Mark's Profile

Member since February 6, 2007

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    Mark

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  1. Comment - AOL Preparing Netscape Browser 9.0

    (Feb 6, 2007 - 1:44 PM)

    Lets sort this out.
    Netscape Communications Corporation still exists as a holding company to produce its services. AOL is the parent company. Their interests remain seperate. You don't call AOL "Time Warner" because its owned by it, so why call Netscape "AOL" when it has its own division.

    Netscape 8 is terrible because it was produced by Mercurial Communications, who didn't really do a good job. Netscape 9 however sees a return to in-house production with some of the original programmers, and has been influenced by months of comments and feedback posted on Netscape's community support board. In addition, the latest Netscape Suite, Netscape 7.2, will also become supported again.

    Since Firefox was created from Mozilla, and Mozilla outsourced by Netscape in the first place in 1999, Netscape have every right to use the source code it released, as written in the Netscape Public Licence. If it wasn't for Netscape, there would be no Firefox. Netscape chose to release its code because IE was getting extremely dominant, and NS felt that, even if it couldn't provide a good enough browser itself, the code it could release would help beat IE usage shares. It has suceeded very postively, even though its not Netscape cashing in the usage shares anymore.

    The Netscape.com portal is developed separately from the Netscape series of browsers, i.e. different team. Since its relaunch, it has become more popular, and makes NO mention of AOL (except AIM Mail - which replaced Netscape Mail, although it doesn't actually use the name "AOL"). Infact check the site all the way through. No mention of AOL whatsoever.

    AOL Browser is written on Trident (IE rendering engine), whereas Netscape uses Gecko (also used in Mozilla, Firefox), and obviously Gecko is the safer and more pleasurable of the two. AOL have signed a multi-million deal which forces them to distribute Internet Explorer-based products until 2010, which after that date it may decide to use Netscape instead.

    The UI in the Netscape browsers is completely optional. In setup of Netscape 8, you can opt which theme you wish to use, and by default, the "Winscape" (ordinary) theme is checked. With a bit of tinkering, you can remove anything you don't want on it.