Before You Try The New Netscape

You may want to read this.
Wahsington Post Review of Netscape 8.0

Thanks for the heads up! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif

Leave it to AOL to mess something good up!! Sorry to anyone who likes AOL... It just doesn't make sense to take something so good as firefox, and then add some quarky dual dispaly engine to it. The whole point of firefox is a replacement that is more secure. Switching back and forth makes no sense.

If pages don't display right in firefox that's because the authors of the page are using un-official non-supported tags or errors in syntax that IE tolerates and has thus caused a "poluted" web of bad coding. The die-hard IE people I'll never understand. IE is not user-friendly and lets so much crap come into your computer. It blows my mind that MS thought that it would be cool to offer up these ablilties and thought that no one would use them for harm! Then what's even more funnier is MS came out with their own spyware scan software. Which I haven't seen it pick up anything yet on infected computers... Instead of MS making their browswer secure, they release something to constantly clean your system.

People have to scan for viruses. Why would we want to scan for spyware everyday now too? We shouldn't have to, the browsers should be built correctly. I don't even have to scan for viruses because I don't randomly open attachments or download files and run them...

But back to AOL... Just doesn't make sense. Why even bother with firefox if you are going to still use the IE engine part of the time? The whole point is to get away from IE... That would be like a bank keeping the safe unlocked and un-guarded everytime a "trustworthy" person walked into the bank. Then locking it up everytime someone "suspecious" walked in... Just doesn't make sense..

Let's not get started on the AOL system fix feature or whatever. That has screwed up so many computers I've worked on.. yeessh!!

I'll stick with pure FireFox. The Netscape name no longer has quality assocaited with it. I did miss Netscape since 1.0/2.0/3.0 days, but now that there is FireFox I can once again enjoy sufing the web conviently and fast... I hope FireFox stays around forever now and doesn't get taken over by people who don't know what they are doing!!!

Hmm I think I typed too much again.. I'll see after I press "Continue" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I'll have to keep an eye on this. It's not at all clear that they are really invoking the I.E. code VS going into I.E. emulation mode. One is bad; the other can be OK. Which is true will become more clear as others research it.

I thought it funny that the author thought that Netscape made the web popular. He clearly forgot that Netscape, IE and almost all the other browsers of the 90's were based on the code from Mosaic, a program written at the University of Illinois. The source was free. At one time I had 5 or 6 browsers all based on that same code.

Netscape became famous because they jumped the gun, putting out new features while the standards were still being written. Microsoft used the same approach later to add in their own 'value added' features that just happened to make their pages incompatible with Netscape browsers.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll be watching too.

Daniel

I'm willing to bet that they are envoking the IE engine and not emulating it. That is why the reviewer's computer got infected. Also it would make sense as that's the easiest thing to do. Any programer can have IE engine run in his application, since it's built into windows. Winamp had this a while back (still does?) amoung other apps (kazza for one).

I remember using Mosaic... I also remeber when netscape 2.0 came out and I could see animated .gif's!! I was blown away!!! haha /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Thanks for the heads-up Empath. It sounds like they're taking portions of the Pepsi formula and putting it into Coke. They took something that was working and they broke it. I believe I'll be staying away from that iteration of their browser. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jpshakehead.gif

It appears that the problems aren't confined to Netscape, once it's installed. Microsoft reports it's installation damages the XML capabilities of Internet Explorer.