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Netscape.com Loses Its Identity 148

Posted by Zonk from the rebranding-a-rebrand dept.
wh0pper writes "Digital Trends has a great opinion piece about how Netscape has lost its identity again in regards to their wanna-be Digg portal. One interesting fact I was not aware of is that Jason Calacanis is the person behind the new beta Netscape portal. A choice quote: 'If this business model sees the light-day and it looks like it will, Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears than real intellectual news.' I've tried using the new beta Netscape site, and personally hate it. The little link to the external site and the frame to keep you on Netscape's site are deal killers for me. Does the general audience think it can compete?"
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Netscape.com Loses Its Identity More

Netscape.com Loses Its Identity

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  • Net-who? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:35PM (#15552279) Homepage Journal
    As far as I can tell, AOL has never been entirely sure what to do with the Netscape brand name.

    They seem to have bought the company mainly to use the browser as a bargaining chip against Microsoft ("We'll switch to Mozilla if you don't give us a good deal!"). Since they secured the new deal for the IE engine and jettisoned the browser development staff they've abandoned Netscape-the-browser at least twice, both times changing their minds. There was the surprise release of (IIRC) Netscape 7.2, which as near as I can tell involved merging the latest Mozilla Suite with their local tree, and then there was the outsourced chimera of Netscape 8.

    They aren't interested in Netscape the browser, but they have this brand name that they don't want to waste, and they keep trying to come up with something to do with it. They tried it as a classic portal, they tried it as a low-cost dialup service, they tried it as a webmail service, they tried it as a toolbar, now they're chasing another trend, trying to jam the square peg into yet another shaped hole.

    It makes about as much sense as it would make for, say, Coca-Cola to buy Dr. Pepper, then retire the soft drink flavor and start marketing Dr. Pepper spice racks.

    (Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)

    • Re:Net-who? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:50PM (#15552362)
      > trying to jam the square peg into yet another shaped hole.

      Aha! So that's why Paris, Britney, and Jessica are featured so prominently.

      Seriously. From the current netscape.com [netscape.com] front page, at least a third of the content is of the form...

      * Men Have Biological Baby Clocks, Too * These Questions Can Freak a Man Out * 10 Things You Never Want Her to Say * You Want to Be Sexy? Don't Do This * See Soccer's Hottest Young Stars * Dating's Best and Worst Moments--Ever * First Kisses: The New Rules * 5 Ways to Let Her Know She's Hot # 64% of Men Have Done THIS by Age 29 # Brutal Breakup Lines: Heard These? Solutions: 5 Sex Problems That Aren't

      That's not a brand. It's a cheap rehash of Cosmo [cosmopolitan.com].

      It is, however, unsurprising, considering the demographics of AOL's customer base.

    • Re:Net-who? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dancpsu ( 822623 )
      They might as well make it an MMORPG while they are at it. That probably would get more users than Netscape 8 at least
      • They might as well make it an MMORPG while they are at it. That probably would get more users than Netscape 8 at least

        Why not just jump to the final step in cheesy exploitation of a brand:

        NETSCAPE: The Musical
    • thats the reason AOL bought Netscape to get the people who were going to netscape.com AND those that were downloading and installing Netscape, so they could put those AOL links in there also. I remember years back some article on the web that AOL was getting info on what sites people browsed from Netscape 6. It was like spyware bundled inside the browser.

    • (Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)

      "Who do you like better, Kimberly, the Spice Girls or the Britney Spears? Well, yeah, I guess they are a little 20th century."

      --- Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie

    • Netscape-the-browser-v8 is a sorry POS. It came as an alternative to IE on my last 2 boxes. Locked the whole freakin O/S up when I tried to start it. Not even ctr-alt-del helped; had to do a hard reboot. Then downloaded and installed Firefox & Opera. I don't know who is sorriest AOL for releasing it or HP for putting it on the desktop. Nestscape 8 is an abomination and a disgrace to the memory of Old [=Real] Netscape (v3-4.x) which I happily used back in the days of Win3.11, Cramp-U-serve, an' all
      • Netscape is basically a Firefox core, with an IE rendering engine taped on the side as an option, merged with half the Mozilla source tree of useless gadgets, a webmail reader, some kind of spyware detector, and a new theme.

