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Netscape The Internet

Netscape 6, PR 3 Released 217

Posted by Hemos from the a-little-less-leaky dept.
A slew of people wrote in about the release of Netscape 6, PR 3 this morning -- Windows version, Linux 2.2, and Mac, assuming you speak English or Japanese. The word from Netscape is that French and German will be "soon." 'Course, I still think that apt-getting a certain Mozilla is all ya need, but hey.
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Netscape 6, PR 3 Released More

Netscape 6, PR 3 Released

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  • It may be a huge improvement over the last release, but here's a quick list of fundamental features that screwed me up in the first five minutes of installing on Windows 2000:

    1. Can't say "use this proxy for all protocols". The is so annoying to have to type the proxy name into three or four fields, especially if you have multiple proxies.
    2. Tab key doesn't move through fields when editing (proxy dialog). On the third press of the TAB key, the focus on the current field disappears and no other is focused. What's going on?
    3. Left or right arrow won't move the cursor when editing text in a field (proxy dialog).
    4. Enter key does not activate default button on HTML forms e.g. logging in to Slashdot. This is just crap.

    These errors are so simple, it shocks me. If they can't even get these things right, then what hope is there?

  • Re:The nicest moz platform to date has been... (Score:3)

    by wbb4 ( 60942 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:27AM (#732845)
    This is yet another Netscape branded catastrophy. Remember Netscape 6 != Mozilla!!!

    However, Mozilla has gotten better and better, I have been using it as my primary browser for nearly 4 months now, and Linux, Mac, Windows, and on OpenBSD.

    IMHO, Konqueror has nothing on Mozilla (I was never fond of the particular style of most KDE applications anyway, so I may be biased). If you want to compare something to something, compare the latest nightly to it.

    The most recent nightlys have been rock stable, they render fast, the UI problems have been cleaned up (Classic being the default theme, with Modern/2 availible and a lot better than Modern.)

    Mozilla has infinite potential, and has been slowly realizing it.
  • Same here as far as OS and kernel version.

    I did manage to get it running however. I discovered that I had to run the binary ([install_dir]/netscape) as root the first time. After that it seems to run fine though it keeps popping up this annoying registration screen. With no 'opt-out' option I might add.

    I've also found that after awhile it just locks up on me. Hard. I have to kill it off by hand.

    I'm going to stick with the nightly builds myself. Granted they don't have the handy ^R features but at least the alpha level nightly's are more stable than a preview release from Netscape.

  • Re:Is it a good alternative to IE5? (Score:3)

    by marcop ( 205587 ) <marcop.slashdot@org> on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:28AM (#732847) Homepage

    I am forced to use IE at work but I use Netscape at home. Yes, Netscape has the slower load time but that's unfair to judge since MS makes IE load at startup.

    I like features of Netscape over IE:
    1) bookmarks are stored in one file instead of shortcuts so I only have 1 file to transfer back and from work to access all my bookmarks.
    2) for web design I like Netscape because of you can right click and view images easier. You can only save the image in IE.

    The only thing I like in IE over NS is the easier method to manage bookmarks. You can right clock on the bookmark menu at delete one or move it around. In NS you have to "edit bookmarks".

  • Support for Sun's JRE went in on Friday, as far as I know (I read the bugzilla entry but the number escapes me). I think the goal was to get it into PR3, but I don't know if it made it or not.
  • It also doesn't understands well Javascripts on some pages I tried.

    Mozilla's DOM implementation is incompatible with both NS4's proprietary model and also with some popular IE extentions to the W3C DOM (like document.all which is almost universal in IE scripting).

    So, this is a feature, not a bug.

    (Is Konqueror trying to implement a full DOM implementation, or are they just aiming for the NS3-style form Javascripts?)
  • I almost pee'ed my pants after seeing the new interface and how stable it is! I am impressed. How much longer (estimated time) before the final version?

  • You obviously haven't tried Konqueror. It has to be the most lightweight, standards compliant browser out there. And it's fully integrated into the KDE environment. People like integration alot more than non-integrated *but cross-platform*.

  • It also doesn't understands well Javascripts on some pages I tried.

    Note that some of those Javascript problems come from broken scripts that just happens to work with the implementation in NS4.x, IE or both, but not in Mozilla. As far as I know, the implementation in Mozilla/NS6 should be more like the standards than in NS4.x:s. But of course there are still real bugs in Javascript implementation itself, so this doesn't explain everything. I just wanted to note that some troubles aren't really faults of browser, but the scripts itself.

  • Maybe by the end of the year well have 2 nice things for xmas. Linux 2.4 and Netscape 6.0. I tried the windows version and it worked with plugins. It launched Real player, and played flash and Java as well.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Yeah, the old Netscape sure was a GREAT program. [/sarcasm] What planet were you on? Netscape was always a piece of crap. Its only claim to fame was being better than Microsoft's pitiful attempt to copy it.

    Browser revisionism lives!
  • Re the stability: agreed, this is a HUGE improvement over the past PR's. I'm testing this browser on a newly-installed Win2000 machine at work, and the PR wasn't even identified as compatible with that OS.

    Re the memory requirements: all betas tend to do that. Memory requirements are trimmed down for the final release. If it's 30+ MB in the final, THEN I'll take issue.

    Re the "Modern" skin: big thumbs up. I just wish Mozilla had at least a couple more skins ready for download when this came out. Re the speed of displayed pages: it does seem faster than IE5.5, although I haven't tested it side-by-side yet this morning. It's disturbingly slower when I click the "back" arrow to reload a page, though. Rather odd.

    Big bug still present: when I modify several preferences at once, it won't "ok" the changes. I have to change just one panel at a time, then "ok" it and go back. But it doesn't crash anymore, at least.

