Netscape vs Mozilla

What's the difference?

[grnidone]

After reading Brett's Breaking News thread Alert AOL to Move to Netscape/ Mozilla [webmasterworld.com] and Littleman's answer in Netscape/ AOL Knows What You are Searching For [webmasterworld.com] I have to ask the question: what is the diffference between Mozilla and Netscape?

I always thought Netscape was Mozilla. ?

[Brett_Tabke]

The core of the product is the Gecko html decoding and rendering engine. It's responsible for interpreting web pages. That core is used the same from Mozilla .9x and Netscape 6+. After that, Netscape played with the interface somewhat to make it their own.

Mozilla is just slightly different in the interface department from Netscape 6.

[pat_s]

My untechncinal take on that is that Netscape is Mozilla, plus AOL extras, but Mozilla is not necessarily merely Netscape. Mozilla keeps developing. Mozilla 9.8 is much nicer to use than Netscape 6.2, IMHO and has features and bug fixes not available in Netscape as yet,if ever.

[Brett_Tabke]

Just for refrence, it's Mozilla v0.98 (not v9.8)

[pat_s]

Whoops..sorry. Of course you're right. Numbers, decimals..almost like math. Not my thing, but I do know that it's not 1.0 yet. :)

[scotty]

I thought it is Mozilla 0.9.8 (note the two dots)... :) I've been using this release on the Win2k platform since it came out early Feb, and it definitely rocks! Proper PNG/MNG and proper CSS2 support - when can I get those from IE (which is our primary development platform) ??

And Mozilla 0.9.9 should be just around the corner, and with moderated CVS commits, hopefully we will have a stable Mozila 1.0 soon :)

[rcjordan]

So, if we're just checking what AOL-ers can -or cannot- see, if it passes (the gauntlet known as) Netscape 6.2 can we assume that Mozilla will render it properly as well?

[littleman]

Yeah, they render the same.

[pat_s]

It seems much better than Netscape 6.2 to me and they both render web pages pretty much properly. As long as they're using an up to date version things shouldn't be any worse than they already are regarding how AOL sees a web page. They could be better. Depends how much AOL decides to mess with this browser.

[straysparrow]

<And Mozilla 0.9.9 should be just around the corner>

I was just on the mozilla website and version 0.9.9 is out as of yesterday

[mozilla.org ]

[papabaer]

Actually, Netscape 6.x and Mozilla 0.98/0.99 render differently. While the former has no problems recognizing external style sheets, the latter is in some situtations.

I've been digging through the FAQs...

[scotty]

I'm using Mozilla 0.9.9 now (thanks to straysparrow's update), and it definitely has no problem with the external stylesheets. In fact, I've been using Moz since 0.9.2, and it has never had any problem with linking an external stylesheet from HTML.

However, Moz does follow the W3C spec that in the CSS file, @import must appear before any selector, otherwise that external stylesheet will not be imported. Whereas in IE, which sometimes goes against the official spec, allows you to have an @import statement after the selectors in CSS.

[pat_s]

Scotty, are you talking about importing something from an external stylesheet right in the middle of the HTML? That's something new to me is why I ask.

About the browser, I had a copy of .9.1 and didn't like it much. It seemed to render fine. Better than Netscape 6.0 did anyway but it seemed too buggy in other ways and I didn't get any subsequent builds until this one. I haven't been this excited about a browser in a long time. I also haven't seen an unrequested pop-up window in two days. :)

[papabaer]

Hi Scotty - here is the situation:
Opera, IE and Netscape have no problems with the following examples, only Mozilla 0.98 & 0.99 - it is interesting....

Site where external style sheet is not imported: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="global.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="cover.css" />

Second site where external style sheet IS imported: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/main.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/chrome.css" />
All in the Head content, the only difference is that the second example also has some embedded CSS (unique to the page) in the head contentwhich of course renders properly, but the external styles are also present, so the are being imported.

Third example where external styles are ignored by Mozilla use the following: <style type="text/css" media="screen">
@import "styles/index02.css";
</style>

Again, all of the above have no problems rendering with the previoulsly mentioned browsers, only Mozilla demonstrating the variance.

[scotty]

papabaer: This is weird because example 3 DOES work for me, with Mozilla 0.9.9 on Windows 2000. I have no problem importing an external stylesheet, and override previously declared styles using @import inside <style> ... </style> tags, as long as @import statement appears before any selector statements.

For example,

<style type="text/css">
div { }
@import url(some_style.css);
</style>

doesn't work for me in Mozilla, but works in IE.

[T Suresh Babu]

Mostly Mozilla 5.0 and Netscape 4x are some.
The Only Difference I found is Netscape 4x supports both fixed and relative styles. But in mozilla the fixed styles(font size, heading size) also rendered as relative ones. (ie) when we increase/decrease the font size the text varies in mozilla even if we specify the font or styles as a fixed one.

[4eyes]

I have a strange css problem

OK in IE6, OK in Opera, Ok in K-Meleon - lost the css in Mozilla 0.9.8 and 0.9.9.

