[MannyP Design]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/31765.html

Jobless levels in the USA reached their highest point for twenty years this week, and the mother lode of the "Long Boom", San Francisco, has just been declared the fastest-shrinking city in the nation.

Now AOL-Time Warner added to the pyre by making most of its Netscape browser division redundant. Netscape's public flotation in 1995 marked the start of the Internet frenzy. But in the blink of an accountant's eye, the great emblem of California's vitality as an engine for technology-led prosperity disappeared, and contractors were seen peeling the logo off the corporate buildings early yesterday afternoon.

Feel free to post your Eulogy (thoughts) about the whole thing.

 

[Strongblade]

Ahhh.... memories of Nutscrape Aggrivator... The only real competitor to Internet Exploder for so long until they were crushed asunder by the MS Juggernaut of free browserness.

Both sucked. But IE sucked less, even on the Mac, by a narrow margin.

The mre recent developments have all but killed it now. And even I would say that Version 7 was a huge improvement.

With Safari, I just don't see much need for Netscape. And although it will be missed, we have moved on to better things...

Safari.

 

[The Doug]

Exactamundo, Strongblade...

 

[MacDaddy]

I hated netscape after it went past 4.7
I have been using Camino (Formerly Chimera) for over a year now and I intend to stay with it. I do not like the safari web browser, I do not find it as usefull as SJ would like to have me think.
Everything in Safari I can do in Camino and have been able to long before Safari did.

So, in a way I am still supporting Netscape as Camino uses the gecko rendering engine, how this news may effect Camino updates, we will see I guess.

 

[Nick]

Thats alright though. The rendering engine used my netscape is still avaiable. Netscape is a bloated version of Camino avalable at mozilla.org. I love it, it fast and there is no crap with it. You can also do all of your web banking wiht it.

 

[Dr.G.]

I agree with MacDaddy. I have only utilized Netscape up to 4.78. I have not used IE much at all, and will utilize Safari on the G5, unless forced to go elsewhere when doing online banking.

 

[MannyP Design]

Good points, all.

I've been getting a little peeved lately with the lack of web standards...I've been working on a complete design of my employer's web site for the last two weeks, and although it is predominantly Flash-heavy, I wanted to at least allow room for those who don't have Flash.The problem being that Netscape and IE behave and react very differently in some instances.

It makes it time-consuming and in general costly to constantly try to find work-arounds to things that should just work on both sides. I find myself wanting to cater to a specific browser.

 

[RicktheChemist]

I hope that Mozilla can hold its own without the "other" browser around..

Cheers,

RtC

 

[Rob]

I really like Mozilla. It works on all platforms and has a very nice integrated email app. It's also a mature product that works well on every site I've had a reason to try.

My big worry with the demise of Netscape is that it could also doom Mozilla. AOL/Netscape provided the seed money to keep Mozilla going. It's going to be a lot harder for the open source community to support it alone. I hope I'm wrong on this. Safari doesn't run on PC's or Mac OS9. This isn't a viable alternative.

 

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

What is the practical difference between Mozilla 1.4 and Camino, other than the ability to block ads in Mozilla 1.4 and the lack of an integrated email app in Camino? Both appear to run at the same speed, and are no slower than Safari, which also won't block ads. The Gecko engine runs Mozilla and Camino, doesn't it?

 

[Jazzboy]

I use both Netscape 7.1 and IE and really have had no complaints with either of them. However, I have to use Netscape when doing my Internet banking (BoM), since their Web site refuses to acknowledge IE. Am looking forward to trying out Safari, now that I've upgraded to X 10.2.6

 

[james_squared]

Hello,

I mostly used Exploiter when I had a Windoze based PC. I found it a lot faster, which seems reasonable since both the OS and the browser are very integrated.

I used Nutscrape for quite a while on the Mac because I really like tabbed browsing. Once I was informed about Chimera, I switched to that instead of Nutscrape. Both had tabbed browsing, but I didn't like Nutscrape as much because I had no use for the e-mail client and all the other 'stuff' that came with it.

As soon as Safari had tabbed browsing, I've started using it as my main browser. I do, however, have to keep Camino (Chimera) around so I can access a few sites.

James

 

[lotus]

You guys are a bundle of joy! First you tell me my beige G3 is toast and now you are telling me Netscape is dead.What is a person to do? I shall just carry on and pretend I didn't hear a word you said.

 

[MasterBlaster]

a

 

[oryxbiker]

The last good version was 4.7, and thats saying to much.

 

[arminarm]

lotus,

carry on ......and don't trade up .... keep it and buy up ..... in many ways i regret dumping my beige G3 for a B&W.
Some consider the Beige to be the last of the well built Macs.

I have on three occasions had to go to my lovely old 7300 backup unit to keep working.

 

[emorycreek]

Try the updated Netscape 7.1 It is a bit slow to launch but it is very fast. I think it is faster than Safari and generally opens pages that Safari has trouble with. It really surprised me. It is much better than other Netscape releases.

 

[jfpoole]

Jamie Zawinski (a former Netscape developer) has a few interesting essays about Netscape and Mozilla. He thinks that Netscape did really cool, innovative things back in 1994-1996, but then stopped doing really cool, innovative things after that and just coasted on its success (hence it's current state).

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/aoltw.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/aol.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html