Netscape Communicator 4.72 Released

Quite a number of people have ants in their pants over the latest release of Netscape Communicator. This latest release, 4.72 to be exact, can also be grabbed through their Web site. Here's to hoping it's more stable than my current release. 'Course, Mozilla's getting really really close now...

doh!

I was going to post a more insiteful comment, but then Netscape crashed.

Mozilla?? What are you smoking?

Mozilla might be getting close for some people, not for me.
It still has a long way to go. Netscape will crash about once an hour for me when I am doing heavy web browsing.
My longest Mozilla uptime is 5 minutes. No joke. Slashdot is the only site I can use with it. www.deja.com main page crashes it right away.
I'm sorry, but Mozilla isn't useable for me. I remember the early Netscape betas years ago and they wer not this unstable.
And yes I submit bug reports.
I wish all the mozilla developers good luck, but its a long road ahead to the point where Netscape is replaced.

Netscape has SOCKS, Mozilla has ...?

Yes - I've already downloaded and installed 4.72. Why? Because I'm fed up with having the 4.71 browser flake out every day or so with another error. So far, so good - nothing has died yet :-)

I've been tracking the Mozilla Seamonkey Milestones since M11, and it seems to be stabilizing up nicely but I'm stuck with using it for browsing behind the firewall at work because we use a SOCKS proxy to the outside world. Alas, as far as I can see this is not supported in Mozilla yet. Anyone have any clues on this one - what is needed to persuade Seamonkey to use the SOCKS proxy? Or does some SOCKS expert wish to sign up for this post on the Mozilla team? It was empty last time I looked.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

P.S. If I see any posts with the title 'Shoes?' following this one ... :-)

Release notes

The release notes are here [netscape.com].

Quick summary:

• Global IME support: users of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0 can now download Global IME modules that enable input of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters into mail messages and web forms. For more information on using Global IME under communicator, choose International Users from the Help menu. Windows 2000 users should use the fonts and IMEs available on the installation CD. If you're running Windows 98, just select the Windows Update icon in the Start menu. From there, select Product Updates, and download the language support and IMEs you wish to use.
  
• User agent support for Windows 2000
  

HOWTO

Keep Netscape/Unix From Crashing Like the Overextended Hack Job Piece Of Crap Code It Is - HOWTO

1) Your distro manufacturer may have packaged netscape incorrectly. See their site for details or upgrades.

2) Turn off Cascading Style Sheets (Style Sheets) support in your preferences. It generally doesn't work well at all and really isn't all that necessary. And IME it makes NS crash. A lot.

3) Turn off Java. Turn off Java. Turn off Java.

4) Turn off Javascript if you don't use somewhat sophisticated sites.

5) Don't invoke mystery components like Messenger and Composer and all that crap unless you actually need to use them. They tend to suck a bit.

6) Feed it lots and lots and lots of disk/memory cache, or none at all.

7) Upgrade. 4.7x is much nicer than previous 4.x releases on all platforms, IME.

-------------------------

This is just my experience. With these changes, NS tends to stay up for a few days for me, as opposed to an hour or less previously.

Take this at well less than face value.

Re:Release notes

Don't forget:

"Netscape Communicator with 128-bit strong encryption is now available worldwide"

(with the exception of a few countries that
America hates)

Saves having to use Fortify instead.

Disabling shopping button..

Put this line in your preferences.js file:

user_pref("browser.chrome.disableMyShopping", true);

Re:Question

I just don't use Netscape for downloading files now. What I do is right click the download link, copy link to clipboard, open an xterm, and then use wget to download the file. That way, if netscape crashes (like it always does), the download is unharmed. Plus, wget is smarter than netscape. If the server isn't letting anyone in at the moment, wget keeps trying. If the connection gets dropped, wget keeps trying and will resume where it left off as soon as it can get reconnected.

Re:Netscape has SOCKS, Mozilla has ...?

Is this what you want?

Some Reasons To Try Out A Nightly Build [mozillazine.org]

Gerv

Navigator is still 4.08!???

Looks to me like Navigator (The only useful part of Communicator IMO) is still 4.08... which has been out for months... Unless they actually modified it and didn't change the version number.