        It only exists on my machine to test sites on, though I must say it didn't cause my machine to totally fail. Perhaps it just didn't play nice with something else pre-installed?
    • Forced frames == fucked.
    • AOL bought Netscape to inherit it's role as a MS victim so they could get a big settlement or a financial judgement against MS. It worked, but they overestimated how much the settlement would be so they lost money on the deal anyway.

    • (Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)

      Not to be mean to her or anything, but I don't know that Britney will remain popular for much longer. I understand she's pregnant, but the photo of her on the BBC [bbc.co.uk] leaves me pretty unimpressed. It's been a while since Toxic. [google.com]

      • I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but I had to share. It's amazing what you can find on Google video. I was looking for a copy of the 'Toxic' music video, but instead I found Yoda. [google.com] Um, that's just ... wrong?

  • Age based? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kesch ( 943326 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:41PM (#15552318)
    Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini than real intellectual news.

    I thought this sort of vapid interest was not delimited to certain generations.

    • Re:Age based? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Life can surprise you sometimes. I always thought delimited was an adjective. :)
    • Heck, I can get real intellectual news lots of places. Jessica Alba's bikini, though? Mark me down for some of that.

  • Microsoft killed the net 0.x companys (Score:4, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:42PM (#15552322)
    Netscape used to be the domanant web browser... back when we were using Windows 3.1, you needed a third-party DLL called Trumpet Winsock to implement TCP/IP, and RealAudio was the dominant streaming program.

    Then, Microsoft came to the party and knocked out the entire industry by illegally bundling competitors to all three of these pre-.com-era startups. Where are these players now?

    RealNetworks still exists, but their proprietary audio/video codecs are used by nobody other than their bloatware RealOne product. Rhapsody is an also-ran in the digital music world.

    Trumpet? They're still supporting networking for 3.1, 95, 98, and NT [trumpet.com.au], but they've never had another must-have hit the size Trumpet Winsock and likely never will again.

    And Netscape? They've officially deemed that there's no money to be made making a browser, and gave what they had for source code over to the Open Source community still uses the basics in the form of Mozilla. Netscape.com is just a domain that Time Warner keeps reformating. They've tried it as a cut-rate ISP, but United Online's Netzero and Juno have that game covered? They've tried it as a portal site, but realized that was redundant to AOL.com. So now they're trying it as a Digg knockoff... let's see how long that one lasts.

    In reality, these companies deserved a better fate. Too bad as soon as the Bush 1.01 administration came in, the Clinton Justice Department's case suddenly died. At least the EU is still trying to take a bite...
    • What utter crap. You actually think that Windows users should still be paying third parties any time they want to connect to the net, browse the web, or stream video? The Bush administration has been a plague upon the country, but dropping the anti-trust wackiness against Microsoft was the right way to go. The anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft have not resulted in one ounce of good for the consumer. It was all a matter of key industry players trying to use the legal system to subvert the free market.

    • Re:Microsoft killed the net 0.x companys (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nuzak ( 959558 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:52PM (#15552369) Journal
      Let me get this straight: you want Microsoft punished for bundling <em>sockets</em> into Windows?

      Of course you were probably the first in line to bash them for not including something so basic.

    • Re:Microsoft killed the net 0.x companys (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Infernal Device ( 865066 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:33PM (#15552535)
      RealNetworks deserves to be out of it's misery like a sick, dying animal. It only exists so that they can continue tilting at windmills.

      Trumpet needs to go away, if only to finally kill off the old dead versions of Windows. The one advantage of something that old is that apparently, nobody bothers to try and virus them anymore.

      As for Netscape? Cool name, but that's about it. Time to send it out to pasture.

      These companies did not deserve a better fate. They weren't fast enough, smart enough, mean enough or have deep enough pockets to be real contenders in the market.

      The one good thing that came out of all of that mess was Mozilla.

      • Re:Microsoft killed the net 0.x companys (Score:5, Insightful)

        by KarmaMB84 ( 743001 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:38PM (#15552553)
        If it weren't for Microsoft, we'd be paying for a copy of Netscape 6.87 based on the Netscape 4.x codebase instead of running Firefox. Thank you, Bill Gates.
        • It is pretty shortsighted of you to think that there could not possibly have been another decent, free web browser.

        • If it weren't for Microsoft, we'd be paying for a copy of Netscape 6.87 based on the Netscape 4.x codebase instead of running Firefox. Thank you, Bill Gates.