    One thing I really want to see with this Mozilla browser, though, is for Yahoo! to pick it up and customize it. Right now this browser is heavily customized for AOL/Netcenter users, and I'm not one of those. If Yahoo! can take Netscape 6 and tweak it their own way, I'll be ecstatic to use it.

  • > Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft > STILL have the better browser. > Although you do specify in your subject line that speed is the issue, faster is not always better. I find IE to be patently unstable and if I figure in having to restart IE or reboot my PC to keep browsing, the numbers shift strongly to Netscape. Netscape is slower when it runs, but then so was the tortoise. Virg
  • I also tried deleting my .mozilla directory and also removing mozilla completely and it still core dumps every damn time I try to run it!

  • Re:Is it a good alternative to IE5? (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @05:04AM (#732858)
    Here's an interesting comparison.

    I have about 400 bookmarks saved in Netscape 4.75. This file takes up 167k of diskspace. On IE, the same bookmarks, as Internet Shortcuts consumes anywhere between 4k and 32k per shortcut depending on partition sizes. That means the same links eat up anywhere between 1.6 and 12.5 megabytes of disk space!

    Not only that, IE has a severely retarded shortcut ordering scheme that frequently goes wrong after renaming or deleting an item, shortcut names can't contain certain characters such as ampersands & slashes, and IE has no equivalent of aliases or separators.

    All in all, IE shortcuts are piss-poor substitute for a single bookmarks.html.

  • Whether or not I'm on drugs, I run Mozilla M17 (not Netscape 6 PRs) as my main browser at home now.

    Mozilla is way faster than Netscape 4.7x, renders fonts a lot better, and doesn't crash a couple times a day like Netscape 4 does (and Netscape 6PR2 did.) It has trouble loading some Java applets and it was a bitch to get SSL working, but I'm looking forward to a nicely packaged 1.0. But I downloaded this one because the Nautilus "preview" wanted it, and I'm glad I did.

    Even more so, I'm looking forward to someone writing a browser that uses Gecko and supports Java/JS/SSL, but doesn't do all that lame non-standard XML user interface garbage that looks nothing like my other windows. I'd be running Galeon right now if it even did JS and SSL.

    I haven't tried Konqueror yet because I can't get KDE2 to install on my Mandrake 7.0 box - too old a kernel version and I haven't had time to download the 7.2 beta ISO's. One of these weekends.

  • Complete agreement on what a browser should be: faster, lighter, smaller, etc. But as far as your .sig, form validation on the client side alone justifies JavaScript. Seriously, there are many instances in which it would be ridiculous to keep hitting the server, and client-side JavaSCript/ECMAScript is the only good answer. Just my $.02 Cheers.

  • Re:*shudder*, it's useful! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I must agree. I have been playing with it for about an hour now, and have hit most of the sites that caused problems before. Not even a crash. All in all, I am pretty impressed by things. Just need to find some skinz now....

  • I totaly understand the allure of a clean UI, hell i use black box [alug.org] ;) Yet, NS6 UI hasnt angered me yet, to the point of using something like Skipstone. im sure the day will come, sooner, rather than later ... and the theme is kinda cool.

    Until that day comes, I do relish in the fact that NS6 UI's is driven by xml ... so one can hack away at it ... till one is content. I just dl'd this release, and messed with it a bit. Removed those anoying links on the bottom. Now the NS logo links to nowhere ... yea these are simple hacks, that really dont do much for speed... but remove some anoying things (in my oponion).

    Next on my list is to possibly replace the logo with a slashdot one ... and link it to slashdot ;) ... that and hack out the sidebar. If I want a sidebar, id use IE ... i use NS because it isnt IE, and I really dont like the whole "Oh MS has some new GUI idea lets copy it mentatlity" ( No offence here ... just a little steam)(I also realize that this idea prolly really came from Opera to begin with...) .

    My only question is, how long be for Apple and its stupid lawerys try to pass the theme off as being an Aqua rip-off and sue?

  • Gone are the days... (Score:3)

    by BrK ( 39585 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:31AM (#732864) Homepage
    I remember when new versions of Netscape brought new features and made the WWW more interactive. Now we've got a better IM client, and a bunch of broken features.
    AOL buying Netscape was the beginning of the end of Netscape. Now, it seems that AOL is trying to slowly creep into our PC's, and personally I don't want anything to do with it. The tech-world is caught up in other things right now, but all these things are layered on top of the WWW. After the general novelty wears off (3-4 more years?) I think we'll have a dozen or more good browsers to choose from. If we all _need_ to access the WWW, then eventually we'll see more programmers dedicate time to writing a stable, efficient browser.
  • Speculation will get you nowhere.

    Did you even actually -look- at how big the link files are? My biggest IE Favorite link is 298 bytes. I have just over 100 favorites, and they total 18 kb.

    People need to stop spouting hollow theories and do some good old research before opening their gob.
  • Uhm. Where is this mozilla that you speak of? The Mozilla [mozilla.org] I've tried has been bloated, slow, and buggy.

    I tried submitting bug reports...I followed their FAQ to the letter...but people on bugzilla seemed to scoff at any reports from anyone outside of @netscape.net.

    For me, IE5 in Windows, Konqueror in Linux. Both are very speedy, and neither one has crashed yet for me...

    Just my $0.02...
    --------------------------
  • Just a quick comment, Konqueror is new to KDE2. The KDE 1 browser is a much more stripped down browser that was embedded into EFM. Konqueror is a very full featured browser that last I heard was even going to support Netscape plugins.
    treke
  • I know they disabled :hover in this release (and the latest nightlies) because no one can understand how to make it work with relation to DOM. Better to not support it at all than support it wrong (just look at Netscape 4)....
  • I am running Win98 and I like to open 5+ windows in Netscape when I use it. Of course that also means that I have Netscape crash on me an average of 7-10 times a day. Would downloading this new PR copy help in this case?

