The key issue, of course, is moving as many users as possible from a discontinued browser—there’s no doubt that security holes will be found in it over time—to one that is actively maintained.

Why Flock, specifically? Well, sticking with the same toolkit and user profile makes migration easier, so that narrows the field to Firefox and Flock. (Not sure about SeaMonkey’s profile.) Since Netscape 8 and 9 were big on integrating with websites, Flock’s “social browser” seems a slightly better fit. And it turns out most of the Netscape 8 team went on to build Flock. Talk about social networking!

(via Flock: The Netscape Spirit Lives On)

Back in February, I was wandering the aisles at Micro Center and noticed a couple of odd software titles on the shelf:

• Netscape Basics, a jewel-cased CD-ROM which contained Netscape Communicator 4.5 and boasted compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98.
• Opera for Windows, a boxed copy of I forget-which-version, but judging by the “New! Voice Enabled!” badge, it’s probably 8.0.

Keep in mind that this was February 2007. So that was an 8-year old Netscape box, and a 2-year-old Opera box. Netscape had been free for 9 years, and Opera had been free for 1½ years.

Someone had sensibly marked the Netscape CD down repeatedly, ending with a price tag of $0.42. I was half-tempted to buy it just to prove that I’d found it, but decided taking a picture would be better, since it wouldn’t clutter up my desk. Incredibly, no one had thought to mark down the Opera box. They were still asking $39.99 for it.

Did I mention pictures?

It’s been on life support for a while now, as AOL has tried repeatedly to revive it. After they dismantled the Netscape team in 2003 (just before spinning off the Mozilla Foundation), everyone expected that would be the end, but they came back with a surprise update, Netscape 7.2, the following year. Then they hired an outside company to reinvent it as a mash-up of Firefox and Internet Explorer, producing the Netscape 8 chimera. And just a few months ago, they went back to the well and released the Firefox-based Netscape 9, trying for the Flock model of integration with social networking sites…but only integrating with their own.

So what killed it? Netscape was arguably the pioneer, building on Mosaic’s success to create the first widely-used browser on the fledgling World Wide Web.

• Internet Explorer being pre-installed on every Windows desktop
• The commercial-to-freeware transition. Back in the 1990s, the only business model for giving away a free web browser was to subsidise it with revenue from other products. This led to selling the company to AOL, and opening the source code.
• The missing Netscape 5. IE5 was considerably better than IE4, and arguably better than Netscape 4 in some areas. And Netscape didn’t have a new version to compete, because…
• The transition to open-source took a lot longer than expected, leading to…
• The disastrous Netscape 6. While there’s something to be said for meeting deadlines, Netscape 6 was a prime example of why not to release early. The program just wasn’t ready (Mozilla actually declared the code to be 0.6), and it turned off many users who might otherwise have stuck around a little longer for a stable release.
• Fundamentally, though, AOL never seemed to know what to do with it. Is it a product? An exploitable brand name? A threat to brandish during contract negotiations with Microsoft?

It’s interesting that, as I made this list, I realized that the transition to open source really didn’t help Netscape, the company. But it led to the formation of the Mozilla Foundation and the release of Firefox, one of the most visible open source success stories out there. The company and brand name withered, but the code itself flourished.

Like the demise of IE/Mac, it’s more of a symbolic end than one of substance. In my opinion, the true “heir” so to speak of the early Netscape has been Mozilla, and now Firefox, for quite some time.

Update: Asa Dotzler has a somewhat less nostalgic take on the matter, as well as a link to commentary at TechCrunch. I can’t believe I forgot to mention the crippling/crufting of Netscape 6-7 as compared to Mozilla.

Update 2: More comments at Slashdot. Gee, I wonder who submitted that story?

Update 3: Some commentary from the Web Standards Project, with a somewhat familiar-looking title.

(via Opera Watch)

A: Netscape 8.

IEBlog has an amazing report—which I’ve just verified. Netscape 8.0.1 disables IE’s XML rendering. So if you try to load an XML document—say, an XSLT-styled RSS feed like the feed for this blog—using Internet Explorer or Netscape 8 with IE’s engine, you’ll see either a blank page or an unloaded-image icon.

Apparently every time Netscape 8 runs, it trashes a registry entry that defines how IE displays XML. At this point the only way to fix it is to uninstall Netscape 8 and delete that entry (directions at the above link).

This raises two questions:

1. Why does Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?
2. Why can Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?

I’ve said it before (though possibly not here), but Mozilla is much better off now that AOL isn’t calling the shots.

Update June 20: Netscape 8.0.2 fixes this problem.

Six days later, my copy of “Netscape” 8 still hasn’t noticed that there’s a critical security update available, even when I tell it to check. Fortunately I’m not using it for everyday browsing, since I just grabbed it out of curiosity. I finally gave up and downloaded 8.0.1, just in case I forgot about it later.

*Just as Netscape 6-7 were based on Mozilla, Netscape 8 is based on Firefox. Netscape 8.0 was based on Firefox 1.0.3, which contained a pair of security bugs that had already been fixed in Firefox 1.0.4. Given that the holes were widely publicized on May 7, Mozilla released a fix on May 12, and AOL released Netscape 8.0.1 on May 20, I don’t see why they couldn’t have incorporated the fix for the May 19 release.

