[schwei]

It took a short time to download (DSL);

But the install process took ridiculously long, the number of files is ludicrously large, and . . .

The app seemed to freeze when it first launched (no progress bar during startup), and the prferences panel never loaded (I forced-quit before anything happened). That on top of the bizarrely-UN-Mac (or even OS X)-like interface:

To paraphrase Al Gore: "What planet is Netscape on??"

It basically sucks. What a sad piece of programming.

[wlonh]

indeed, and i could not agree more... hell, i have tried to download netscape's recent version(s) including the 4.75 (i think that's the version) and it the download will NOT complete... there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with my Macs, and try as i might the damn thing will not download... it is a joke!

and for the rest of today, unless someone flames me, i will be doing my best to steer clear of this mostly ignored Netscape forum...



[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 08-08-2000).]

[rian_hall]

I could not disagree more. I am an advid Mac Fan, but I am also forced to use Windows NT at work. I downloaded it as soon as I saw the link and my install went fine on both platforms. Infact, I'm using it right now.

As far as the interface, I truly think the "modern" theme is horrible. However, the "classic" is not that bad given it is still a beta product.

Yes it has quirks, but I think Netscape it doing a good job so far. PR2 is what PR1 should have been.

My only big complaint is speed. It's almost twice as fast on my NT box than my Mac. That's VERY annoying, but it should only get better.

Kudos to Netscape. Keep it up.

[wlonh]

well, well... seems some others have some realistic perspective on this matter... from the frontpage of MacInTouch, TODAY:

"Roger Moffat notes that Netscape 6.00 PR2 preview release is available for downloading:

"You download a small installer which then downloads all the rest of the components. What a 'monstrosity'. The download proceeded quickly over DSL, but the installation took a very very long time. When it was all done there were over 3,300 files installed to make up the full install. The first launch also took a loooooong time while it registered all the .shlb files that are part of those 3300+ files. The second launch was much faster, but still nowhere near as fast as IE 5.0."

also from MacInTouch, same page, today... a slam of Communicator:

"Dan Brumleve reports on a Java security hole he nicknamed Brown Orifice:

"I've discovered a pair of new capabilities in Java, one residing in the Java core and the other in Netscape's Java distribution. The first (exploited in BOServerSocket and BOSocket) allows Java to open a server which can be accessed by arbitrary clients. The second (BOURLConnection and BOURLInputStream) allows Java to access arbitrary URLs, including local files.

"As a demonstration, I've written Brown Orifice HTTPD for Netscape Communicator. BOHTTPD is a browser-resident web server and file-sharing tool that demonstrates these two problems in Netscape Communicator. BOHTTPD will serve files from a directory of your choice, and will also act as an HTTP/FTP proxy server."


sez me, wlonh: " the disgrace continues apace!"




[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 08-08-2000).]

You do NOT need to be a programmer to work on Mozilla. The team is desperately short on Mac testers and bug reporters (and developers too). You can help to improve Mozilla for the Mac (and by extension, Netscape 6) by going to http://mozilla.org and perusing the bug lists, or by downloading a milestone build and testing it out, or helping with documentation, or any one of several tasks that need assigning. Also, bear in mind that there is a port called Fizzilla whose networking code will run natively under Mac OS X.

Please don't give up on Mozilla just because of a preview release. There is still a huge amount of work that needs to be done before its release, and if everybody who downloaded it filled out just one bug report, or even voted for their favorite bug, it would make the lives of the developers that much easier. This is your chance to shape YOUR browser! We need your help!

Why Mozilla is a Good Thing (tm)

We are all kidding ourselves if we think Mozilla or Netscape 6 will become the dominant browser on desktop computers any time in the near or not so near future.

But once Mozilla, and the truth about what it really is gets out of the lab, you will likely have a copy on your computer doing something. And you may not even know it.

While trying to make the mozilla browser portable, they ended up creating a small, lightweight, portable engine that allows programers to do a very powerful thing � write REAL applications using internet standards like XML, DOM, and JavaScript.

People will tell you that the XUL standard is all about "Themes" and changing your browser to match your taste. It can certainly do that... but XUL is about defining the interface AND functionality. Take a look at this HTML editor, totally designed and implemented within the Mozilla: http://www.alphanumerica.com/project...script_editor/

Now is it really difficult to imagine that someone will use this to make a small, Mac-like browser?

the BrownOrifice exploit does not work on Macs, only PCs and Unix. See www.slashdot.org for an article and discussion of the topic (search recent news). Also, NS 6 does not share any code from older versions, so this bug (and the MDEF) are irrelevant to NS6

so, you gave up on it because it crashed twice? Hmmmmm, maybe you'd rather be using IE 5? It still has problems with Java applets or Outlook Express being open in the background, plus it steals processor cycles from other programs. No thanks.