    I love Netscape but it seems to be the reason I have to reboot 90% of the time...due to my own crazy multitasking of course, but still...

  • Could you provide links to some of the sites that only work in IE? Assuming they are sites that are worthwhile visiting...

    I have been using Konqueror as my main browser for a month now, and going by the CVS of two days ago, the only site I value that has serious problems is www.cex.co.uk, where a JavaScript menuing system doesn't work. Other than that, it just works! I haven't looked at Mozilla for a month or so, but I would hope that it has even better compatibility than Konqueror - I only stopped using it because I didn't like the slowness of its UI.

  • not weird at all -- completely logical (Score:3)

    by Preposterous Coward ( 211739 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:59AM (#732880)
    Considering that a lot more people in the world speak spanish then german, french, or japanese, this seems a weird choice in languages

    Actually, it's completely logical, considering that English, Japanese, and German are, in that order, the three most common languages found on Web pages [about.com] and among Net users [blueearth.net]. French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Spanish are in positions four through six, though their specific order depends on which of these numbers you use.

    I don't particularly want to cast myself in the role of a Netscape defender, but it's rather knee-jerk conspiracy-theorist to imply this is evil money-grubbing corporate pandering when there is a simple, logical explanation that fits the facts equally well. Namely, that Netscape is devoting its resources to serving the largest markets (as defined by user base) first. Let's save the gratuitous Netscape-bashing for their truly dumb and craven decisions.

  • What happened to http authentication in this release? They disable password manager or something?

    Authentication failed or is missing

    What does that mean??

  • Re:The nicest moz platform to date has been... (Score:3)

    by marm ( 144733 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @05:12AM (#732883)
    Much as I hate to say this in a story all about NS6 and Mozilla... but this tallies very well indeed with my experience.

    The most recent nightly of moz I have (29/9/2000)is still slow, not anywhere near as slow as it once was - it is actually very usable, but it is still noticably slower than other browsers, especially in the UI. Click on a menu or any other XPCOM widget and you can feel the thing thinking about it before something happens. Those of you with fast machines may not notice this, but it's very noticable on my old PII. Page rendering is decently fast, but not anywhere near best-of-the-best.

    There are still rendering bugs - there's a small but annoying one here on /. where the rounded left edge of the green story headings is not placed correctly. Mysteriously, this bug seems to disappear after about an hour's use of mozilla. What's going on there then?

    Perhaps most worrying is the bloat. On launch, mozilla is already quite greedy, taking up around 18MB on my machine. However, an hour's solid web-surfing - in just one browser window - has this up to about 40MB, which is just insane. On my 64MB machine, this causes no end of swapping and thrash. I pity those poor souls trying to get mozilla working on machines with anything less.

    Now, before you flame me to death (or, of course, mod me down into oblivion) for attacking mozilla, remember that (with the exception of bloat, which appears to be getting worse :( these are huge improvements over the moz we knew and loved of just a month or two ago, and the stated aim from now until M20 is to improve all these things, and these have started to bear fruit already.

    However, there is a new kid on the block if you want a fast, solid, modern, compatible browser for *nix, and that's Konqueror. As it stands now, for pretty much every aspect of web-browsing I can think of, it's significantly better than moz is. It's blazingly fast (neck and neck with Opera IMHO), solidly standards-compliant (it claims HTML4/CSS2 compatibility, and I haven't seen anything which implies otherwise yet), has a small memory footprint, does Java, Javascript and SSL well... what more could you want?

    Finally there is a browser for *nix that I want to use. It feels good.

  • ...Netscape 6 is using 34 MB of memory! That's a bit excessive, 2-3x what IE5 uses.

    Actually, the 2-3x figure is deceptive (Nothing new for MS). You don't know how much IE5 is using because so much of it is built into the OS and executed on bootup.

  • Re:Here's the thing... (Score:3)

    by steve9000 ( 39396 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @05:20AM (#732889) Homepage


    Don't forget that windows .dlls and unix .so
    are quite different beasts, despite doing roughly
    the same thing.

    Windows dlls are not fully PIC (position
    independent code) so they are smaller than an
    equavalent unix one. OTOH a unix .so can always
    be shared between processes, but a windows one
    may not be able to unless it can map to the exact
    same address in both processes!

    Unix is better if you have many processes using
    the same lib, and windows wins if there is only
    one copy being used.

    Stephen.

  • When one person says it, it may be a lie. When more say it, there may be some truth.

    Mozilla isn't ready for primetime. It was painfully slow compared to Konqueror, and it didn't render a page w/ CSS anything like IE or NS4.x does.

    I'm going to put it through more tests, but I'm finding it hard to keep my hopes up.
    --------------------------
  • > Don't try this version of Netscape on Linux. I just tried it few hours ago.. Lots of rendering bugs, slow (very slow!), a very slow java implementation, problems with Javascripts...

    Wait, how is this different than the currently shipping Communicator?

  • Is this slow for anyone else? I am running win98 on an AMD K6-200 with 64mb ram, nothing else running, and it is amazingly slow. Not just slow launching, but an overall sluggishness in everything from file menu access to page rendering. Unusable for me . Pretty, seems to have become rather asthetically pleasing, but still unusable as of yet.
  • The fact that I said "mozilla installer" was an oversight.

    I do understand the difference between the two, I just would have preferred an option to disable that "feature" I don't take very kindly that Netscape put an icon for itself on my desktop either without asking.



