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Netscape Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy 133

Posted by Zonk from the you-can-never-go-home-again dept.
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape. From the article: 'Mozilla's Usenet public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla's public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use. Most of the approximately 63 different newsgroups that began with the old moniker have now been officially abandoned.' Related: Earlier this week Netscape Communications released version 8.1 of its Netscape Browser."
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Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy More

Mozilla Severs Netscape News Legacy

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  • Includes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by someguy456 ( 607900 ) <someguy456@phreaker.net> on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:34PM (#14590452) Homepage Journal
    Sadly, today's Netscape is just a shadow of its former self: "What's Included in the Download? Installation may include Netscape 8.1 Browser, Netscape ISP, McAfee, Rhapsody, Real Arcade and WeatherBug." Sad.

    • Re:Includes (Score:4, Interesting)

      by storem ( 117912 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:54PM (#14590569) Homepage
      I briefly browsed around the browser's website, and was please to see it still holds an archive of most Netscape releases since 4.7x

      http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/download/archive.j sp [netscape.com]
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Includes (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Hehe, I had a laugh the other day. I was poking around my old cdroms and found a single .tar.gz on a cdrom, a backup of 1 of my old machines from 2002! Had a blast getting it to run in a virutal machine under vmware. Redhat 6.0, Hedwig :) Totally custom though. I even got that latest 2.2 kernel rolling just for fun once it was up.

        What was funny is that I fired up Netscape, hit my my company's Citrix secure gateway, and it handled the new ssl certificate from Thawte no problem, insalled without a hitch! This

      • At least go for the oldest version they have available: 3.04 [netscape.com].

        Or the newest version that will run on 16-bit Windows 3.1: 4.08 [netscape.com].

        Anyone know the last version to run on a 68000 based Mac?

        Anyone have a copy of Mozilla from before it was called Netscape?

    • I would rather think of Netscape as having provided intial codebase and support to produce the Mozilla project as successor and as Netscape having been transformed from the ashes and rising like a Fire Bird, oh @^$@$@$! wait ... wrong analogy .. the um, ... now hot Firefox product.
      Regardless, Netscape has evolved purposely. The shell of the Netscape browser you now see bundled with all kinds of other software is just a marketing piece based on the new successor, (same gecko engine internals as Firefox). Th

      • Re:Includes (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I would rather think of Netscape as having provided intial codebase and support to produce the Mozilla project as successor and as Netscape having been transformed from the ashes and rising like a Fire Bird, oh @^$@$@$! wait ... wrong analogy .. the um, ... now hot Firefox product.

        Hey... given that analogy, they should call it Phoenix! I can't believe no one has thought of that yet. :)

      • Re:Includes (Score:5, Funny)

        by EvilMonkeySlayer ( 826044 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @08:08PM (#14590637) Journal
        Yes, you could even say it was reborn in a "phoenix" like event...
      • Funny, the way I remember it after Netscape released their source and everyone had some time to look at it they determined it was a pile of shit, threw it out and rewrote essentially from scratch, although borrowing some basic design.
    • Is it Possible Googles recent stake in AOL

      they will use that to market Netscape and Google related tools?

    • System Requirements
      Before installing, make sure your computer meets these system requirements:

      Operating System:
      Windows XP
      Windows 2000
      Windows 98 SE, ME

      Hardware Requirements:
      233 MHz processor
      64 MB RAM
      35 MB hard drive space

      Other:
      Internet Explorer 6.0 (If using the Trident rendering engine)

      Recommended Configuration:
      1 GHz processor
      256 MB RAM

  • Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thelem ( 218540 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:41PM (#14590502) Homepage
    The renaming of the newsgroups has been one of the failures of the mozilla projects, and has dragged on for years.

    It caused problems back before even Netscape 6 was released. The newsgroups were intended for developers, but because they were called "netscape.public.mozilla.x" they would get loads of noise from people looking for help with Netscape 4. Thats died down now, or at least moved on to questions about Firefox. Having said that, I'm a fan of what Mozilla.org has done, and if the names of their newsgroups are my biggest criticism of them then they must be doing something right.

