I just installed Netscape 8 on one machine.
First thoughts:
- It’s default skin is odd, but not ugly
- about:config – browser.info.guid – brrr, scary
- about: – Netscape logo links to www.mozilla.org
- It opens new tab right after current instead opening after last one
- Whole Netscape 8.0 is a Firefox browser with ability to display Trident in tab and some small UI changes which look unpolished
- They use their own extensions and themes – fools
- they made something strange with DOM Inspector. In their version grippy element inside splitter is displayed.
- If I’m right, they use IE as default engine for most webpages (I unchecked some checkbox ‘use IE engine by default’ IIRC) – fools
But what really most pisses me off is that they used Netscape brand. It hurts.
5 replies on “Netscape 8”
The funniest thing in NS 8 is the AOL Instant Messenger in the sidebar. It uses some sort of NN 7.x Modern theme (instead of Fusion/Winscape) and looks totally “alpha release”-like to me. 🙂
“javascript:” URLs do not work when the Trident engine is used (even though normal MSIE is ok with that). So no bookmarklet will work for sites displayed in Netscape 8 in the Trident mode.
The Fusion theme looks quite nice, but it doesn’t make Netscape 8 look very professional (it’s even worse than Opera’s theme). It also distracts the user from the webpages, which should be the most important thing in a browser. I really prefer Winstripe, Qute and even Netscape Classic (from 7.x) to this. Winscape is a good idea, but terrible implementation…
There are more flaws in NS8, for more criticism and some offensive comments read my blogpost… 🙂
But now, “/set ADVOCATUS_DIABOLI true” 😉
In fact, Gecko is used for most web pages. Trident is used for “trusted websites” (they shoulda called that different, IMHO) – sort of a whitelist which includes AOL web properties (including Netscape.com ;)), microsoft.com and a few others.
The “about:” page isn’t accessible from the menu, so they just don’t care where it links to, but in fact, we “don’t care” about that either, since Firefox 1.0.x pl-PL links to 0.10 release notes from there ;))
About the tab placement – you can set it the preferences where you want the new tab to be opened, so that’s not a real problem.
The sidebar is quite nice (they backported SeaMonkey’s sidebar to Firefox) and has more features than Firefox’.
It opens new tab right after current instead opening after last one
I would love to see this in Firefox too. Coz, most of the times when you are using middle button or any other way of opening a new tab from a current window you would like to go it next. So, I personally prefer this behaviour
To ktoś jeszcze używa Netscape ? myślałem że wersja 6 to była wystarczająca porażka a poźniej oddali się mozilli.
The “Netscape” blue color on certain widgets is just distracting, it clashes with the colors of the default theme and the Windows (standard) UI..
I like some of the sidebar capabilities. The ability to check Webmail in the UI is cool.
If itcan’t use the Weatherfox and Spellbound extensions it will never replace Firefox for me.
It’s alright I guess…I used for about a good 2 hours, and uninstalled it. I really didn’t like it, the UI is too busy and it is pretty much Firefox AOL style. Firefox is still my favorite browser weather it be on Windows XP, or on Linux. Netscape needs to try harder, and just including the Tridant engine isn’t all that its cut out to be. The only time I do use Internet Explorer is when I need to do non-critical windows update, all the others are done thru the Automatic update.