MozIE has a similar ability, but is aimed squarely at web designers: it gives you two panes, one embedding IE and one embedding Gecko, and synchronizes the views. You get a side-by-side comparison of how each browser will display your page.

And a few years ago, Konqueror could switch between KHTML and Gecko. I’m sure it still can, and the only reason I don’t have Mozilla in my list of alternate views anymore is that I didn’t install the relevant bindings, or Fedora Core stopped including them in their KDE packages.

Is it new? Of course not. But this is Netscape. It’s kind of like Apple deciding to ship all new Macs with Virtual PC and Windows XP pre-installed. Or maybe France making English a second official language.

*My main interest in trying out different browsers is to see how they display websites. In theory, Maxthon and any other browser of its ilk should be identical to IE in this respect.

First impressions: importing was clean and worked well. UI is a bit freaky, as things are spread all over the place—like the main menu, which is in the upper right and in line with the title bar instead of where the menus are on every other Windows application. The multiple toolbars seem confusing at first (it took a while to dig up my bookmark bar, for instance). Then I looked at the site trust/rendering choices, the big exciting feature of this release. And I’m not impressed. Or rather I am, but not favorably.

The current tab shows a shield icon indicating the trust level of the site: Green if it’s been verified by a “Netscape Security Partner,” yellow if not, and I would presume red if it’s a known phishing/virus/etc. site. There’s also an icon indicating the trust level: a check mark if it’s trusted, an ellipsis for “not sure” and an exclamation point for not trusted. Unverified sites are, by default, in the “not sure” category. So far this makes sense.

Clicking on the shield icon opens a site controls dialog box enabling you to choose to what extent you trust the website, and below that, whether to display the site using the Mozilla Netscape or Internet Explorer engine:

Imagine my surprise when I selected “I trust this site” and was greeted with a message saying “You have chosen to view this web site using the Internet Explorer display engine. Your setting will be remembered the next time you visit this site. Please be aware that there are known security vulnerabilities with the Internet Explorer display engine.” Of course, I had not made that choice.

It turns out that the default settings are as follows:

• Trusted: Display as IE with cookies, ActiveX, Java, and JavaScript.
• Not Sure: Display as Netscape with cookies, Java and JavaScript.
• Not Trusted: Display as Netscape, no cookies, Java or JavaScript.

It also reloads the page immediately—which kind of makes sense—but which forced me to start writing this post all over again when I decided to check a setting halfway through the second paragraph. They don’t seem to have worked out a way to get the IE and Netscape engines to share cookies, either, because I had to log in again after switching.

But what really bugs me is that it assumes with “trusted” sites that you’ll want to use the IE rendering. It may actually be true for a lot of people, but it undermines the effort to get sites to use browser-independent designs. It’s one thing to make it easy to switch into IE mode for sites that require it, but making it assume IE from the start leads to “why bother?” thinking. By default, on top-tier websites Netscape is no longer Netscape. If you look at Netscape.com, which is in the built-in trust list, you will view it as IE does. And of course, there’s a natural tendency to mark sites you trust, because it keeps reminding you that it doesn’t know whether you trust the site. So if you decide that you trust, say, meyerweb.com, and you mark it, you’re going to have problems with the examples on CSS/Edge.

You can set a trusted site to use Netscape rendering—this gives you a gear icon for “custom” settings, which looks like a slightly lumpy circle when shrunk down to the tab size. You can also change your own default settings, but given that as far as I can tell the only difference between Trusted and Not Sure is the rendering engine (and ActiveX), the only benefit I can see to doing this is for sites in Netscape’s own trust list.

In short, I don’t think Netscape 8 is going to pick up much of Firefox’s audience. On the other hand, I have to admit that there’s something strangely exciting about being able to load Windows Update in Netscape.

There are some nice ideas: adapting Firefox’s RSS capabilities to create a headline ticker, for instance, and the Firefox team has been talking about bundling extensions since it was called Phoenix. As for the embedded IE mode… on one hand it provides a convenient solution to the biggest criticism laid on all non-IE browsers: they don’t render pages exactly the way IE does. But it comes at the cost of all the security risks inherent in IE itself. It does remind me of the “View with Gecko” option Konqueror used to have (and probably still does on some systems).

But the clutter… The sheer number of buttons, icons, widgets etc. in that screenshot is staggering. Even after installing the web developer extension I don’t think I have that many buttons on Firefox. 3+ buttons on the tab bar, 3 icons on each tab…. I hope that CNET was just enabling every feature they could find to get them all in one screenshot, but if AOL is trying to bill it as “easier” than Firefox (which was created with a simple user interface as a design goal), they’ve got to try another approach.

Update (via WaSP): It seems BetaNews has more information on the dual-engine setup. Apparently they do have security settings to mitigate the IE issues… but then so does IE, and we all know how well that’s worked. Also, another screenshot, which looks even more cluttered than CNET’s. I think this will be a browser that requires you to run it maximized at 2000×1500. (Also of note: Firefox developer Blake Ross’ Open Letter to Netscape and Henrik Gemal’s collection of screenshots.)