    This change should also help reduce the amount of spam on the newsgroups, since they will only be accessible through the mozilla news server and google groups

    • Re:Finally (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What tard decided to create a whole new hierarchy rather than legitimate new groups in comp.infosystems.www.browsers?
      • mozilla is more than a browser, it is also an email client and news reader.
        • Don't forget that Mozilla also has a Composer component.

          In a world, seemingly the one that the 'Firefox Community' wants, where content creation is restricted to vi hackers and people who buy FrontPage, the 'web browser' becomes a pretty-button-clicky consumer-only thing. Which is really disappointing.

          It's a good thing with classic Netscape, and classic Mozilla, that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is installed by default. It's a simple step to point out to someone that a program they can use to easily CREATE web c

  • shades of Dr. Evil (Score:5, Funny)

    by 42Penguins ( 861511 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:41PM (#14590506)
    This reminds me of Austin Powers...

    Under the Ballmer-McBride thesis that open source is evil, Netscape is Scotty and Mozilla is Mini Me:

    Netscape, you're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough!

  • Times have changed. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gasmonso ( 929871 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:42PM (#14590508) Homepage

    While is sad to see Netscape fizzle away, it was the browser that took on IE and fought the good fight. Mozilla and Firefox are the next evolution in the fight against IE. There is one constant in this universe though and that is Internet Explorer :( Hopefully this stiff competition will make IE a good browser once again.

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

    • Uh, what? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:49PM (#14590533)
      IE was the browser that took on Netscape, not the other way around. All Netscape did was lose, partly because IE at the time was superior and partly because Microsoft broke the law.

    • Re:Times have changed. (Score:5, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:55PM (#14590577)
      "While is sad to see Netscape fizzle away, it was the browser that took on IE and fought the good fight."

      You don't really believe that Microsoft invented the web browser, do you? When Netscape was born, Bill Gates didn't even think the internet was particularly important. And Netscape was just building on the university-developed NCSA Mosaic browser.

      Back in the mid-90s, Netscape was THE dominant browser. But it got stagnant as the corporation tried to figure out how to make money off of it. Meanwhile, Microsoft built a browser that was comparable in quality (neither one was great), and used it's monopolistic position - combined with some rather unethical tactics - to grab users away from Netscape.

      • Re:Times have changed. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @08:40PM (#14590797)
        ...and used it's monopolistic position - combined with some rather unethical tactics - to grab users away from Netscape.

        While there is an element of truth in that, Netscape was more responsible for its downfall than Microsoft was. They made a lot of poor decisions, and failed to make the browser experience better, instead preferring to get into a feature war with IE, one they were ultimately to lose.

        A good example of this was Netscape not working with roaming profiles. At my place of work (before my time, but I've discussed it at length with my colleague) they were unable to use Netscape because of this. Numerous discussions with the company resulted in nothing productive - they just weren't interested. That was responsible for a good number of enterprises switching to IE.

        The Mozilla foundation have so far done a good job on focusing on making the browser better, adhering to standards (yes, they still have some way to go) and making the user the focus. Lets hope they continue this way, esepcially when IE 7 is released. I'd hate to see another feature war break out.

        • Breathing (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Dr. Evil ( 3501 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @09:18PM (#14590964)

          Netscape used to be able to charge corporations money to use their browser.

          When Microsoft gave away IE for free, it cut off Netscape's revenue source. I blame the downfall in software quality on Netscape's inability to find a new revenue stream.

          Or to put it another way... even if they implemented roaming profiles, you'd still be paying Microsoft and not paying Netscape.

          • Re:Breathing (Score:4, Informative)

            by NutscrapeSucks ( 446616 ) on Sunday January 29, 2006 @02:56AM (#14592168)
            When Microsoft gave away IE for free, it cut off Netscape's revenue source. I blame the downfall in software quality on Netscape's inability to find a new revenue stream.