Given up trying to resolve it.

I do all my css the same, but only one site is affected.

[papabaer]

Very strange situation - 4eyes seems to be experiencing the same anomaly. I have tried a number of combinations to no avail: Mozilla 0.98 & 0.99 are not importing the style sheets.

Again, no problems at all with Opera, Netscape6.2 or IE5.5 and IE6 -- Mozilla is No-zilla at this point.

[pat_s]

Doe anyone have a URL where this is happening? On the sites I've been on, Mozilla isn't having problems with stylesheets so far.

[4eyes]

[sah.org.uk...] (its a non-profit hospice - hope its OK to drop the URL).

Its fine on every other browser but Mozilla.

[jaeden]

I usually put my stylesheet references right up on the top following the title (personal preference). And as far as I understand you can't nest end comment tags, so there is an exta //--> right before the last </script> tag which might (doubt it) have an effect on the stylesheet reference. If the comments were removed around the first function then it would at least look cleaner and serve the purpose it was supposed too (comment after the <script> and before the </script>

[papabaer]

The situation remains, there is something amiss with Mozilla.

I will stickymail the urls of the examples to anyone who might be intersted.

As with 4eyes' site example, I can see no reason for Mozilla to fail to acknowledge the external style sheets.

[bird]

4eyes, I just experimented a little with your sah.org.uk, saved the page to my local disk, and saw some interesting results. First, the css file "palliative_care_hospice_uk.css" got saved as "palliative_care_hosp.txt". Looks like Mozilla099 doesn't like file names that are longer than 24 characters all inclusive when saving. Also, it obviously thought that it got a plain text file there and changed the file extension to *.txt.

Now the interesting part was, that while the local *.txt css file still didn't work, renaming it back to *.css (as well as the reference, you know you have two of those?) suddenly reanimated it. This effect may be a consequence of Mozilla applying its internal mime-type database when reading files from disk, so that it will refuse to load a *.txt file as css. I then made the name longer again, and it kept working from the local disk.

My guess would be that your server is not configured to serve *.css files with a "Content-type: text/css" header, which confuses Mozilla. The file is currently served with a type of text/plain. I'd try to add the following type declaration to the .htaccess, and see what happens:

AddType text/css .css

It looks like Mozilla ignores the type attribute in the link tag, if the server doesn't deliver the file with the matching type header. I have no idea if that's correct behaviour, but it should be easy enough to circumvent.

[papabaer]

Bird, I believe you have nailed it... I suspected the problem was server related as two sites, coded following similar methods displayed one with, and one without styles being imported. Both are on seperate servers and as such, this became suspect.

Opened "locally" Moz DOES recognize the external styles. I also suspect there are more than a few servers out there that are not set up to accomodate Mozilla's external CSS handling. As you stated, I do not know if Mozilla is following strict rules or if it is an oversight. Either way, I did not find any reference to this in the Mozilla FAQs (yet!)

[4eyes]

Thanks for all of you who got stuck in here.

I missed the obvious.

Unlike all our other sites, that one is hosted elsewhere (on a Zeus setup).

I posted it to our normal unix/apache box and the problem was gone.

The .htaccess didn't work on the Zeus site - but then some of my other .htaccess kludges didn't either, (although my custom 404 page does)

So , it is server/mozilla interaction.

I fixed the problem by moving the css file to my own server and calling it from there (only fixed the index page so far).

Its not ideal, but it works

[papabaer]

I did not have any success with the .htaccess approach either - this nudges my opinion of the situation to the "it's a Mozilla PROBLEM!" Time to call up BUGZILLA!

[papabaer]

I modified the .htaccess file, to:

AddType text/css css

Moz is now importing the style sheets, but hanging while trying to load the shockwave plugin for Flash.

[leogah]

Mozilla has tightened up on style sheets recently. It's in the 0.9.9 release notes:

[mozilla.org...]

[papabaer]

Mozilla 0.99 release notes 03/12/2002:

When a page using a strict document type declaration (e.g. HTML 4.01 Strict) links to an external style sheet (using <link>, @import, etc) Mozilla will load the style sheet only if it is served with a MIME type of "text/css". Style sheets served with other MIME types, like text/plain, application/x-pointplus, etc. will not be loaded. To add the proper css mime type to an Apache web servers, add "text/css css" to the system mime.types file. Or if you can't do that, add "AddType text/css .css" to your .htaccess file.

Webmasters take note! When using a Standards <!Doctype> Mozilla will NOT import your external style sheets unless the proper mime type is present on sites housed on Apache web servers. Without the <!Doctype>, Moz will default to quirk mode and WILL recognize the external style sheets without any addition to the .htaccess file.

This is one of those situataions that can sneak up on Webmasters as they migrate to Web Standards. I am sure this is one of those things that will cause more than a few Webmasters an unpleasant surprise.

I would like to see the Mozilla Organization give this a little higher profile in the release notes and FAQs.

[4eyes]

Confirmed - that htaccess worked for me too.

Phew!