Mmmmh, maybe I'll stay with FF then. Although I didn't read the license agreement completly so who knows what they might be up to.

It's also spyware:

*shivers in horror*

Sorry, only noticed that later. Yeah, that's strange indeed.

The problem with this 'Netscape' is just that it doesn't use 'spoofing', but it actually uses the Microsoft engine to render pages

I wish I'd kept the URL, but I read an AOL-issued press release the other day in which they managed to spill some 2000 words on THEIR new browser without mentioning Mozilla once.

I tried the Firefox/Thunderbird releases, but they're far slower than any Mozilla suite releases I use on various machines.

As for browser impersonation, KDE's Konqueror has been doing that for a while now, and there's a bigger choice of browsers/platforms to fake. You can even create your own, which is pretty funny if you imagine web admins going through their logs and stumbling on "Lynx 0.9 w/DHTML+Java extensions on Windows for Workgroups for the DEC PDP-8".

This abomination is out now. Stay clear of it!

You guys are going to love this tidbit I just found:

Having both rendering engines available in a single browser can be a useful tool, and an amusing toy, IF it's used properly. It can be used by developers to see how their site looks in IE without having to fire up a second browser, and it can be interesting to compare a site as just a user. It can also be useful if you're browsing the web and come across a site that looks like shit, then you can switch to the IE engine and see if that's the source of the problem.
Realisticly though, this is a bad move. Most netscape users will start using it because of one or two pages that won't load properly/at all in netscape due to either poor design, or M$'s crap (the way they only allow IE to connect to the windows update site), then just get lazy and leave it set to IE. Also, it will make many people start thinking "well if netscape is using IE's engine, but IE isn't using netscape's, then IE must be the better browser".


btw This isn't the first attempt to get both engines in one browser, although it may be the first successful one. The one IE frontend (I forget it's name now, but it's claim to fame was extreme skinnability) had the ability to use the gecko engine. However, it was nearly impossible to make it work.

edit:
Heh, that's funny.

edit 2: Neoplanet is the IE frontend I was thinking of, the one that included an option to use the gecko engine.

Edited by Cypherswipe at 16:54 on December, 05th 2004

That's what I don't know.
For example I fear the Mozilla Organization could change priorities in extending mozilla and firefox. Don't know. If I could specifiy this feeling I would already have said something, but I can't. I just have a bad feeling about it.

Mh... maybe the fire could be gone when they reached their goals...

What would be so bad about that?

That's a point, indeed. But this will change (hopefully) in the next months, while Firefox gets known to and used by common-users.

I don't even know if it would be so good, if Firefox would get a share of more than 25%. I just don't know...

To 'techie' users, yes. However, Mozilla (including Firefox) never achieved the amount of 'brand name recognition' Netscape still has. Telling people about Mozilla will only result in a blank stare usually. Telling them there's a new version of Netscape gets them interested in way more cases.

So what? The Netscape browser was totally useless since version 6.0 anyway.

That pretty much sums it up.

In more practical terms, I really wonder how it is going to help to establish the actual standards on the net if there's the 'fallback' option to use this completely buggy mess.

Ha! Development-Platform...
The open Web-Standards are some kind of a Development-Platform and there are already al lot of Web-Application (which are mostly not on the Web, but in Intra- and Extranets), but there are natural borders for Web-Applications: possibility and performance. But I'm getting of topic... Of course it's their development platform...

This article is quite stupid. They still don't understand, that it is totally irrelevant how a Webpage looks like, since every layout is just an offer to the viewer, which must have the option to deactivate the layout (CSS) and maybe use it's own.

But for that they would need to learn how to make correct Web-Pages...

From http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article5691.html:

http://news.com.com/New+Netscape+embraces+Firefox%2C+IE/2100-1032-5470378.html

That's probably the most stupid thing I've ever read.