    -Julius X
  • That was the goal at one point, but that was before they decided to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the browser.

    At this point, its something of a lost cause to try and prevent bloat in NS6.
  • Another problem I've run into is this:

    Web Page checks to see if I'm using IE, nope.

    Checks to see if I am using Netscape 4.x, nope.

    So none of the javascript gets called. I've tried a few of these pages where if I take out the browser checking, the script works fine.

  • Pepsi owns Pizza Hut, is it okay if they splashed some on top of my supreme or pre-dipped my breadsticks in it?
  • Looking through these comments I can see they are evenly divided between "it's slow and bloated and doesn't work" to "it's lean and fast and really much better". I guess the moral is that just because it works for you, doesn't mean it'll work for someone else. And if it doesn't work for you, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Mozilla has now become my main browser, the only thing I need netscape 4.x for is to log into some sites because of bug 53182 [mozilla.org]. Vote for it, if you haven't. It's important.
  • Opera's CSS1 support is top notch (its currently the best *release* browser for Windows in terms of CSS1 support), and CSS2 is pretty good with some problems.

    The DOM support is severely lacking at best. Its hard to find out just what it supports, but I don't believe even DOM 1 is really implemented yet.

    Apparently, we can expect that to drastically change when the next big release comes up (which I believe will be 4.5). Considering the way that 3.5 went from no CSS to one of the best implementations in Windows in a single release, I think they can pull it off.

    - A frequenter of the opera newsgroups.

  • Re:Size? (Score:3)

    by Screwtape ( 9319 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @05:36AM (#732918) Homepage

    I was under the assumption ... one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code



    Well, they sort of have and sort of haven't. For starters, Netscape 4 is about 12-15MB IIRC, and a Mozilla nightlies are about 8-10MB. The Mozilla tarballs contain at least two entirely seperate skins, and Netscape 4 doesn't even have one (it lets Motif do most of the drawing, while Mozilla Does It All Itself). So that's a chunk of stuff Mozilla includes and Netscape doesn't, so chop that off the Moz filesize.



    Next, remember that Netscape 4 on all three platforms is ported from one platform to another - only the very core code stays the same and the rest (GUI, networking, and so forth) is provided by the platform. Mozilla is designed to be as portable as possible, and so abstracts away as much of the underlying OS as possible so almost all of Moz is cross-platform code. This is more functionality that you won't find in Netscape 4, so for comparison, chop another hunk off the Mozilla filesize.



    After taking into account the (sizable) extra functionality that Mozilla has over Netscape, Mozilla *is* a lot smaller. But really, it's shifted the bulk of code, rather than removing it, so you can make up your own mind.



    Personally, I don't mind - from what I've heard of Netscape's current situation, they've only resources to write their browser once, not three times, so it's a choice between extreme crossplatform-ness or Mozilla being Windows-only... I'm glad I've got Mozilla for Linux at all.



  • On the windows front, Mozilla is going to have more of a struggle against MSIE

    It'll be interesting to see what AOL does with Netscape 6. If they decide to replace IE with it then we could see a massive dent in IE's market share.

    Chris

  • Nice! (Score:2)

    by GypC ( 7592 )

    I am impressed with the amoun to f improvement since PR2. The UI is lightning fast even with the new "modern" skin in Win98 on a PII233 with 64MB. The menus all pop up instantly, and the HTML canvas scrolls smoothly.

    This is just sweet! I'm one happy camper. Now, hopefully the linux version is just as good...

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • Re:Doesn't work with dynamic data (Score:3)

    by Shimbo ( 100005 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:54AM (#732923)
    Doesn't work with the JavaServer Pages I'm developing. Neither does it work with NatWest banks website (http://www.natwest.co.uk). Sheesh.

    And your point is what? You can't write portable code and neither can NatWest? You need to look a bit deeper and see who is at fault. It might be Netscape: if so log a bug report. On the other hand there are a lot of crappy web sites 'designed for IE'. You need to work out which before you go shooting your mouth off.

  • PR3 is working really well for me. Try it, you might be pleasantly suprised.

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • and I've been using Linux since 1990

    IIRC the first public release of the Linux kernel was 1991. So not only are you are troll, you're also a liar ...

    Chris
  • The name is something like, With Special Guest. It's found right here [penny-arcade.com]. An oldie (Quake3 demo?), but a goodie.

  • Re:Mozilla/Netscape policy branch? (Score:3)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:03AM (#732930)
    Somehow I don't think this is the best thing Netscape should be doing.

    Remember that Netscape is AOL and AOL is by nature evil. AOL needs to have a proprietary, closed browser, so they *have* to fork Mozilla. No way around that one. That's the bad news, the good news is that right now we have our own Mozilla, it's a damn good browser, and we can use it to hit AOL over the head with standards compliance. Don't freak out about this too much, because right now AOL's interests are running in parallel with ours, and they will until Microsoft is beaten. It's our job to take Mozilla, now GPL, and make it *better* than AOL's closed version. Damn, all we ever needed out of this deal is a replacement for Netscape that is open source and can handle all the current standards. We're actually getting a good deal more: we've got an 800 pound gorilla for a friend that is intent on busting up Microsoft's attempt to corner the web server market.
    --
  • If you are talking about that IE sidebar like thing. Go to your View Menu, then select Sidebar.

    On another Note, to get Shochwave to work under windows copy the program netscp6.exe to Netscape.exe, then install shockwave and when it asks vor the cersion point it to the plugins directory. It works, but is not perfect.