Re:4.72? No thanks...

There are plenty of criticisms that are valid against netscape, and the shop button seems silly to me too, but your criticisms are a bit unjust. If your resolution makes things unreadable, why use it? it seems counterproductive.

Be gald that the buttons can be disbaled. Since no one has posted how in this thread, here it is, straight from my .Xdefaults:
Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false

That's it.
To disable the search/my netscape, and add a Find button:
Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.numUserCommands: 1
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandName: findInObject
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.labelString: Find
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandIcon: Find
Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false

AOL Takeover

The quality of Navigator/Communicator seemed to be going downhill long before AOL took over Netscape; the fact that 95%+ of the original Netscape programming staff left after the takeover isn't going to help any. Given the quality (or lack thereof) of AOL's software, I shudder to think about the future of Navigator. I really don't want to have to switch to M$ Internet Exploiter, nor would I want to see a Navigator dumbed down to the level of the AOL client.

Communicator 4.7 is pretty stable for me under NT, but I have pretty robust hardware (Athalon 550/128MB); it seems much less stable under Red Hat on my K6-II/400. My main gripe is it's speed; it seems to take forever to render a page, even on my Athalon. My other major gripe is that the email and news facilities are annoyingly primitive for such an otherwise mature program. (Plus, PGPFreeware dosn't have a Netscape plugin)

I havn't had a chance to play with Mozilla yet; but I'm looking forward to seeing the final release. Hopefully Mozilla will fix a lot of the annoyances of 4.x

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

FreeBSD NS v. Linux NS

The Linux NS is much more stable than the FreeBSD NS (scary, eh?). I'm posting this from Linux NS running on FreeBSD 3.4, a common enough option that there's actually a port for linux netscape in the freebsd ports collection.
----------------------------

Coincidence or Conspiracy?

I headed over to Google and searched for "Netscape Navigator 4.72" [google.com]... Check out who comes up 1st (and 2nd, and 3rd, and 6th) with Netscape.com nowhere to be seen.

Re:Netscape has SOCKS, Mozilla has ...?

Mozilla has had socks support for a while now, you can setup proxies manually by editing the prefs50.js file. Also in the new nightly builds I believe its possible to configure proxies in the mneus. Well m14 should be out any day now, so you can wait untill then if you want.

Platform support

Netscape/AOL's choice of platforms to support makes no sense to me. Figure this: Linux 2.2 is the current version; most people have stopped using 2.0 by now. Libc5 hasn't been supported by its authors in almost three years. So why is it that the Linux 2.2/glibc version is a) still unsupported, and b) linked against not-even-current versions of those libraries, especially when they still support 2.0/libc5???

As if that weren't sufficiently annoying, there's not been a Linux/SPARC version since 4.51, but there are five Solaris versions. Of course, none of those are for current versions of Solaris either. All this, of course, would be excusable if they didn't have any systems to build on or they weren't going to support oddball platforms (I will admit that Linux/SPARC is marginal, though it has multiple supported distributions and a growing user base), but then why oh why are there two SINIX builds??? Most people don't even know WTF SINIX _is_, much less have it.

The point? It doesn't seem like Netscape understands what people are actually using today. If the objective is to be compatible with as much as possible, then not having up-to-date Linux builds for at least Intel, SPARC, and Alpha makes no sense. For that matter, they don't even claim to support Solaris 7 or 8. 2.5.1 is itself archaic. If the objective is instead to support only the most popular platforms, then I certainly don't see the need for five Solaris builds, two AIX builds, anything related to SINIX, or a Linux 2.0/libc5 build. The obvious platforms to support would be Solaris 7, Linux 2.2-intel/glibc, the latest AIX, the latest Digital Unix, and IRIX 6.5.

So what can we do to increase their awareness of this problem? Numerous polite letters have garnered either no response or a polite "get lost" form letter. Ideas?

Alternate paranoid theory: AOL wants all the Unix builds to be against old systems so that people will switch to windoze and buy more aol service. Pretty paranoid, but aol is pure evil after all.

PS: Kudos to the mozilla team for recognizing the value of compatibility and multi-platform support. The Linux/SPARC build works as well as any other.

