Netscape 10

Discussion of general topics about Seamonkey
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DJGM
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by DJGM »

One thing, that some people don't seem to realise . . . if it wasn't for Netscape's legacy, and what they
did by releasing the Communicator source code back in 1998, there'd have been no Mozilla Project
to effectively lay the Foundation (pun intended) for what eventually became Mozilla Firefox.

Without Firefox around nipping at the toes of Internet Explorer, Microsoft wouldn't have been kicked
into touch, and forced into working and developing on (and to some extent, improving) IE again,
instead of expecting everyone to stick with the stagnating heap of crap that is IE6.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if it wasn't for what Netscape did in 1998, we wouldn't have such a
wide choice of internet browsers to pick from. There'd be no Firefox, no SeaMonkey, no Safari,
no Chrome, and even though they've been around since 1995, there would be no Opera either!

IE would not just have a 90+% majority market share ... it'd be 99.9% ... near blanket coverage!
-----------------------------
SeaMonkey is like a Swiss Army knife: Versatile and dependable, with many useful tools.
Internet Explorer is like really, really, very old Swiss cheese: Full of holes, and it stinks!
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BenoitRen
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by BenoitRen »

DJGM wrote:There'd be no Firefox, no SeaMonkey, no Safari, no Chrome, and even though they've been around since 1995, there would be no Opera either!

I think you're exaggerating, here.
  • Safari exists because KHTML, an open-source project that had nothing to do with Mozilla, was promising, and Apple needed a good native web browser for their operating system that was controlled by them.
  • Whether Google Chrome would have existed is uncertain. Google itself would still have existed, but most of the talent behind Google Chrome are (ex?) Firefox developers.
  • Opera would still have existed. There's no question about that. I don't see what their web browser has to do with Mozilla at all. Sure, they never had a large market share in the desktop market, but their web browser business thrives thanks to the need for web browsers on mobile devices.
rsx11m
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by rsx11m »

BenoitRen wrote:
  • Whether Google Chrome would have existed is uncertain. Google itself would still have existed, but most of the talent behind Google Chrome are (ex?) Firefox developers.

I'm wondering though why Google's Chrome is based on WebKit then, hence having much in common with Safari, and in turn with KHTML/Konqueror as the common source...

Edit: Here we go, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#History. They are actually using Mozilla's NSPR+NSS, and support NPAPI as the Netscape plugin specification. WebKit was supposedly recommended over Gecko by the Android team, it's not clear why from the Wikipedia article.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I fail to see how that matters. Chrome also does resemble Netscape 9 but has more feature parity with IE than Firefox, someone else would have but none of that has anything to do with who is working on it. I think it's really hard to imagine a world without Mozilla/Firefox, but I'm sure Google would have eventually released a web-browser... but what form that would have taken is impossible to imagine.

Without the option of a really good free web browser, I think it's impossible to even imagine what the internet landscape would be like today. By 2002-2003 most of us had gotten really sick of using either IE6 or whatever hokey browser AOL or Compuserve was pushing out, pop-up ads and malware infections were already a major problem... basically the world was ready for a new browser. If Netscape hadn't released the code, there were several other open source browsers available to build off of, but none of them really as mature as Netscape.... it was after all IE's biggest competitor. KHTML/Webkit are the only other Open Source projects of that era that went anywhere, and probably only because Steve Jobs wanted to ensure that Safari would be a totally native product powerful enough to kick IE off of the Mac.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by patrickjdempsey »

rsx11m wrote:Here we go, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#History. They are actually using Mozilla's NSPR+NSS, and support NPAPI as the Netscape plugin specification. WebKit was supposedly recommended over Gecko by the Android team, it's not clear why from the Wikipedia article.


NPAPI was developed originally by Adobe for PDF integration in the browser. Netscape just happened to be the most popular browser at the time, so that's where Adobe started and the Netscape team joined in and the first version to ship with it came out in 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

Netscape technologies like NPAPI, NSPR, NSS, and JS would probably have become industry standards and licensed out to other browser manufacturers without the Netscape codebase going Open... or it's possible that competing formats would have risen, with the Microsoft version becoming the de-facto standard in the competitive vacuum after the fall in Netscape popularity.

One thing is certain in my mind though... if there was no Firefox, the web would be a much slower, much more hectic, much less standards-friendly, much more dangerous than it is today... and without that speed and simplicity and accuracy, would the internet be as popular as it is today? Or would people have just switched en masse to Apple?
Tip of the day: If it has "toolbar" in the name, it's crap.
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JohnB_XP
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by JohnB_XP »

You mean like this? 8-)
http johnbilkey.tk/netscape10/

If Sea Monkey is open-source,I thought I might as well modify it to Netscape 10.
Last edited by LIMPET235 on July 20th, 2016, 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Killed the link.
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LIMPET235
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Re: Netscape 10

Post by LIMPET235 »

Hi,
Why post to such an old thread?
This one died on 20th Jan 2011.

Locking.
[Ancient Amateur Astronomer.]
Win-10-H/64 bit/500G SSD/16 Gig Ram/450Watt PSU/350WattUPS/Firefox-115.0.2/T-bird-115.3.2./SnagIt-v10.0.1/MWP-7.12.125.

(Always choose the "Custom" Install.)
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