    To get quicktime 4 to work install quicktime for netscape 4. Then copy the QuickTimePlugin.call file as well as the npqtplugin.dll, npqtplugin2.dll, and npqtplugin3.dll files. That should work. I was able to view a few movies with that with no problems.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Not only is the block servers option missing, but everytime my hosts file blocks an ad I get an "Connection refused" dialog box I have to click. Nor can I get the properties of an image without first copying its location and then pasting it someplace I can see it or view the entire page source.

    I can get rid of the box pop-ups if I run apache, then I get a quick "not Found" message in the ad space. But I don't think I'll be switching from IE anytime soon. How's junkbuster work with this version?

  • The complaints against the current state of the Netscape 6 Preview Releases should be tempered by the understanding that it is primarily the Netscape 6 release schedule which is causing the mozilla improvements to occur so quickly.

    Sure, there are problems in the NS6 preview releases which are fixed in the latest nightly build, but that's because the NS6 preview release is not based on the latest nightly build. You should expect that. Generally, you will find that the fixes from the Netscape NS6 team's most recent preview release appear in the latest Mozilla build. By contrast, it is literally impossible to have the latest Mozilla fixes in the most recent NS6 release.

    As for Konqueror, I haven't used it, but my understanding is that Konqueror was intended to be a leaner, meaner browser based on Gecko. It darn well ought to be faster. But does it have the all-important AIM integration? I think not! Take that, Konqueror! ;-)
  • I just installed PR3 and tried it with a 'thin' java client we use with our ERP package. This is a very complex little java applet which is basically a re-write of the vendor's MS Windows client server application in Java.

    It ran flawlessly, and without some display artifacts that I have seen in IE - so actually it ran better than it did in IE.

    -josh
  • >assuming you speak English or Japanese. The word
    >from Netscape is that French and German will be
    >"soon".

    Considering that a lot more people in the world speak spanish then german, french, or japanese, this seems a weird choice in languages. Or perhaps Netscape incorporated is only looking at where the advertising dollars come from.

  • AOL On Desktop?! (Score:5)

    by Julius X ( 14690 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:04AM (#732950) Homepage
    Ok ok...I can deal with most things, but when I saw the Mozilla "installer" (i.e., downloader) picking up a package called "AOL On Desktop"--aod.xpi, I promptly became suspicious. I deleted the file before the Netscape Installer could install that .xpi, but then the installer crashed. How beautiful. They give you no choice on whether you want that or not. Looks like Netscape is doing the Real(tm) thing for us.

    (Sigh).


    -Julius X
  • *makes note to self in palm*

    "mommy, I got a +5 informative today.. the world must truly be going to hell*..."

    * especially since i was actually dopey enough to read that irc transcript.. :)
  • Oh, thats simple..

    Current Netscape runs lots more pages than the new NS 6PR3.

    But the NS6 PR3 renders much faster then the current shipping one, but lots of pages are not rendered well, or rendered at all. Also - you cannot use SSL (I've just tried few seconds ago - it's just freezes)

  • I downloaded Opera 4 yesterday to test out some web pages I've been developing for my company. These pages are extremely rich in terms of CSS and stylesheets, so it's extremely important for me that I make things as cross-browser as possible. I find it quit amazing that IE4+, NS4+, and Mozilla all can render these rich pages while Opera cannot. Specifically, Opera seems to have problems with complex DOM-based JavaScript and applying CSSP/2 attributes to select widgets. Couple that with the fact that they take away my address entry field while loading a page, and the little nuisances soon become major annoyances, enough so that I see why they probably can't do much in the market, even if they were to give away the browser for free.
  • XPCOM is completely independant from Windows' COM. the reason for the file size difference is the compilers. Part of this is that Microsoft simply makes a better compiler on Windows than gcc is on Linux.

    But don't be too hard on poor gcc - it alone supports the entire non-windows open source movement. It's a good think WATCOM C is getting free huh? With gcc's front end and Watcom's back end we will run the world. Err, we will rule the world *sooner*.
    --

  • Re:AOL On Desktop?! (Score:3)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @05:54AM (#732963)
    Netscape has also started installing this Evil Icon(tm) from 4.75 as well. We recently rolled out 4.75 to our whole campus (needed 128bit): you can't even stop it from installing the icon using the Netscape Client Customization Kit.

    Oh, it says that the AOL on Desktop option is disabled when building a custom configuration, yet we found it still put the icon on about half the desktops we ran the setup on. We ended up having to use Novell Zen to do a check for the icon and remove it after the installation.

    *Sigh* indeed. From IE to RealPlayer, I loathe programs that insist on throwing useless crap on your desktop.
  • Netscape branched from the Mozilla trunk halfway between M17 and the soon to be released M18. It doesn't correspond to any Moz milestone.
  • Unix shared libraries way predate MSDOS. This includes position-independent versions, which are needed to allow more than a few vendor-supplied libraries to be shared. That is why, clumsy as it is, Unix at least has a scheme to manage huge numbers of shared libraries.

    Windows DLL's are position independent though. The 80386 design allows PIC code without too much loss, this was certainly due to a desire to allow the chip to be used for Unix with shared libraries.

    I suspect the main reason for the smaller size is that by default all symbols in a DLL are local to the library, while by default all symbols are public in a Unix library and thus harder to "strip". They did this by requiring "_dllexport" macros to be stuck before any symbols that can be linked outside the library, in effect adding something that should have been added to C a long time ago... (of course they royally screwed it up so that you cannot write a header file for a DLL without using macros, as the syntax changes for code inside and outside the library!)

  • Very nice. (Score:4)

    by Julius X ( 14690 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:12AM (#732980) Homepage
    Ok.... I'll admit it. I griped previously about the AOL on desktop thing...but what we really carea bout here is the browser.