            Well, that's true, but let's not forget that Netscape's REAL business was Enterprise server software. The rise of Apache had a lot more to do with Netscape's poor finances than the rise of IE did.

            In conclusion:
            + Netscape browser gets beat down by IE
            + Netscape web server loses against Apache and IIS
            + Netscape groupware gets squeezed off the map by MS Exchange and IBM Notes
            + Netscape application server (Kiva) gets overwhelmed by Java stuff like BEA and WebSphere

            Endgame: Netscape ends up a as a lame portal company.
            • Further, Netscape's business plan involved introducing proprietary browser tags that were only fully supported by their server technology. They wanted to become another Microsoft.

              The praise heaped on the Netscape corporation by some people who see all evil emanating only from Microsoft is disappointing. That people insist on distorting the real history to make Microsoft the ONLY villan is even more disappointing. There isn't even a shallow profit-driven business case for distorting the history anymore.
              • Aside from <blink> (which is still supported by Mozilla/Firefox/etc. and people still USE when plain static text is more appropriate?!!) what taks did Netscape support that MSIE did not?

                It's really the other way around. Microsoft tried to hijack the web by introducing a lot of MSIE-centric tags and making those features VERY accessible - nay, desirable - to most so-called "web designers/web developers" in Frontpage. Marquee anyone?

        • In other news.... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by sillybilly ( 668960 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @10:46PM (#14591369)
          Bullshit.. I remember that mystical feeling of the early days of surfing the net, in a library, way back in 1994, with Nescape 1.0. Yahoo was a neat place, had a lot of categories, while it was young, run by two hillbillies as a startup, there was Webcrawler as a search engine, then Altavista later a little better (nothing as good as google though that showed up in 1999, or ICQ in 97), and even Ebay was around. Back in 94 forget looking at the library catalog index to find a book, walk to the shelf, when you could just sit down at the same computer and just have the answers right at your fingertips. And you could have all that from home, via a SLIP dialup, with Trumpet Winsock/Win3.1, manual logins! Yay! And all this came alive because of Netscape - gopher, news, ftp, telnet and such have fallen mostly by the wayside, and http became the major dominant force of the internet, all because of netscape making it so accessible. Microsoft had no clue, was just simply left in the dust, they thought of the internet and www as you think of gopher or ftp these days - insignificant user experience, clumsy and frustrating to use, and who needs it anyway? Netscape, riding on NCSA's Mosaic's back, proved it differently. Netscape 2.0 had neat javascript (plus bundled news and especially email) - who would have thought an C-like syntax is masterable by the masses, when average joe needs either cobol or basic? Then holy cow, Netscape 3.0 with java! Yahoo games, chess, card games, pool, it all rocked! Secure sandbox too! Good old days when the web used to be secure, unlike the activex junk today, plus all the downloadable instant messenger backdoors and spyware 'innovations' that happened since then. Or blogging, you no longer have to go to the confession booth to repent your sins, you can put it all in writing online! Be honest please, and personal! Gee, what progress since then to please you the customer! Back then Netscape 3.0 was miles ahead of IE 3.0, even though by 4.0 you could feel the pressure lowering on the company to stop doing what it was doing, including sabotagelike deliberate crappy work - 4.0 was pretty much crap compared to the revolution 3.0 was, dhtml was a mess compared to the perfection that secure java applets were. If netscape were allowed to flourish, I believe the whole computing experience would be different today - I can't tell what they would have invented, but I'm sure it would have been more nice stuff - for instance you could be having an online desktop, with wordprocessors and all your needs, from any-isp service provider at a low cost, all you need is hardware, boot via some free bios program, log on from anywhere in the world to your service provider, and there you go, at 10bux a month everything included, connection, software, everyting, if there is enough competition, because netscape didn't try to hog the market, they didn't try to be yet another AOL and "everything goes through me" service provider, but they let local isp's live too. Today even if you had such an webmail service type of world, it would be only 3 players - yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Barrier of entry humongous. What about local ISP's, mom and pop shops? Talk about an information economy where there are only 2 players and the rest of the population is excluded, can only be p4wns. Unfortunately there were powerful forces vested in the current monopolistic desktop model. After Netscape was exterminated, what has happened? Nothing! We're just milking the same old cash cows from way back 1993, Win31 + MS Office + some database on the network somewhere, all with a new face slapped on it, and ok, some stability improvements, but with all those trillions invested, you better get some stability, and even so I dont' think the customer is getting a fair return. Why innovate if the money is flowing in, why be stupid and undercut yourself, why lower the cost of computing, and have everyone better off when that means making yourself worse off? Of course you won't. And most importantly, don't let the market turn into a competitive place where there a
        • While there is an element of truth in that, Netscape was more responsible for its downfall than Microsoft was. They made a lot of poor decisions, and failed to make the browser experience better, instead preferring to get into a feature war with IE, one they were ultimately to lose.

