Netscape 8.0 Browser release appears imminent

8.0 Beta pages gone, Coming Soon pages up.

[jdMorgan]

Well, here comes another browser to check your pages against.

The "Try Netscape 8.0 Beta" pages have been removed, and "Coming Soon!" pages for Netscape 8.0 [browser.netscape.com] have been posted. Not quite sure why they did it this way, since "Coming Soon" is more common on amateur sites, but there it is anyway. No clue on when the official release date will be.

I need a new hard drive to store all these 'test' browsers!

Jim

[willybfriendly]

Looks like it is arrived. Your link has a "Download Now" button

WBF
<edit>
(Oops, I hit the download button and it says "Netscape Browser 8.0 is Coming Soon!") Your commetn about amatuer rings true!)
</edit>

[Shadowkiller]

Somebody with more knowledge then me might disagree, but I've never noticed much difference in rendering between the Mozilla based browsers. Whatever has worked fine in Firefox has always looked the same in Netscape for me.

[jdMorgan]

Best to make sure if your income depends on it... :)

Jim

[Robin_reala]

It uses Gecko 1.7 (same as Firefox 1.0) or Trident (I assume whatever version you've got on your system?) for rendering, so as long as you test in IE & Firefox 1.0 you'll be fine.

I still don't get why anyone would use it though, especially as it's already got two critical security flaws and isn't even out yet.

[encyclo]

It has now been launched:

[browser.netscape.com...]

Important points:

Windows only

the integrated mail client is gone

Ugly interface

Based on Firefox 1.03, not 1.04 so does it already have known security failings?

Has a "Trust Rating System: "The Netscape Browser is equipped with a web site rating system called "Trust Ratings" which is driven by lists of sites provided by our trusted security partners." Who these "trusted security partners" are is not clear, but they are trusted by AOL, not by me.

Comes bundled with various media players including the uninstallable RealPlayer

Netscape brought me to the web, and I used it all the way until Mozilla became stable. However, it peaked at version 3.04 (the early 4.x versions were horrendous). They've decided to dump the Unix versions too, now.

The one good point: as it uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla/Firefox et al, at least we don't need to download it even for testing.

[mrMister]

It'll be interesting to see how it does. It's a bit of a token gesture. Netscape is just a small part of Time Warner now.

Netscape lost the browser wars with version 4 of Navigator and they'll forever pay the price for that shoddy browser.

[tstaheli]

No Mac or Linux version :(

[shri]

Here's something very weird ..

[browser.netscape.com...]

Trust Rating.

Interesting choice of trust partners on the next page.

[StupidScript]

Apparently (according to the LA Times), this browser is built on two engines: Gecko and ... wait for it ... MSIE!

Pages from some 150,000 "trusted domains" will be rendered using the IE engine with additional security features and the rest will render using the Gecko engine and it's "hands off the OS" approach.

Should be very interesting ...

[BReflection]

awesome

"AOL INSTANT MESSENGER ("AIM") AND AN AOL MEDIA PLAYER ENGINE ("MEDIA PLAYER") ARE INCLUDED WITHIN THE NETSCAPE 8 BROWSER. THE EXECUTABLE VERSIONS OF THE NETSCAPE 8 BROWSER, AIM, AND THE MEDIA PLAYER ARE REFERRED TO COLLECTIVELY HEREIN AS THE "BROWSER."

[RailMan]

>>Netscape lost the browser wars with version 4
>>of Navigator and they'll forever pay the price
>>for that shoddy browser.

yup - - they destroyed the name Netscape with an extremely poor product - i'm disappointed they are still persevering - they should junk the whole project now ...........

[Oranjy]

Nothing spectacular. Stick with firefox. However it's convient that you can switch between IE and FF engines, but how come it hasn't got it's own engine?..for that reason it isn't what I call a browser...but a skin with some extra features.
Well, maybe I'm speaking too soon, but I'll have a closer look at it.