    Big selling point---the "Modern" skin looks much better. Its very smooth and doesn't clash with every other program I'm running. Many people will like it just because it looks good.

    The stability is much improved, and its faster than Internet Explorer 5.5 in loading and in downloading web pages. One thing I noticed....I'm just sitting at Slashdot typing this right now, and Netscape 6 is using 34 MB of memory! That's a bit excessive, 2-3x what IE5 uses.

    Overall...I think PR3 is a huge improvement over PR2...and could be the best Netscape release to date. I'm actually looking forward to the final release now...as long as they cut down on the memory usage.

    I wonder how Mozilla M18 will compare to this.

    -Julius X
  • I just got the same behaviour on my Slackware 7.1 box...

    Shame really, I'm really looking forward to being able to replace Netscape 4.x...

    Cheers,

    Tim

  • Re:Mozilla/Netscape policy branch? (Score:4)

    by Gerv ( 15179 ) <gerv@@@gerv...net> on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:16AM (#732984) Homepage
    They have already branched. M18 will be released from the trunk (as opposed to the NS 6 branch) sometime later this week.

    Gerv

  • Skipstone (Score:5)

    by spinfire ( 148920 ) <dpn@isomerica.net> on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:35AM (#732986) Homepage
    The best browser package i've seen in a long time is Skipstone [muhri.net], a galeon-like browser that uses Gecko as its rendering engine. The result is a browser that runs fast (Gecko), without all the user interface cruft mozilla has.

    With the creation of the mozilla-gtk widget many new mozilla-likes have sprouted up, but i think Skipstone may be one of the greatest of lightweight browsers. (Of course a full mozilla/netscape session is needed for SSL or other features)

  • java - hooray, doesn't work - boo (Score:3)

    by gruntvald ( 22203 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:35AM (#732988) Homepage Journal
    If you're smart you'll have been running nightly builds instead of the last milestone, and none of the massive improvements will be a surprise. The 11th hour inclusion of Java on Linux is a pleasant surprise, I've been following bugzilla (53907) and was hoping they could make it. So - I can run a few applets now, but the ones I tried so far (melange chat, local library) either didn't completely work, or didn't work at all. Sigh. Back to 4.75 once again for functionality and pathetic style sheet renditions, or over to the wifes NT box for the IE java experience (the best I've seen). But this thing is on a roll now, and it's getting better and better and better.....

  • Size? (Score:3)

    by TheTomcat ( 53158 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:36AM (#732989) Homepage
    I was under the assumption that apart from making Netscape WORK, one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code base significantly (I heard down to the size of a floppy). Is this no longer the case? Or is there 14 megs of debugging pre-release info (even though I didn't install the quality feedback agent)?

    This is not a troll or flame, I'm just wondering what happened to those ideals.

  • Re:Here's the thing... (Score:3)

    by ghazban ( 28784 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:36AM (#732990) Homepage
    Actually.. the reason why the mozilla nightlies have ballooned in size is because they now include three themes (theme probably isn't the best word for them, because they change how it works too), which take ~2-3M compressed. It has not been a result of feature bloat, just more optional (or not! ;) extras.
  • When you follow their download link you end up getting their hideous installer that connects to their site and pulls things down for you (if you're lucky) and then tries to put them in the wrong place).
    You know the one:

    'Thank you for downloading Netscape 6, you are held in a queue and will be attended to shortly....your download is important to us... please hold...if you have a numeric kepad press * now....etc...'

    It still doesn't play The William Tell Overture in four-part square-wave harmony though, so it's not all bad...

  • This is not true (Score:3)

    by alecf ( 2079 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @06:16AM (#732998) Homepage
    XPCOM is completely independant from Windows' COM. the reason for the file size difference is the compilers. Part of this is that Microsoft simply makes a better compiler on Windows than gcc is on Linux. The other part is that gcc and ld do not properly truly unused strip symbols from binaries when a link is done.

    try it - take a large set of XP code, and build a dll on each platform. the linux .so will be 30-60% larger than the windows .dll.
  • Mozilla supports the W3C standard DOM (version 1 and most of version 2), which is very similar to what's in IE5. For most of the stuff people want to do, you can write one script that will work in Mozilla and IE5.
  • I haven't tried NS6, but i've been keeping a close eye on the nightly builds of Mozilla. With a few speed and stability enhancements I think Mozilla will become the de-facto standard browser for Linux. NS will have to pull off something special for that to change. On the windows front, Mozilla is going to have more of a struggle against MSIE (which, funnily enough, is about the only MS product I can tolerate). How NS will fit into this battle is anyone's guess, but it should be interesting finding out.
  • Doesn't matter what they are - the point remains that IE gets an unfair free ride on memory usage because most of it shows up as "System". 3rd party browsers don't get that advantage. Heck, explorer.exe (the desktop) even preloads all your plugins (Flash/Director, Real, Quicktime, etc) so *they* appear as "system" memory usage too.

    It's amazing what you can discover about Windows running wine :)

  • Mozilla/Netscape policy branch? (Score:4)

    by jedrek ( 79264 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @02:59AM (#733005) Homepage
    Somehow I don't think this is the best thing Netscape should be doing. I recall a lot of people complaining that NSpr2 was 'too early' -- not ready enough for any kind of release -- even though it was released concurrently with Mozilla M17. Remember, this version is being dropped even though M18 hasn't come out yet.