          You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?

          IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience. Others, having failed to learn from Netscape's demise that it's not possible to do business on M$, have improved IE with p

          • Re:boring rehash (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            "You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?"

            How could we forget. It allowed Netscape's founders to make a lot more money selling the company then they would have made if MS had never entered the browser market. Competition was inevitable, they were just lucky it came from a company with a lot of legal baggage so they could play the victim card and sell the legal candy to AOL for big bucks.
            • More like lucky for them Microsoft were willing to do anything to derail the possibility that customers could move to other platforms. Were MS prepared to compete like everyone else then there'd be a lot less vitriol directed at them.
          • Let's not revise history too much. IE was a vastly superior browser around the transition out of version 4. Sure, Microsoft used their monopoly position unfairly to take over the market, but at the time, they also provided a much better experience. It wasn't until IE was the clear cut market owner that Microsoft stagnated on the browser, leaving us with the relatively ancient pile of shit we all now love to ignore.

          • Re:boring rehash (Score:3, Informative)

            by Grab ( 126025 )
            There was a *very* long period where IE was the *only* browsing experience worth using. IE4 vs. Netscape 4, you could still just about justify using Netscape. As soon as IE5 came out, there was no comparison. And a working, stable, non-processor-hogging version of Mozilla was still 2-3 years in the future.

            Grab.
        • It sounds like this topic was certainly before your time!

          As far back as I can remember, Netscape profiles could be shared across Unix machines using NFS, and I presume the windows counterpart also worked the same. File locking was in place to prevent the profile being trashed. And then in version 4.5 (October 1998), Netscape allowed the profile, including calanders, to be stored on a central server using Internet protocols. It was not until many years later that Exchange offered the same level of functio
        • What happens if a feature war breaks out between IE and FF?
          • What happens if a feature war breaks out between IE and FF?

            The latter picks up a really really big sword, tears one arm and one leg off of its clothes, makes itself look as female as possible, and says "..." a lot.

            Victory is then assured.
      • Except MS invented nothing like a browser. They bought SpyGlass, hired ex-NeXT developer Chris Franklin to work it over and created IE. Just to set the record straight, as if anyone gives a hoot.
      • To be accurate. IE uses the Mosaic codebase. Netscape Communications, called Mosaic Communications at the time, opted not to license the NCSA Mosaic codebase and stole the programmers instead.

        • Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina wrote NCSA's Mosaic and went on to start Netscape Communications Corp. Please stop the FUD and read up [ibiblio.org].
          • What FUD am I spreading? Andreesen and clark opted not to license the Mosaic codebase and instead recruited the programmers Andreesen had written Mosaic with. Article you linked to said the same damn thing.
          • Marc Andreesen is sort of a Steve Jobs sort. He uses charisma to talk other people into doing the work, then tries to take all the credit.