BTW, did you send the crash results via TalkBack/FullCircle to Netscape before deciding not to use it, so other people might not suffer the same fate?

[markhers]

It's a preview release, you know...you would all leave for Windows if you had to rely on Apple's internal development builds of the Mac OS.

The biggest reason NN6PR2 on the Mac is so slow is because of the number of files it takes to create the UI.

The UI is made up of three things: XUL files, CSS files, and Javascript files. Each piece of the UI, including the widgets for both themes (Netscape 6 Modern and Netscape Classic) requires additional files. Multiply that by the number of applications in the suite (for both skins) and suddenly you've got 3000+ files.

One solution is to package the UI files into a .jar archive, so that the Mac OS only has to read in a couple of big .jar archives rather than 3000+ tiny files. This support just landed in the M18 builds of Mozilla, so it's likely that Netscape PR3 will have it as well. Since NN6PR2 is base don M16, it can only use the technologies that were in that fork.

The CSS support is excellent. It has to be, since 100% of the browser is rendered using CSS and GIFs/PNGs with Javascript accessing the DOM for true DHTML interaction. In this sense, you can think of Mozilla/Netscape6 as a browser rendered entirely in DHTML, but with XUL (an XML-based UI language) defining your elements.

I agree that it's got a long ways to go. I'm afraid that Netscape is pushing these pre-betas out the door far too early. Their reputation could possibly suffer, as witnessed in the recent articles about Mozilla and Netscape.

For kicks, I dropped NN6PR2 into a RAM disk on my Mac, and notices about a 30% speed boost. Especially in menu drawing, where you experience a delay because everything is continually being read through the XUL Javascript files. The current Mac OS file system simply isn't robust enough or fast enough to support such a modern application as Mozilla/Netscape 6. Sigh...

More....

If Mozilla and Netscape 6 were written to take advantage of the Mac OS native widgets, UI toolkits, and other highly-optimized OS procedure calls, then it would surely be a very fast browser. The same is true for Windows and Unix. One of the main reasons IE is so fast on Windows is that it's tightly integrated with the OS and can take advantage of these kinds of things.

But with Mozilla, the goal was to create *one* application (which turned into the Mozilla "platform") that could run identically across *all* operating systems. It's entirely true that for Mozilla you have to only write your application code once. This is true (with some minor OS-specific exceptions) for any application you decide to build using the Mozilla technologies as well. It's what Java was tried to do with write-once-run-anywhere before it got sidetracked and Sun kept it more-or-less closed.

The alternative, for Netscape, was to build a browser for *each* OS platform using native toolkits and technologies. This is what they did with the 4.x browsers. What people often forget is that this solution would have required a different development track and probably different development teams for each and every one of those OS platforms. This means that you'd have a Unix track, a Windows track, a Mac OS track, etc. This is horribly expensive and likely would have resulted in Netscape not releasing a 6.x browser at all for Unix or the Mac OS due to return-on-investment figures. They are a for-profit business, after all.

So, there are tradeoffs for each solution. The Gecko HTML rendering engine is small and fast. It would be pretty easy for someone to embed it in a Mac OS-native software framework, and am surprised that no one has done it yet.

[This message has been edited by camworld (edited 08-08-2000).]

Microsoft can byte me!

Go Netscape Go!

I'll wait. Thanx. Phil.

camworld:

You stated that Netscape 6.0 PR2 is based on
Mozilla M16, not M17.

Was this a typo, or, if not, can you quote
chapter & verse on where this is stated?

I have been looking at all the Net sites that
mentioned the PR2 and M17 releases today, and
can not find anything to support your
assertion that it's M16-based. There was one
place (MacFixIt, I think) that claimed it was
M17-based.

I'd be surprised if it was M17-based, given
the simultaneous releases, but again, I'm
simply curious to know, and would like to
have chapter & verse quoted ...

[Adam Bailey]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; N; PPC; en-US; m17) Gecko/20000807 Netscape6/6.0b2

hey wlonh...

you say you cannot download communicator 4.7x???

you must be using ie (duh....how many slams of netscape do i have to read in here to get that picture....). well, it happens to be a very common thing (happens in windoze too) that M$ browsers do not like to let you download netscape products. i've seen it happen so many times.


personally, i've downloaded communicator without a hassle every time there's an update, so if there's nothing wrong with your os, then it's probably your browser....

i'll fight to the last to avoid using ie...too much junk dumped in the system folder, and i will not support a company that wants to rewrite all the standards to their own sub-standards.