--TM, still using 4.51 on Ultralinux, the preferred platform of all major deities

Netscape's Great

Well I think Netscape's great- twice the performance and a lot more stable than anything else made by other people who haven't paid me as much cash to say that.

Barry Fishcake
Senior VP, Mindcraft [rinkworks.com]

I'm smoking M13--and it tastes great!

I've been using M13 as my ONLY browser (at work) for two weeks. I use it pretty heavily, and I go to Deja approx once per day.

I have not had one single crash of the browser. (I have had mail crash on me).

I was anxiously waiting for M14 to clean up some interface/formatting/speed problems, but apparently they aren't going to do one(?)
--
Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.

Re:Disabling shopping button..

better yet use a hex editor or something such thing (i like bvi since it uses vi commands) and change the the "Shop" string to "/." and the url to slashdot.org. The string "Shop" can be found by searching for "toolBar*Myshopping.labelString:" and the url netscape shopping url can be found my searching for "tshop.html" Be sure you just replace and do not enter more characters than are already there or you will the binary will be useless. Make a backup and work on a second copy.

I make a xdelta patch so I can apply it on all the linux computers I use. The patch is specific to the build version though (do about: and you will see the version on the title bar). The newest one I have is for v4.7 build [en] 19990915. I have downloaded 4.72, but have not made a patch for it yet. I ran it and played around for a bit, and after seeing that it still displays the same annoying bugs as 4.7 I put off making a patch for now.

Anyhow my navigation bar has the following:

(forward)
reload
casa
search (goes to goole. you can edit the url for this too)
[fm] (freshmeat.net)
print
security
/. (slashdot.org)
halt

Use IE if you run Windows

I've been using netscape since it was version 1.x but finally this week, i got too pissed off at navigator for crashing, etc, i downloaded internet explorer 5.01 for win98 and it is just sooooo much faster and better than ns 4.7. almost nobody can deny it is a better product. the rendering speed alone is worth the price of download. i don't think i am ever going back unless i am using linux or on a school computer.

if you have no other reason to use IE other than Microsoft hatred that's fine. But if you want to see what Mozilla will hopefully eventually being like, just download IE and see for yourself.

4.72 seems better

After installing it I launched it... comes up much faster than 4.7 (on NT). Certainly faster than Mozilla or IE. Also, for those that haven't tried... copy your Netscape plugins directory contents into the Mozilla plugins directory. Quicktime works pretty well (it skips a little but wasn't that noticable on the X-Men preview). Flash is... "not entirely stable" (to steal from C3PO). Works on some sites and doesn't work on others (shockwave.com of all things)

Re:HOWTO

2) Turn off Cascading Style Sheets (Style Sheets) support in your preferences. It generally doesn't work well at all and really isn't all that necessary. And IME it makes NS crash. A lot.

3) Turn off Java. Turn off Java. Turn off Java.

4) Turn off Javascript if you don't use somewhat sophisticated sites.

5) Don't invoke mystery components like Messenger and Composer and all that crap unless you actually need to use them. They tend to suck a bit.

6) Feed it lots and lots and lots of disk/memory cache, or none at all.

My god man! What's the point? You've turned off everything that makes it worthwhile to install a 4.x generation browser in the first place, haven't you?

If none of the new features work... the solution is: Stick with the old version.

- StaticLimit

Re:Coincidence or Conspiracy?

What do you want ot bet that MS has hundreds of GeoCities pages with the words "click here to download Netscape" and a link to the Microsoft homepage :)

Re:Disabling shopping button..

Why disable it? Change it to something cool instead! Add to your ~/.Xdefaults

! Replace "Shop" with something useful:
Netscape*strings.22495:http://slashdot.org
Netscape*myshopping.labelString:/.
Netscape*myshopping.documentationString:Go to Slashdot
Netscape*myshopping.tipString:Slashdot

The CHANGELOG (release notes)

If you want to see what's changed, check out the Release Notes [netscape.com]! Looks like a lot of changes, few fixes.

Go here

You can download Navigator standalone 4.72 for *nix here [netscape.com]. I don't think there's a Windows Navigator 4.72 though, that's probably still at 4.08. Oh well.

javascript sophisticated???