            Further, his pompous 'we will take over the desktop' grandstanding was the red cloth that riled up the Microsoft bull. The man is an egotistical ass. Unfortunately, egotistical asses like him are sometimes necessary to kickstart a project. But there's no need to distort history to give him more credit than warranted after-the-fact. The man is a dud, tech-wise. Perfe

      • Re:Times have changed. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @09:00PM (#14590876)
        Microsoft didnt need monopolistic tactics to defeat netscape.
        with the later 3.x versions, and especially with the evil 4.x ones, Netscape Navigator managed to evolve into a PIG of browser.

        He used to have netscape installed on 64Mbyte machines in the university datacenter, and people BEGGED the admins to allow the use of IE5, just because netscape 4.73 was slow, and when it wasnt slow, it was buggy, or crashed, or swapped around like crazy.

        It took the mozilla developers 2+years plus a complete change of the rendering engine to somehow salvage the trainwreck netscape navigator had become.
        • Just to be fair IE 5 of course was always conviently preloaded into memory even if you weren't using it...
          • Every version since 4 has the rendering engine as part of the GUI system. The entire browser isn't preloaded, just the core. The UI is a regular application that makes use of system components. It's a rather efficient design that allowed for much nicer UI in general, and has been a positive, overall.

            It's also paralleled by KDE with KHTML, and OSX with Webkit.
            • The difference is that when I startup KDE, khtml doesn't get loaded until I launch a program that uses it. Once one such app is up, new apps can use the library without as much loading. IE's rendering engine gets preloaded when Windows boots up.
        • Netscape Navigator managed to evolve into a PIG of browser.

          Not to mention those damned fonts. Anybody remember Netscape 4.02 for Solaris?

          *shudder*

        • I agree. Starting with MSIE 4.0, I switched from Netscape to MSIE and used it until Firefox became stable (I never did grow to like Opera all that much - I use it for testing and that's about it). Microsoft got a lot of things right in MSIE 4.0, including memory footprint and performance (relative to Netscape). Netscape focused more on bundling, adding more features unrelated to web browsing, and gradually became more and more unstable. Look at Netscape 5 (or, really, download the source and compile what
      • The grandparent poster was kind of right. Netscape took on Mosaic
        which became IE. After a brief success, it lost, begat Mozilla and
        started a long guerilla war.
        Quite similar to how Unix took on VMS which became Win NT. After
        some not so brief success of Unix, Win NT started to kick Unix' butt.
        Unix begat several OSS children (Linux having highest profile).
        Unix was never quite defeated so the war is more of an open combat
        type today.

      • When Netscape was born, Bill Gates didn't even think the internet was particularly important. And Netscape was just building on the university-developed NCSA Mosaic browser.

        Interestingly enough, only one of my browsers contains the following text in its About dialog:

        Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

        Guess which one.

      • I see ICQ doing the same thing. They stagnate adding more and more bloat to their client (or just do nothing) while MSN is taking over; partly because everyone knows it, and partly because it works better in some situations.
        • ICQ lost me just around v2000 or 2002. They lost the one good feature that kept me around (a very good chat logging interface) and replaced it with adver-crap that bloated the app and bogged down the system. Luckily, that's about the time Trillian came around... ICQ is just a protocol to me now.

          They get some points for being the first, but they just seemed to have lost sight of the purpose of the app.
    • Netscape were the KINGS of the internet in the middle 90s.
      Tons of webpages used their propritary tags, and those stupid "use netscape 2.x" tags were more common than any IE-only bias that followed later. As long as netscape had 95%+ market share, they werent nice guys in any way (or why would they have invented the blink tag, and the frame creep?)

    • Re:Times have changed. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shelled ( 81123 )
      "Mozilla and Firefox are the next evolution..."

