”
Resizeable Textarea
Drag the bottom-right corners of text fields in forms to add more typing space.
That should be in every browser! Including Epiphany’s confirmation box when navigating away from an unsubmitted form…
Resizeable Textarea was originally a Firefox extension and was further developed by Justin Watt to become the Resizeable Form Fields extension available at either
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3694/ (version 0.2.1) or http://justinsomnia.org/files/resizable-form-fields-0.2.4.xpi (version 0.2.4).
I suspect that Netscape either bundled this extension with their release or added the equivalent code to the base browser.
For those who expect to use Netscape to check their mails, they will have to use a webmail, or Seamonkey. They dropped the e-mail client!!
I dunno if I am more excited about the “In-browser voting” or the “News Menu and Sidebar”.. too much cool new features.
This is what I call innovation!
And what is this ‘Navigator’ they speak of? Is this the same Netscape that actually used to make a decent browser until they rewrote it from the ground up to be a steaming pile of dog poo?
No, this is the Netscape that was bought by AOL and managed to lose nearly all pre-buyout employees within a year
Netscape, meet Dead Horse. Dead Horse, meet Netscape.
Do they even have a browser presence anymore? I don’t have any of the numbers (and nor do I feel like tracking any down), but I would assume they are somewhere behind Opera in the market penetration segment.
All companies I’ve done outward facing website programming work for have tested against the following platforms/browsers:
IE (Windows and Mac)
FF (Windows and Mac)
Opera (Windows and Mac)
Safari
I’m not kidding when I say I forgot Netscape existed for maybe a year or so until I saw this headline. And I build websites for a living.
I think if I was an engineer on the Navigator team, I’d lie to all my programmer friends and just say I worked on Real Player. It’s that bad.
I would suspect that there are probably more people still using Netscape 4 than there are users of current versions of Navigator. Last time I saw any stats, around 2000-2001 or so, the breakdown was along the lines of NS: 15%, IE: the rest.
I like to imagine that the imagine that the current Netscape development process is similar to that old Dilbert strip – “Sure boss, I can remove the URLs from all our webpages. I’ll just replace them with Uniform Resource Locators – but it will take six months.”
Some stat pages (and we all know how reliable they are, but still somewhat useful for seeing just how little used NN actually is):
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/ (effectively 0%)
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm (~.15%)
http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html (~1.77%)
Stats from my own personal site from the last 10,000 hits (first column is hits out of 10,000, last is version #):
7 0.07% Netscape 7.2
3 0.03% Netscape 7.1
1 0.01% Netscape 8.0.4
That’s 11 hits out of the last 10,000…and going back further yields more of the same type of trend.
The point of this post isn’t to bore anyone to tears (sorry if it does) but it is to point out that by and large NN has well under 1% market penetration. Which begs the question…who the hell over at AOL keeps signing on to develop new versions? And why are AOL shareholders (err, Time Warner I guess) standing for this humongous waste of money on what is effectively a DEAD platform? Firefox would have been long gone, and IE replaced years ago by either a rewrite, or with MS endorsing a different platform and branding it out under the MS trademark.
I mean seriously folks…what gives here?
My guess is that the development is only continued so that AOL can have their “own” browser to bundle with the AOL client software (assuming it’s still using Netscape these days). I think that’s partly due to the whole AOL-Microsoft history – it does have the feel of an (increasingly-futile) “screw you” gesture to Microsoft, since the whole “AOL uses IE in exchange for MS bundling AOL with Windows” deal went sour.
Almost a little sad that AOL has declined so far in relevance – I kind of miss the good ‘ol days of alt.aol-sucks (and alt.usenet.kooks, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, etc – good times).
Actually, AOL uses the IE Trident engine for its renderer, even in its new “OpenRide” software (which seems to have gone nowhere, btw). Only Compuserve (yes, it still exists) uses the Mozilla engine, but they haven’t updated their software for the past 7 years or so, so we’re talking Mozilla 1.0-era rendering.