I'm certain that there are valid uses for javascript out there. So far, though, the only uses I have seen are
a) popu-up advertising
b) taking control of the display away from the user in general
c) creating links where a real link would have done at least as well
d) forcing of automatic forwarding to an advertising site
e) a single case where it was used to enable nested choices--choose the textbook then the chapter.

Only e) even vaguely benefits the user, and this is arguable. a-d all either affirmatively harm the user, or are crummy programming.

If your page requires javascript to function, unless you're doing something rather exotic with user data, it's almost certainly wrong. More than that, I'll go to one of your competitors--I used to use foxnews, but they're not enough better than CNN to put up with this.

hawk

Re:I'm smoking M13--and it tastes great!

Why is it that everyone that Mozilla works fine for thinks that everyone that Mozilla does not work fine for must be suffering from delusions. Mozilla may in fact work fine for you. It doesn't work fine for me though. It crashes ALL the time for me. It crashes all the time for a lot of people, actually.

And based on the undisputable truth that Mozilla does crash consistently on some systems, I would have to say that no, Mozilla is not almost ready for primetime. They clearly have way too many bugs that have yet to be tracked down.

Having said that, I would like to point out that I am not saying that Mozilla should be ready for regular use. I understand that it is an Alpha, and I wholeheartedly expect it to get much much better as it moves on. But you can't have it both ways.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:Coincidence or Conspiracy?

Hey. That's pretty funny. :)

Just a guess: the Google guys claim that what sets their search engine apart from so many others is that it weights sites based on other sites that link to it - if your site gets linked from one that sells widgets, a search for widgets is more likely to pull your site.

Now, think of how many pr0n sites make you click one of those "I understand and agree with the terms of service" links. Almost invariably, the "I don't agree - I'm under 18" link takes you to Disney's page.

So, searches for some "adult" key phrases bring up Disney, by sheer force of association. (Dear god. I can't imagine what would happen if their lawyers got wind of this.)

Re:Use IE if you run Windows

Run Win2K, best of both worlds. I'm running it on my home machine, played Unreal Tournament and Age of Empires II: Age of Kings for several hours last night without so much as a hiccup. Most games run on Windows 2000, at least most good ones :) I wanted to slap the local Software Etc. punk when he told me that they weren't supposed to sell Windows 2000 to anyone other than small-business customers "Because you can't play any games on it" I told him I had the beta version, and it had worked just fine for my games for the last 6 months. He told me he had it, and not only couldn't he play games, it didn't work with his cable modem either. I promptly decided he was a retard and left. Useful link: http://ntgamepalace.3dfiles.com/ [3dfiles.com] That site will tell you which games and hardware have been found to work with Windows 2000. Of course, it says that my HP Digital Camera C200 works with Windows 2000, and I can't get it to, so your mileage may vary.
---

Re:I'm smoking M13--and it tastes great!

Wow! That amazes me! I'm wondering how you're actually using the program! I had it crash 4 times in under an hour just surfing sites, so I stopped using it. I have respect for the Mozilla team, but they've got a long way to go from what I've seen by using the browser. I dunno, maybe they're all trivial fixes.

It seems they just don't care

They just don't seem to care. There are too many unfixed bugs in Netscape, some of which are actually new, introduced in 4.72 A few highlights from the Linux/Unix section at http://hom e.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/4.7/relnotes/windows-4. 72.html#unix [netscape.com]

"Using the Insert Link command (or the Link button) in Composer or when composing HTML messages may cause Communicator to crash." This is a brand-spanking new bug in Netscape 4.72 Why don't they fix this stuff before they release it? Or, barring that, at least take out the feature so people don't crash Netscape by using it.

"If you attempt to use Messenger the very first time you run Communicator, it may quit with an "Illegal instruction" message."

"If you delete your only IMAP server and then add a POP server, Communicator may quit."

"A previous workaround for Unix systems, to avoid the freezing on startup of the edit or compose window, has been changed." Is it just me, or does this just sound silly? Changing workarounds, why don't they just fix it!?

I wouldn't mind this so much, except they're introducing new features, mostly useless features, before they even bother to fix these bugs.

Chris Hagar