      Correct if you mean 'Mozilla the foundation'. The Mozilla suite is dead and will see no further development by the Mozilla foundation. It's now an independent community project called Seamonkey. If I read the news groups correctly the team is substanitally the same one responsible for the old suite. See: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ [mozilla.org] The best bet is one of the nightly build releases under the 'contrib' branch of the trunk tree. Gecko/20060116 SeaM

    • Erm, no. Netscape 3.x was massive, bloated, and just about the buggiest software I've ever seen. IE 3 was the young upstart that fought the good fight. Try thinking about what actually happened, rather than "microsoft is teh 3n3m3y!!!11one".
    • If IE is a universal constant, than the age of the universe must be about 15 years or so. Now that would give the Creationists something to talk about. :P

  • I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:54PM (#14590570) Homepage Journal

    I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...

    All XPCOM interfaces start with "nsI," cross-platform support is based on the "Netscape Portable Runtime," most functions start with "NS_"...

    I wonder if they have any plans to slowly transition over to "mozI" or "Moz_"? Somehow I doubt it (massive plugin breakage), but still - the remains of Netscape are still all over the code.

    • Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pneuma ROCKS ( 906002 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @08:34PM (#14590763) Homepage
      I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...

      That's a massive job, even if done slowly. I don't think it'll happen, specially because it would mean constantly breaking pending patches and blocking access to different groups of files at given times. It would also break common code between other Mozilla and Mozilla-related technologies, like Seamonkey or Camino. It's good that bugs fixed on one app can be easily migrated to the other. I think the ns is there to stay, just like the Kung Fu Death Grip [mozilla.org] and such. It doesn't do much harm, anyway. A little annoyance to developers.

      • Why consider the prefix to be an annoyance? Moz/FF was built on the shoulders of giants (Netscape), and we should not actively work to deny this.

        • Camino (Score:2, Insightful)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Why consider the prefix to be an annoyance?

          Because on the Mac OS X platform, NS meaning Netscape conflicts with NS meaning NextStep.

        • Moz/FF was built on the shoulders of giants (Netscape), and we should not actively work to deny this.

          I agree. Netscape was a pioneer browser and a very important piece of Internet history, as well as the predecessor of one of the greatest current browsers, the greatest IMO. All I'm saying is that now Mozilla and Firefox are different entities that Netscape, and their code should reflect that.

          It's also a matter of consistency. Maybe not now, but in the future young people who want to contribute to the proj

      • just like the Kung Fu Death Grip and such.

        What is that exactly? I tried your link, and a google search, but I cannot find what it actually means.

        • I didn't look into it much, I read somewhere that it had something to do with pointer counters. I'm no expert on Mozilla code so don't take my word for it.

        • Re:I wonder when they'll get rid of "ns*" then... (Score:4, Informative)

          by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday January 29, 2006 @10:39AM (#14593009) Homepage Journal

          Try an LXR search [mozilla.org]. Generally speaking, kungFuDeathGrip is used (as Pneuma ROCKS guessed) to ensure that reference counts are kept above 0 during a code path. A good example is in libpr0n [mozilla.org], where the comment kind of explains what they're doing.

          In XPCOM (and COM), objects have reference counts. When the reference count reaches 0, the object is destroyed. The reference count is incremented any time a block of code takes a reference to the object, and is decremented whenever a block of code releases that reference.

          Occasionally there are places where the reference count is potentially 1, and a certain function call may reduce it to 0 (thereby destroying the object) before the object is really ready to be destroyed. In that case, the Mozilla codebase grabs a kungFuDeathGrip on the object (increasing the ref count by 1) until it's really safe to release the object.

          Generally speaking this occurs when an object (event source) makes a callback on another object with a refcount of 1 (event handler), and the event handler removes itself from the event source - reducing its refcount to 0. However, if the event handler isn't complete yet (still has some cleanup), then they need to grab a kungFuDeathGrip to ensure that the object isn't destroyed before it's ready to be destroyed.

    • I wonder if this means they'll slowly start to rid themselves of the "NS" prefix that's everywhere inside the code base...