    As a 'business' decision I couldn't really care less about Netscape as a company. Politically though, NS6 is the browser to watch for for a lot of people, not Mozilla, and a lot of people are mistaking NS6prx with 'the new Netscape'. And they're getting scared off. As a webdesigner, I do not want to use MSIE but it's slowly getting so I have to use it more and more often - both professionally and personaly.

    jedrek

    -- polish ccs mirror [prawda.pl]
  • C|Net has an article here: [cnet.com]
    As previously reported, the Web redesign is aimed at providing improved ease of use, said Susan Merit, Netscape's vice president for design and production, while better targeting the company's chosen market of professional, at-work users. The Web redesign will also provide more integration with the company's new Netscape 6.0 Web browser, she said....

    Netscape 6.0 preview 3 will have a new look over previous versions, LaGuardia said, based on feedback from preview 2 beta testers, who had the opportunity to try out and design a variety of new interfaces, or "skins." Preview 3 won't offer a broad range of new features, he added, saying this version is primarily aimed at addressing stability and performance issues.

  • Make sure that you're using J2RE 1.3, it's got a huge performance and stability boost over the others.

  • Sorry, I'm not on drugs, and definately not lying to anyone here...

    As I said - I downloaded it and tested it here - I got at work 2 machines (K7 650 and K7 700 with 128MB RAM on each)

    I have tried both browsers. Mozilla is slower on rendering long pages (try slashdot page with 300 comments, or huge tables with 30,000 entries) and see what I mean...

    It also doesn't understands well Javascripts on some pages I tried.

    I'm not trying to say Fuck Netscape! what I'm trying to say that *this* version of netscape sucks in terms of speed and compatibility. A co-worker here tried the latest night built mozilla (from yesterday) and all the bugs and speed issues I mentioned are gone!

    Maybe I didn't make myself clear - but I've been tired of trying Netscape PR1, PR2, PR3 and get lousy results! Once I've tried Konqueror, I really liked it (although it got its small number of bugs), and I'm planning to use it as my sole browser.

    I'm not trying to start Desktop Enviroment war here - lots of people at my work like Gnome and Window maker - but they also like Konqueror and they run it without any problems on their machines with their favorite window manager!

  • Re:Is it a good alternative to IE5? (Score:4)

    by Delirium Tremens ( 214596 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:43AM (#733017) Journal
    The only thing I like in IE over NS is the easier method to manage bookmarks. You can right clock on the bookmark menu at delete one or move it around. In NS you have to "edit bookmarks".
    I happen to be running Mozilla build id:2000092908 (the same build than NS6pr3), and I can edit my bookmarks with right clicks and the like. Obviously, in Netscape 6 pr3, the feature is also there, but not enabled by default. To turn it on, go to Tabs in My Sidebar and click on Customize Sidebar..., then unfold Recommended and add Bookmarks. From now on, you'll be able to edit your bookmarks à-la-IE, or better à-la-Mozilla!
  • Allright, cool© I apologize for misunderstanding© It looked like your post was yet another "bash anything that isn't part of KDE2" post© There are too many of them these days© Anyways, yeah you should have been a bit more clear, but I realize that you probably didn't know you'd get modded up so fast :

    I was also unclear, in that I stupidly assumed that when you said "Netscape", you mean Mozilla which I use¥almost every day¥I would use it constantly, if it wern't for the friggin' auto-focus feature[bug]© And yeah, the latest nightlies are bloody amazing :

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • It tries to find a components.reg file, doesn't find it and crash, without any error message.

    Back to Konqueror.

    (Which handles even my online banking since yesterdays CVS!!! https, java, javascript at once!!)

    Maybe a kgecko html kpart will one day be useful, but I doubt it if I look at the quality and development speed of khtml.

  • It's still not as fast as IE. (Score:4)

    by pixelix ( 169806 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:48AM (#733020) Homepage
    Using PR3 now.

    Very pretty.
    Quite small to download and install.
    Skinnable.
    Slightly better DOM and Javascript rendering than 4.72.

    All of which is good.

    But, most importantly, it's _STILL_ not as quick as IE. Pages seem to take twice as long (not as long as in 4.7 or in any of the Mozilla builds though) to load in PR3 than in IE5.

    Sorry, it pains me to say it, but Microsoft STILL have the better browser.


    --
    jambo
    system.admin.without.a.clue
  • If you want to try Mozilla - go ahead..

    Don't try this version of Netscape on Linux. I just tried it few hours ago..
    Lots of rendering bugs, slow (very slow!), a very slow java implementation, problems with Javascripts...

    I just compared Konqueror from CVS against it - Heck, it seems to me that Konqueror is twice faster, more compatible, IBM's java runs on it perfectly well, rendering is fast and Javascript is almost always working... (2 scripts didn't work from the 30 web sites I checked), and I really like the damn fast resizing rendering which they added yesterday.

    Also the SSL works perfectly now - I logged in to sourceforge with SSL, checked other web sites with SSL (Amazon, fat brain)..

    Sorry Netscape, it was nice.. but I'm switching to Konqueror...

  • From the release feature list ... (Score:4)

    by ebw ( 5903 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:02AM (#733023)

    Netscape 6 is a full-featured yet lean browser that bucks the trend in software bloat. Netscape 6 was developed from the ground up to be as small as possible while still providing a rich feature set.