That’s pretty amusing, but not too surprising. AOL never could get themselves pointed in any consistent direction. In the late 90s, I worked for a company that was an “AOL content partner” – around the time they ended that program, 2000 or thereabouts, the big hype was that they had started beta-testing a version of the AOL client that used Netscape as its internal browser. IIRC, there was a big rush to “eat their own dog food” after AOL bought Netscape.
“Almost a little sad that AOL has declined so far in relevance”
AOL was never relevant, at least not outside the U.S.A.
(Counting by number of paid-up subscribers)
It was the biggest ISP in the world. I don’t know if it still is.
Until Freeserve came along, it was also the biggest ISP in the UK as well as the US.
That was a little while ago, mind. They still have lots of customers, though. In the consumer e-mail handling space, they’re still a major player: the amount of e-mail traffic they process every day is immense.
“It was the biggest ISP in the world. I don’t know if it still is. ”
Probable because the U.S has more citizens than any other western country. This does not make them relevant *outside* the U.S though.
“Until Freeserve came along, it was also the biggest ISP in the UK as well as the US. ”
I could have bet it was Demon that was the biggest back in the day.
“In the consumer e-mail handling space, they’re still a major player: the amount of e-mail traffic they process every day is immense.”
There are many larger email providers, both in the U.S and outside.
They did okay in Canada for a while, and I seem to recall the same about the UK version until the free dialup ISPs came along and ate them for lunch.
Many of their problems breaking into non-US markets were directly due to their own miss-steps, though. E.g., when they started moving into Canada, they sent out tens of thousands (if not hundreds or millions) of their install diskettes, had a big TV ad campaign, etc – while they only had 4 local dialup numbers for (geographically) the second-largest country on earth.
That semi-directly lead to a class-action suit: quite a few customers missed the fine-print saying, essentially “But it’s $18/minute if you don’t live in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver” and then rung up several-hundred dollar connection bills within a week.
And I’m sure that having “America” in the name didn’t help them much outside of the US – although they were quite anal about calling it just “AOL” outside the states. Incidentally, I always found it amusing that “You’ve got mail” was grammatically-incorrect, but not the “new mail” notification in the UK version (“You have EMail”).
Well, there is the Nestcape ISP:
http://getnetscape.com/
http://isp.netscape.com/
I think they bundle the Netscape browser on a CD when you sign up for their service. My guess is that’s the biggest driver of this.
Also I seem to recall that back in the day Netscape 7.x had quite a few followers (I was one of them), thanks to its extra sidebar features (including built-in AIM without ads). Maybe they’re hoping for a return to glory.
Of course as I recall the main problem with the last release (Netscape 8, based on Firefox 1.x) was that it took too damn long before a lot of extensions and themes were compatible, which damaged its potential as a Firefox alternative. And that probably had something to do with its very unconventional interface.
http://www.codeweavers.com/bin/img?id=1429;size=full
Seeing as the new version has a considerably more normal-looking interface, hopefully extension compatibility will be better this time around.
Ah yes, I’ve seen a few mailout ads for the “Netscape accelerated dialup” service – forgot about that.
I think if I was an engineer on the Navigator team, I’d lie to all my programmer friends and just say I worked on Real Player. It’s that bad.
Ben Goodger, Firefox’s lead developer worked on the very same Navigator team along with quite a few Mozilla/Firefox contributors.
There is nothing to be ashamed about. It was a case of the management not listening to the programmers if you have ready any of their thoughts of how Netscape sank. Those last few releases and version 6 etc, not a single developer wanted to put it out but management made them work on it and release it.
“Ben Goodger, Firefox’s lead developer worked on the very same Navigator team along with quite a few Mozilla/Firefox contributors. ”
The key word there is worked, which is the point I was trying to make. They had a shedload of talent, and lost all of it due to poor management.
