I've received several emails asking me to talk about the new Netscape Browser. I don't have much to say except that from the reviews, screenshots, and blog posts I've seen, (and having been tangentially involved with several Netscape releases in the past,) I think this is probably Netscape's best technology preview to date.
If you're looking for a more serious critique, mozillaZine's Alex Bishop has put together a fairly lenghthy review of the Netscape Browser with lots of screenshots. I encourage you all to check that out.
Garnering nearly 8 million downloads in the first three weeks, Firefox 1.0 -- with its small size and clean, easy to use interface -- has certainly taken the Web by storm. There's no doubt that Netscape picked a solid foundation for their new product, using Firefox's Gecko and Toolkit. Where they're going with that, well, that's still not clear to me. I guess time will tell.
Posted by asa at November 30, 2004 06:50 PMThey certainly don't seem to be sticking with the clean, easy to use interface at any rate!
Posted by: nentuaby on November 30, 2004 11:37 PMNo, and I suppose it has problems with extensions too since they're 1.0 and it's 0.9.3. If it even supports extensions at all... I also don't like the security configuration, a user shouldn't have to configure anything to make it secure enough.
Posted by: Jugalator on November 30, 2004 11:54 PMIt's 0.9.3 because it's a beta, the press release clearly stated that the final product would be based on 1.0.
The UI is configurable, I customized it to a clean one in less than a minute, furthermore nothing says that it is the definitive user interface. It supports themes and extensions, but you can't install them for the moment, extensions would have to detect the version number and name for compatibility netscape sends the name "unknown" and version number 0.5.6.
My personal take is that it will appeal to a fringe of the population that would not be interested by Firefox. Nestcape has a much more geeky feel, it definitely is intended as a "poweruser" browser.
As for security, when you have to use a special online application that doesn't work on gecko or your IE only bank site, you would have to switch to IE anyway and IE doesn't have easy per site security configuration like netscape. Personnally I prefer to see people surf 98% of their time with a gecko based browser and switching transparently to the IE engine the last 2% to get to their bank account or windows update, rather than staying forever with IE because joe user wants to browse with one browser only on all pages.
Posted by: Pascal on December 1, 2004 03:43 AMPascal: Persuade your bank to support other browsers. That my bank supports Mozilla was the result of an evangelism bug filed at bugzilla.mozilla.org - I'd actually considered switching before they changed their site, and their doing so is all that stopped me from moving.
Post SP2, I only use IE if I need to visit Windows Update for some 'recommended' updates as opposed to the regular, critical kind.
Posted by: James on December 1, 2004 04:59 PMJames, I have been part of tech evangelism in Mozilla for years, thank you I know how things work :)
Posted by: pascal on December 2, 2004 10:50 AM