      Probably not, for the reasons stated, just as I don't expect another company [apple.com] to get rid of its "NS" prefix in its code [apple.com] to sever itself from that code's history [wikipedia.org].

    • Especially that current standards [w3.org] are ridden with it :)
      Yeppers, w3c-blessed DOM standard has most functions duplicated with
      "NS" version, like createAttribute and createAttributeNS.
    • Whatdayamean it's hard to do?!

      Edit > Replace > Find what: NS_, Replace with: Moz_ > Enter

      ;)

  • Funny... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mark0 ( 750639 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @08:14PM (#14590683)
    I realized that a piece of paper I was scribbling some notes on today had been torn out of a give-away notebook from the Netscape Internet Developer's Conference which took place almost exactly 10 years ago.

    At the time, their HTLM editor had no spell checker and I was trying integrate a third-party solution for a customer. I tried to talk to some of their developer relations folk to get some help. They refused to give up the clipboard format and I didn't have the chops at the time to reverse engineer it. At that time, I told them I believed that MSFT would eventually eat their lunch, seeing as how they treated their developers pretty well.

    Whether or not that was a significant contribution to their current state, the prediction worked out.

    Funny how the give-aways outlast the companies.

  • Netscape's still around (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NorbrookC ( 674063 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @09:26PM (#14590995) Journal

    They are still around? They dont really fit into the "browser wars" at all.

    Actually they do. Even though they're not the browser anymore, they're still involved - If you're using Bugzilla, that's a Netscape product - and it's in Firefox. Netscape is a Mozilla-based product right now, and Mozilla only exists because Netscape opened its source.

    Netscape is a case study in how to fritter away a brand. It wasn't that long ago in real time that Netscape had THE browser and THE portal. Then they tried to release "do everything" browser packages, networking systems, and a whole slew of other things which they really botched. AOL buying them didn't help in the least, since AOL didn't have a clue as to what to do with them. About the only thing they did right was to release their code base, and that was more an act of desperation than anything else. It took a long time for Mozilla to straighten out the mess. Now it's finally looking much better, and FireFox and Thunderbird are what Netscape should have been.

  • More bad naming structure (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday January 29, 2006 @05:40AM (#14592474) Homepage
    Probably too late for this to be read by many now, but sticking a top-level hierarchy as your organisation name is just pure nomenclenture. I agree that many others have done it, but I level this charge at them as well.

    Should be comp.mozilla, not top-level Mozilla. There's also a comp.infosystems.www hierarchy, which would seem a better place.

    Think of the typical Windows Start menu, and what a mess it is because companies keep sticking their name in it rather than the name of the product or anything tied to the product's purpose. Usenet has gone the same way unfortunately.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • just pure nomenclenture.

      Er...just pure bad nomenclature that was supposed to read.

      Cheers,
      Ian

    • Old old news. Not only does that naming convention for organization hierarchy groups predate the Start button, it almost certainly predates Windows too.

      It's done when the organization (companies, universities, etc) needs to be authoritative (or even authoritarian) about the various sub-groups under their hierarchy, and doesn't want to have to go through the Big-8 process for creating a new group every time they suddenly need a mozilla.plug-ins.bustamove or something.

    • Relegating their set of newsgroups under comp.* (one of the Big 8 hierarchies) would render it subject to their newsgroup creation procedures [killfile.org] which involves an eleborate public voting process. That is fine for public newsgroups but not appropriate for a set of groups belonging to and managed by a specific organization.

      Essentially these are simply local newsgroups that the Mozilla organization has chosen to distribute around the net. They could have started web forums but this way you can read their groups

  • The last vestiges won't be removed until they move the "Preferences" form under "Edit" in the file menu in the linux version, to under "Tools" like in the other OS versions. I have never understood this inconsistency between OS versions.
    • And you'd have to rename "Preferences" to "Options", to match Windows, but every OS has its own UI heuristics. Mac OS X and places its (consistently named) "Preferences" item under the application menu.

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