Further Update: MozillaZine has posted a more thorough review.

Netscape 7.2 has been released

It’s been just over a year since AOL closed down Netscape and spun off the independent Mozilla Foundation. Despite the uncertainty of that transition, no one can deny that Mozilla has flourished. People everywhere are switching to Firefox and recommending it on security, usability, and capability grounds.

It’s really quite surprising, particularly since Netscape the company no longer exists. But Mozilla has been marching ahead, and all that stood between AOL and an updated Netscape was updating their proprietary features, like the AIM sidebar and access to AOL email, to work with the new Mozilla code.

For the past year, I’ve been advocating that people switch from Netscape to Mozilla, since it seemed the best upgrade path. (Someone on Mozillazine pointed out that AOL is actually promoting the Mozilla connection — an interesting switch.) I’ve been skeptical about the new version actually materializing, but here it is.

I’m going to stick with Firefox myself, but for Netscape fans and those looking for the full browser suite (complete with AIM/ICQ)…

• Download Netscape 7.2

The first thing I realized was that the technique isn’t suitable for large, arbitrarily-sized regions, because you need to have a background image as large as or larger than the area being given the shadow. When you’re trying to apply it to most of the page, you need a multi-thousand pixel image. That’s not only hard to work with, but even if it compresses well it’s still going to take up a lot of unnecessary room in the browser’s memory.

I wanted to keep the markup simple, so I shopped around a bit more and came across a CSS drop shadow example at W3C which was very simple: all you do is put a shadow-colored div behind the area and mess with margins.

Well, that worked great in Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. Then, the dreaded Internet Explorer test.

No dice. IE on Windows has a problem dealing with negative margins (which explains why it thrashes the layout on my software page). It shrank the containing div down to one line, but spread its background all the way down, and duplicated the top of the inner div so that there were two borders. (Note that IE for Mac worked fine.)

So I thought, how about using positioning instead of margins? That actually worked, keeping margins intact and everything. So I had a simple drop shadow that worked in all the major modern browsers! Next step: What would it do in Netscape 4?

I’m at the point where I don’t worry about design appearing right in Netscape 4, I just worry about the content being visible and clickable. If things don’t line up, or the background is missing, I don’t mind, but if you can’t read it, or you can’t follow navigation, I try to fix it. Well, Netscape 4 is picky about applying background colors, and it had decided to show only the shadow’s background color — which, of course, was black, the same color as my text! Fortunately, there is a very simple, validating hack to hide CSS rules from Netscape 4, so I used the Caio Hack to hide the background color for the shadow div.

So now I’ve got a test page that looks good in all major modern browsers, and is at least usable in Netscape 4 (for the die-hards who won’t or can’t upgrade to Netscape 7.1 or Mozilla). I proceed to update all my pages to add the nested div. Story done, right?

Of course not! The first problem was with IE, which took some files – but only some – and actually double-layered the text! After a bit of experimenting I realized it was only doing it to the largest files, and it seemed to be wrapping the text around from the bottom to the top as if it had some sort of maximum length on nested and/or relatively-positioned blocks. It looked just like a sheet of paper that’s been run through the printer twice. By this time I wasn’t really interested in starting over with a new design, so I just added another class and reverted those pages back to a shadowless layout.

So was I finished now?

No, Netscape 4 – despite being fine with the page I had used for testing – was royally messing up the rest of the pages, somehow deciding that a negative position for the left edge of the inside block should be measured against the right edge of the container instead of the left. And once you move something in NS4, chances are the links either haven’t moved or have moved somewhere else. So I had unclickable menus off at the right edge of the page instead of the middle, and poems you couldn’t see without scrolling to the right. Very much not in the mood to fsck around with this, I just moved all the positioning inside the Caio hack.

Done?

Nope! A few pages have images floated off to the right. IE/Win would flash the image briefly, then paint the background over it. Really. On the one page where the image matters, I just resorted to a table. A table inside an otherwise CSS-based layout, just because one browser is too buggy to display floated images right.

Now, let’s go back to the beginning. Remember, I wasn’t trying to do anything complicated. The HTML change consisted of going from <div>...</div> to <div><div>...</div></div> — that’s all — and the CSS change consisted of (first try) setting margins or (second try) setting positioning. Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Konqueror all got it right the first time. Not once did I have to tweak anything. But IE/Win and NS4 both exploded, repeatedly.

Microsoft, unfortunately, has the browser market sewn up and has gotten lazy. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were willing to fix their bugs, but they aren’t. These aren’t new or advanced standards I’m working with here, these are basic features that have been around for 7 years. I can understand Netscape 4 screwing up — it’s old, and the only reason I’m even bothering is that so many people were scared off of upgrading by the crap that was Netscape 6 or the hardware/OS requirements for the much-better Netscape 7 and Mozilla. But IE 6 is supposedly current (even if they haven’t done much with it but plug security holes for the last few years). It ought to be able to handle this stuff.

This minor site upgrade should have been a half-hour project at most, instead of using up an entire evening and prompting me to write several pages detailing the experience.