          Has everyone forgotten Internet Explorer? Fuck you, Bill Gates, with your first to market bundled bullshit that has exposed every grandmother that tried to venture onto the internet to credit card fraud and zombification. Say what you like about Nutscrape, it at least didn't have its hooks deep in the OS.

      • They weren't fast enough, smart enough, mean enough or have deep enough pockets to be real contenders in the market.

        Or have Daddy's network of contacts to help them out, unlike William Gates III...

    • Re:Microsoft killed the net 0.x companys (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jpmkm ( 160526 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:36PM (#15552547) Homepage
      No company has the inherent right to be in business and to stay in business forever. Why do you bring the Bush administration into this at all? Hell, what does any administration have to do with any of this? This is capitalism, no more, no less. Protecting companies like Trumpet and Real by prohibiting other companies from entering those markets is simply absurd. TCP/IP is a standard. Nobody owns it and nobody has exclusive rights to it. Trumpet offered an implementation of it. And so did Microsoft. How is Microsoft in the wrong? RealNetworks is barely relevant anymore mainly because their protocol sucks. The only reason they were relevant in the first place is because they were one of the first companies to offer streaming media. There are better protocols now. Again, how is this microsoft's fault?

      These companies didn't deserve anything. Companies come and go as markets change. Protecting these companies will only stifle innovation and competition.

      For the record, I'm not a Microsoft supporter. I don't care for their software and I don't use any of it. However, I do not feel the need to bash them with bullshit economics like you apparently do. Stop that.
    • "Then, Microsoft came to the party and knocked out the entire industry by illegally bundling competitors to all three of these pre-.com-era startups"

      Acutally, the final judgement of the courts was the MS hadn't broken the law by bundling IE with Windows. It was for other reasons that they ultimately got in trouble.

    • Total crap (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tomcres ( 925786 )
      Guess what the first operating system to include a bundled web browser and TCP/IP stack and dialer? Give you a hint... it predates Windows 95... it's Windows 3.1 compatible... it's...

      OS/2!!

      All of this talk about how Microsoft killed the internet is typical OSS/Mac/Commie fanboi rhetoric that picks on companies they don't like (like Microsoft) while ignoring companies that are supportive of their particular agenda (strange how IBM used to be the evil empire, but they embraced Linux, so they're "cool" now

    • All this Microsoft illegally bundling this stuff with the OS crap is just crap. IBM had more internet apps bundled in OS/2 before Microsoft had even integrated IE into Windows. When IE came out you basically had two choices for Windows. You could download IE for free or you could BUY Netscape Navigator. What most people did was download Navigator and then lie saying they were in education, thus getting it for free.

      I've always thought Netscape killed itself. They were making alot of money having the onl
    • And Netscape? They've officially deemed that there's no money to be made making a browser,

      Tell that to Mozilla, which made $72MM from Google [internetnews.com].

  • All right kids... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dubmun ( 891874 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:42PM (#15552323) Homepage Journal
    Here's the deal. Frames are baaaad. Mmmmmmkaaaay?

  • Link to the beta (Score:5, Informative)

    by jellings ( 199721 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:49PM (#15552356) Homepage
    http://www.beta.netscape.com/ [netscape.com]

  • The Netscape Name Is Now Worthless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:49PM (#15552357)
    The name "Netscape" now carries no special weight. AOL would be better off trying to leverage their existing proprietary features (AIM, user logins and stored information, etc.) to integrate some new features into the services they provide and bring them to new consumer markets.

  • Old (Score:1)

    by Joebert ( 946227 )
    Netscape is old & tired, it needs to be considering startups instead of trying to re-invent itself.

  • Why a young audience? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 011011 ( 894467 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:56PM (#15552391)
    I don't understand why they would want to target an audience that they already have captured for the most part with AIM. A young audience's expendable income may have a larger percentage of expendability, but it's not like they make a lot of money.

    math: 100% of $10 is less than 10% of $200

    If they wanted to make a decent portal, they really should consider either making their audience choices a little larger or tergeting an audience with a better marketability. Sure kids will snap at ANY next best thing, but more mature consumers have the power to keep it going.

  • Framing that issue (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:59PM (#15552402)
    I don't think I'd call what Netscape has been "real intellectual news".
  • Netscape is pretty much irrelevant as a brand name these days. They should shut it all down and turn netscape.com into a museum of the internet.