So to rephrase, “If I worked there now…
“I’m not kidding when I say I forgot Netscape existed for maybe a year or so until I saw this headline.”
So did I. I actually haven’t thought about Netscape for a good many years so I figured I check out their site.
Turns out that it is still what it was last time I checked (years ago): some shitty portal service thingamabob.
I don’t know why you say Navigator is that bad considering the new version looks to be pretty much exactly the same as Firefox with a couple of add-ons. The fact that you seem to think it needs separate testing, when in fact it uses the exact same rendering engine as Firefox, just goes to show how clueless you really are.
All companies I’ve done outward facing website programming work for have tested against the following platforms/browsers:
IE (Windows and Mac)
FF (Windows and Mac)
Opera (Windows and Mac)
Safari
Navigator is based on the Mozilla/Firefox code. There is no need to test against it specifically.
I’m not kidding when I say I forgot Netscape existed for maybe a year or so until I saw this headline. And I build websites for a living.
Well you are a little clueless but it doesn’t matter because:
A. No one uses Navigator
B. If anyone actually did it it would render the same
I think if I was an engineer on the Navigator team, I’d lie to all my programmer friends and just say I worked on Real Player. It’s that bad.
I admit that I absolutely hated the old realplayer but I think the new realplayer is actually very good. I use it to listen to real streams, mostly news sites and it works quite well along with fitting in nicely with my GNOME desktop.
I don’t know if I’m even gonna try it someday, but being a linux user, I was quite surprised to find that the new version is (as in the old days) multiplatform!
Does that mean that they abandoned completely the double-engine capability in favour of a far more strict compliance to the Firefox codebase (thus the extension compatibility…)?
Yes, the IE rendering mode seems to have been thrown out. As far as I can tell, it really is little more than a skinjob of Firefox 2 with a few features thrown in to integrate the browser with the new Netscape.com. Some of which are already available as Firefox 2 extensions.
Sounds like none of the previous posters have tried out this new browser, instead just rehashing ancient history. I say “new browser” because it bears NO resemblance to the Netscape of old. I downloaded it onto my Intel iMac and I have to say that it is very fast at loading pages, feels noticeably faster than Firefox actually. I like the look and the new features, while not all are anything I need, they work and are pretty cool. Someone has put some good thought into the program.
It looks and works almost exactly like Firefox, but with a somewhat different theme and a couple of extra features. One nice thing I found out is that the Netscape site says that extensions are supposed to work if they are built for Firefox 2. Still, Adblock Filterset.G refused to install, informing me that it only supports Netscape browser “up to version 8.12”. (WTF?) Themes are also uniformly not supported unless specifically built for Netscape 9.
I was also disappointed to see that there is no built-in AIM support, which was the one feature I was really holding out for. As far as the other features, most of them are integrated with the Netscape.com portal (submit sites to the portal, find out when other “friends” have submitted sites to the portal, rate sites, get notified when you have new Netscape mail). So it really is most useful to people who use Netscape’s services (and apparently there are some, somewhere, because there are sites being submitted, commented on, etc).
The three features useful to non-Netscape people–the ability to manage news feeds separately from “live bookmarks”; the “Link Pad”–which is like a short-list of bookmarks, each of which disappears when you click on it; and the mini-browser–which as far as I can tell is just a full browser put into the sidebar, may be nice for newbies but are really just minor conveniences for any seasoned Firefox user; no reason to go switching browsers anytime soon.
Edited 2007-06-07 13:31
True, although the naming of the product is suggestive. Navigator was always just the browser part, while Communicator (the suite) included mail/news, composition, and various other bits over the years.
The FAQ on the site seems to indicate that the mail/news part will return, although in separate form. As nostalgia, it’s a bit sad; Communicator was excellent when it was first introduced (over a decade ago now), due in large part to the integration. However, the market seems to have moved on.
Who knows, perhaps Netscape will make a resurgence one day…
trying to ressurect itself. Netscape is dead. how many people will use this browser, maybe 2 people.