[chadmg]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Netscape lose the browser wars when IE 5 came out? If you want to pinpoint a version that killed it off, wouldn't it be version 6?

[SEOPTI]

Netscape is still alive? Didn't know that.

[MatthewHSE]

Pages from some 150,000 "trusted domains" will be rendered using the IE engine with additional security features and the rest will render using the Gecko engine and it's "hands off the OS" approach.

This sounds very fishy to me, or at least highly undesirable. I knew you could choose to use the IE rendering engine in NN 8, but I really don't like the idea of it being turned on and off automatically just because someone, who may or may not know their business, has decided to "trust" a particular website.

I use Gecko-based browsers for a reason. I don't want Gecko "turned off" unless I do it manually.

[StupidScript]

Installing the "viewInIE" extension to FF lets you pick and choose which sites you want or need to view with IE. I guess the difference may be the additional security layer NN8 adds when rendering with the IE engine.

[Rodney]

However, it peaked at version 3.04

Man, I *loved* NS3, I used to use it waaay longer than I should have.

It was so fast and simple.

I wonder what some current pages would look like now with my old favorite.

[jdMorgan]

> I use Gecko-based browsers for a reason. I don't want Gecko "turned off" unless I do it manually.

An install option is available to let you control the IE rendering engine -- Check out the advanced options in the setup program.

Interestingly, a bunch of the "Free Stuff" that used to self-install w/NS is left out in this version. The "Free AOL" Favorites and desktop icons, for example. Total download appears to be 11MB smaller that NS7.2.

Jim

[philaweb]

For those of you that hasn't checked, yet - the Netscape 8 User-Agent looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050308 Firefox/0.9.6

Not a single word about Netscape.

[Oranjy]

I guess if the engine is IE or FF then we won't need to worry about other compatible issues.

[mrMister]

I wonder what some current pages would look like now with my old favorite.

I still have it installed. I refer to using Nescape 3 as the Sisyphus Experience...

You open up NS3 and automatically go to Netscape's default homepage

You are confronted with a JavaScript error window, so you press ok.

Then another javascript boulder appears, and you push it back with an ok message.

Eventually they cease and you visit another web site...

...and another boulder comes rolling down that hill. You soon realise that you've been condemed to eternal damnation!

I can't remember which browser vendor came up with the idea of putting JavaScript errors in the status bar, but it was a good one!

[jatar_k]

>> User-Agent

mine looks like this

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050512 Netscape/8.0

[CritterNYC]

Of course, if any of those 150,000 sites is compromised, you're just as screwed with Netscape 8.0 as you are with Internet Explorer.

[philaweb]

~jatar_k

Well, seems like the distro changed. Yours is of May 12 (Gecko/20050512), mine is of March 8 (Gecko/20050308). :)

[encyclo]

Not only has this browser been launched with serious, unfixed security holes, but the whole notion of the "trusted" sites is a pure fallacy: it gives a non-technical user a false sense of security when the sites marked as trusted are merely AOL partner sites - a purely commercial arrangement not based on any security analysis whatsoever. For example, just because a site has bought a Verisign cert doesn't mean that they have secured their database, web apps or FTP password.

What can I say? Do not use this browser, and do not recommend it to others. I'd rather use IE.

To mrMister: for NN3 just disable Javascript first - and you've got a great, fast browser with an excellent email client which is surely a much better prospect than Netscape 8 ;) It doesn't run on my platform, sadly (AMD64 Linux), but I use Dillo [dillo.org] instead.

[Krapulator]

Not that I'm likely to switch to it, but on my machine it is rendering pages mega-fast (faster than Firefox).

[zeb]

I just read in a finnish newsletter than 44 security holes has been found in new Netscape. Some of them are critical!

[zeb]

Here's an article in The Inquirer [theinquirer.net]

[grandpa]

Combines the security holes of both Explorer and Firefox.

Good grief! You can't even get V8.0 now, and if you can, don't! It's already up to V8.0.1 Somehow that says a lot, and it doesn't sound good in any language.