    • "Netscape is pretty much irrelevant as a brand name these days. They should shut it all down and turn netscape.com into a museum of the internet."

      Yet the traffic to their domain is about 4x that of digg's traffic. Most people reading this post would like to get one thousanth of Netscape's traffic.

      The Netscape brand may not be particularly hip among the /. crowd, but they're likely making scary amounts of money.

      • Where do you get your information from? According to Alexa, Digg is 129th most popluar site globally and Netscape is 186th.

        And I would think that 90% of Netscape hits are from browser homepage settings or similar. So the netscape.com site is therefore irrelevant because the browser could just as easily be set to have a homepage of abc.com.
  • I ahve heard hide nor hair about NS for some time now.
  • a new Slashdot Beta called Diggdot.org
  • There is no sense in carrying netscape anymore. It's old and decrepit. AOL should let it die.
  • haha that's funny that Jason is heading this project up, now it makes perfect sense. That guy is a complete moron.

  • Not A Chance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gbulmash ( 688770 ) * <semi_famous@yah o o . c om> on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:17PM (#15552484) Homepage Journal
    It's pretty rare when a big corporation sets out to compete with some popular grass-roots movement and actually gets it right.

    It will gain *some* traction. They're going to throw enough money behind it to get people checking it out. And of those who do, a small percent might actually use it. But they're not doing it better than their competitors. It's not really innovative. It's just a "me too" (a phrase I'll forever associate with AOL and its users) site.



    Calacanis being behind it probably gives it less cred with me than if they'd hired away Cmdr. Taco or one of the Digg or Fark founders to do it. Calacanis is a suit in sheep's clothing, and nothing good comes of suits.

    - G

  • The link (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:24PM (#15552508) Journal
    FYI - the 'new' site is http://www.beta.netscape.com/ [netscape.com]

    I agree about the frame. It's huge.

    And the comments are about as high quality as Digg.
    The first comment, in the first story (about hooters), is:
    It's all about the Wii.

    I think that sums it up.

    • Re:The link (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:14PM (#15552697)
      I doubt they would do it, but with a bit of cleanup it could be a decent site.
      Just remove all images from the right side of the screen, kill the ads in the
      middle of the frame, and finally remove the junk at the bottom of the page
      (nobody's gonna look there anyways so might as well save bandwidth).
      As it is, the site is too busy and it is hard to focus on the stories. Story
      selection seems weird - it is just news. Nothing to provoke a serious
      discussion. The commenting link is very small, as if the designers were
      afraid someone might actually post a comment.
      I also don't get their voting system. It'd be one thing for me to rate the
      story on a scale, say from 1 to 10 and then post the average rating next to
      the story. That way user input has some meaning. But what does it mean that
      10 people voted for a story? Ten out of how many? How is that related to the
      quality of the post?
      Bottom line: it is not crazy for AOL to run a community discussion website -
      forums were their core business for a while. But this website shows that that
      they have surprisingly little clue about their core business.

  • ugh. (Score:5, Informative)

    by arudloff ( 564805 ) * on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:41PM (#15552565) Homepage

    et tu, slashdot? ;)

    I have the pleasure of working as the lead developer for the new netscape.com.

    We've been in beta for approximately 31 hours. We haven't even taken over the domain yet (and won't for awhile). The response has been overwhelming. It's the most valuable feedback we could have ever asked for though (and frankly, we expected a lot of it...) The frame navigator and the pop up new windows for instance, are things that annoy folks to no end -- duh, right? Well internally, it's an odd 50/50 split -- they are both designed from the start to be user preferences, configurable for each person. We'll get there in time, right now we're focused on measuring reactions to features and design changes. I know the definition of "beta" has changed.. but.. uh... it's beta. ;)

    Are we attempting to be a "digg killer?" Not at all. We're attempting to iterate on the concept of social news for a completely different demographic. We're trying to create an honest, fun, interesting portal. Did digg kill slashdot? It's faster and has more daily content, yet people come here for discussion -- Slashdot's strength. We may not be "there" yet, but again, this thing is a brand new project, about 4 months old, and has only been publically accessible for less than two days.