    It's always amazing how differently geeks and marketing people see things. :)

    ebw
  • I think it's quite a good alternative to IE5 at the moment, the only bad thing being it takes quite a bit longer to load. This is more to do with the fact that IE5 loads many of it's libraries at Windows startup, as it's very tightly integrated with Windows. In use though, Netscape (or Mozilla) is faster than IE5 and more standards compliant. Also, it doesn't seem to crash that often (I've only managed it once!) I use the Mozilla nightlies in place of IE5 whenever possible, as sometimes pages are laid out incorrectly, though this is probably more to do with bad HTML rather than a bug. HTH

  • Netscape 6 ? (Score:3)

    by scrutty ( 24640 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:06AM (#733026) Homepage
    Funnily enough, when I go to netcenter using last nights moz build, it tells me

    You are currently using:
    Netscape Communicator 5.0
    English language, 5.0 (X11; en-US, Weak or Unknown Encryption

  • However, there is a new kid on the block if you want a fast, solid, modern, compatible browser for *nix, and that's Konqueror. As it stands now, for pretty much every aspect of web-browsing I can think of, it's significantly better than moz is. It's blazingly fast (neck and neck with Opera IMHO), solidly standards-compliant (it claims HTML4/CSS2 compatibility, and I haven't seen anything which implies otherwise yet), has a small memory footprint, does Java, Javascript and SSL well... what more could you want?

    I just installed the latest Debian packages of KDE2, and switched over from Blackbox (perhaps temporarily). The first thing I did was try Konq - and honestly, I'm not that impressed. It doesn't even render Slashdot properly (the topic icons are way to the left, some text doesn't line up, forms aren't spaced properly, etc). Moz renders all this perfectly. It's also not particularly 'sleek' - it's using about 25 MB of RAM for me, and I've only been browsing for about 4 or 5 minutes. Pages also seem to render at about the same speed as Moz/Gecko.

    It has some nice features - it's fairly responsive, and contains 'just the basics', which is good. But it's not nearly as good as you make it out to be. Maybe the Debian packages are out of date, and the version in CVS is much nicer.

  • Remember, this version is being dropped even though M18 hasn't come out yet.
    Either they had a change of plan or I guess this means we can expect M18 real soon now. The current roadmap [mozilla.org] (which is only 10 days old) shows netscape and mozilla branching at the M18/PR3 point.

    --

  • I should clarify that most IE scripts *won't* work off the bat because they use non-standard features (especially document.all). They need to be modified to use the standards-based way of doing things (e.g. getElementById).

  • Windows NT 4.0 - Netscape PR3 - VERY USEABLE! (Score:4)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:50AM (#733038) Homepage Journal
    This is definatly the best version, even better then the nightly Mozilla binaries for Win32. Fast, clean interface and quick install. The Windows Installer was actually nice and didn't require a reboot or anything. It also imported my mozilla cache/cookies and everything just fine. I hope these 2 browsers don't split up very much when they developers break the tree. It works great, using it to post this message. Very nice interface, love the new scrollbars and the integration with the netscape websites and instant messanger is a nice feature. I don't understand how that is going backwards. Anyhow, i recommend it. Works with my oracle system as well, and it appears the security manager works now with all my https sites. congrats netscape, nice looking product! This should have been PR1 :)
  • I had something like this when running the Mozilla nightlies. You need to run it once as root.

  • Didn't they scrap a whole version of Lesiure Suit Larry just the same?
  • Seriously, I'm too afraid to even go to netscape.com, out of fear that even venturing to their website will cause instability. I've already heard hell with the JavaScript compiler and rendering engine. Haven't they considered the possibility of actually making a faster browser? Personally, I think that browsers already have more than enough functions as they are. It's time to start optimizing for speed and stop squeezing in little widgets which chew up 2 MB of RAM and 5% of CPU time each.

    Remember, JavaScript is a half-valid excuse for programmers to make uncompiled work. Sure it's cross-platform, but it's SLOW!

  • Re:Not for RH 7.0? (Score:3)

    by jancastermans ( 115132 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @04:58AM (#733048) Homepage
    Just to a 'chmod -R a+rwx .' in the netscape directory. This is a problem that nightly Mozilla builds had quite a while.

  • Gimme Bigass Tarball (Score:5)

    by uncleFester ( 29998 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:17AM (#733050) Homepage Journal
    if you want the complete tarball monster instead of the stupid little 62+k installer...

    ftp://ftp2. net scape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6_PR3/unix/linux22 /sea/ [netscape.com]

  • Re:Here's the thing... (Score:4)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:18AM (#733052)
    On the Windows platform, Mozilla's still quite small. It's only on Mac and Linux that it gets huge.

    I think this has to do with XPCOM. For some reason, when the Mozilla team decided to do a cross-platform component-based architecture, they made it in such a way that it conveniently wraps around Windows' COM stuff. That means they don't have to include it on Windows, which trims out quite a lot of stuff.

    Hey, how else could you explain why the Windows Mozilla downloads are a full third smaller than the Mac or Linux ones?
    ----------

  • Re:Size? (Score:2)

    by asa ( 33102 )
    I've been following this project for a long time and directly involved with it for some time now. I can't recall any time when Mozilla (the browser suite, or even just the browser) fit on a floppy. The layout engine, yes, it did fit on a floppy and I susupect that it could be made to do so again.

    -Asa
  • Wow... As soon as I heard of pr3, I instinctively went and downloaded it. I didn't really have any expectations of it (cause IMHO, the other two pr's were barely usable, at best), BUT IT ACTUALLY WORKS. And, better yet, it kicks IE5.X's ass for speed. WAY TO GO NETSCAPE!

    Just think.. finally, a version of netscape to be *proud* of using.

  • Getting it to run! (Score:4)

    by smartin ( 942 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @03:23AM (#733057)
    I had to delete my .mozilla directory, otherwise the thing core dumps. Also, the installer does not seem to work through a proxy, but the entire download is available from their ftp site.
  • You are currently using:

    Microsoft Internet Explorer (a non-Netscape browser) 5.0
    English language, Windows 98, Weak or Unknown Encryption

    Upgrade Available!
    Netscape Communicator 4.75
    English language, Windows 98, Strong 128-bit Encryption

    Thats the coolest greeting I've ever gotten from a web page.

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