    Thankfully, we all have pretty thick skin here. It's been enjoyable talking to folks and seeing what the concerns are. Hopefully we can evolve this thing into the great product we all have in mind. I do appreciate everyone who has taken the time to send us their thoughts by e-mail or blog post. We're actively reading them and responding as much as we can. Let us know what your concerns are, and we'll try to address them (where we can, that is.. we don't like tons of ads just like everyone else.. just the nature of our position right now)

    • heh..

      If you strike me down Darth, I shall become more powerful that you can possibly imagine.
      • :) are we having fun yet?

        I am rotflol at the pathetic effort to secure the system :) i mean heck, i'm a human/magi/robot because of them a triple class >_ with all the xp spill, and beat them with an un-powered up savior.

        i'm just going to laugh for a while and then decide what i wanna do next

    • Re:ugh. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Grrr ( 16449 ) <cgrrr@nOSpaM.grrr.net> on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:38PM (#15552793) Homepage Journal
      Thick skin can be a boon or a curse. It can allow one to weather the storm or serenely ignore what needs to be heard...

      We're trying to create an honest, fun, interesting portal.
      ...for thirteen-year-olds.

      I look at this latest development, following so many other baffling ones, and feel a dull ache. Once I was happy - even eager - to send bucks toward Jim, Marc and Jim. How depressing to think it would've been a mercy to retire the company name long before the conception of the beta's k3wl arcade labyrinth. It's like a mutated descendant of GEnie gone horribly wrong.

      <grrr />

    • Re:ugh. (Score:2, Informative)

      by akorvemaker ( 617072 )
      One bit of feedback: the site can't be viewed if cookies are disabled. It just constantly redirects to http://www.beta.netscape.com/ [netscape.com]

  • So, it seems that it's them who are that unnamed business that's being exploited with a zero-day flaw [slashdot.org], and the attack is a form of identitty theft [slashdot.org]!

    Now I'm beginning to get the big picture!

  • Confused Identity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eander315 ( 448340 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @07:53PM (#15552616)
    The new Netscape will not make it as a portal because they aren't aiming at any particular demographic (I can't believe I just used that word in a sentence). They seem to be abandoning the tech-savvy, intelligent for a younger, broader audience, but they aren't flashy and fun enough to entertain a generation trained to change focus and subject every 30 seconds. Customizable portals have already been done (Google, Yahoo, etc), and while they're great for news, stocks, whatever, they aren't great for building a feeling of community. A more static front page will get you a more homogenous readership, but the content must be active, funny, trendy, and engaging in a way that the intellectual and geek crowd have never really understood.

    Frankly, the Netscape name brand is probably not a good choice for this. I've never understood why the Netscape website has always been stretched so far beyond its original use. Netscape was a browser, not a portal, and as much as you try to make it otherwise, Netscape.com still just a place to get an alternative browser (it's just harder to find the link nowdays).

  • Netscape confirms it.
    Or something.
  • Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears than real intellectual news.

    Maybe it's just the fact that it's the end of the day on a Friday, but I can tell you that, between the two, I am way more interested in Jessica Alba's bikini than in the latest round of unrest in Iraq at the moment.
  • ...but I admit I don't much mind seeing Jessica Alba in a Bikini.
  • What is a "netscape"?! And what has it got to do with the intarnet?

  • Netscape is irrelevant. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:20PM (#15552720)
    The success or failure of the Netscape brand no longer matters to AOL. They know they'll never see Netscape bring back the billions of dollars AOL spent on it - not that making money was ever the point of buying Netscape anyway. AOL now uses Netscape to play with differnt or new ideas without watering down the AOL brand. In a year Netscape.com will be something else, and the lessons learned from giving users control over content at Netscape.com will be applied to hundreds, if not thousands of other projects in the AOL/TW universe.

    • You almost got it right.

      AOL knows there can be no success related to Netscape. What they do seem to be interested in is how many ways and to what completeness they can use Netscape as a loss leader for obviously dismal failures.

      Everything AOL has done under the name Netscape has been a mind bogglingly stupid idea, or just a rather dumb idea with no marketing behind it so failure is assured.

      I'm sure AOL does market research. They have to have a spreadsheet somewhere showing that Netscape brand recogniti

  • No. (Score:2)

    by BSDevil ( 301159 )
    Next question?

  • I'll Marc Andreessen is rolling... (Score:4, Funny)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:30PM (#15552762) Journal
    in his gra....... err ...... cancel that...
    Seriously and ironically, Marc Andreessen IS an investor in Digg
  • Everytime this thread pops up, I go to netscape.com and I guess I'm just missing it - I don't see anything that reminds me of digg. It still looks like Netscape to me. Way too much coverage for what it's worth. There has to be more interesting news than this (since it's been covered twice tod on slashdot).
  • ...I think the last time I tried to take it seriously was in ...97? when I first got on the web?

    Netscape.com has never been any kind of geek destination as far as I'm aware of. I usually hate "how is this news for nerds" comments, but this time around...I dont' see the geek angle here.

    Yes, it was the first dot-com IPO -debuting in 1995. And yes netscape was the major web browser for the mid and late 90's but...the portal hasn't been relevent for like 10 years.

    So, tell me, who in /.land really cares? or is t
    • the topic of the discussion is the slashdot article on the netscape portal. In my post I was asking why we should care about the portal.

      That's not offtopic, you crack-smoking monkeys; it's not even close!
    • Yes, the Netscape portal in the state it's in today is pretty boring, but when it first debuted in 1999, it was years ahead of its time. The major competition was My Yahoo!, and My Netscape had two killer features: the ability to drag-and-drop modules (imagine that) and a way to let publishers add their content to My Netscape, using a new file format called RDF Site Summary.

      Netscape was a visionary company. If Microsoft hadn't squished them, they would single-handedly control the Internet today. You stil

  • Age? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spiked_Three ( 626260 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @09:10PM (#15552942)
    "to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears" who the fsck isnt interested in that? at any age?
  • In my opinion, many of the Netscape users have converted to Firefox.

    In my own experience, two years ago I have been a Netscape user and in fact, remember version 1.0 with the "beating N" and even version 0.94 beta at work on a Sun Solaris machine. I made the switch to Firefox at the time and one item that got me to switch was the built-in pop-up blocker. A big item in my book especially with the in your face obnoxious marketing.

    I remember a few years back when AOL bought out Netscape, in my opinion, t

  • Framing third-party sites is bad (n)etiquette (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adnonsense ( 826530 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @09:36PM (#15553028) Homepage Journal

    I thought that went out with the 90s, at least as far as the reputable portals go. It's rare that I agree with any actions perpetrated by Fox News, but I see they have the sense to include a "frame-buster" script on their site (as I do on all of mine), so clicking on the Netscape link led to the site I was expecting to see, not Netscape's "hijacked" version.

    Oh, and having linked sites pop up in new windows is annoying too.

  • If this business model sees the light-day and it looks like it will, Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears than real intellectual news.

    I for one see nothing wrong with Jessica Alba's bikini... And, really is there such a thing as too much of Jessica Alba in a bikini?

  • Jessica Alba's bikini isn't intellectual news? Damn, there goes my research grant.

  • Jason Calacanis was one of the worst dot-com pimps to crawl from Silicon Alley during the Bubble. Anyone spending money on what he says deserves to lose it all.
  • ...shouldn't be interested in Jessica Alba's bikini?

    I must have missed the memo.

  • Censorship (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ClamIAm ( 926466 ) on Saturday June 17, 2006 @01:21AM (#15553712)
    I don't know Digg's policy on pulling stories, but I'm pretty sure Time Warner's is a little more strict. Will net neutrality articles get pulled (RoadRunner, Netscape dialup)? How about anti-DRM ones (warner pictures/music/cable, CNN/TBS/TNT/Adult Swim)? I really doubt they'll allow lots of stories that challenge the party line.
  • I've tried them all. Netscape wins my QoS award for reliability. Yahoo.com is the big loser for "spam" reasons. Gmail.com has privacy problems but ranked 1st in low net latency.

    There is nothing on Netscape anyone would want to see. And their latest makeover is so bad that I continue to use an older link bypassing the new interface.
  • That's what makes slashdot what it is. The site itself maybe flawed in one way or another, or may not be, but that doesn't matter; what sets it apart are its users and their comments. Whenever I see a story on the web that amuses me I'm always thinking "I can't wait till this hits slashdot"; a recent example, the story that humans and monkeys had sex for a million years, I can't tell you how much anticipation I had when I saw the story on Google News for it to arrive on slashdot to read the hilarious commen

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