Steven T. Hatton wrote:
On Monday 24 September 2001 12:15, Nick Zentena wrote:
On September 24, 2001 12:05 pm, Paul Abrahams wrote:
I'm considering Kmail and Mozilla as alternatives, and also considering reverting to Netscape 4.77, which has its own problems.
I use Kmail and Netscape 6.1. Provides the best combination IMHO. I haven't even looked at netscape email.
- Does Kmail provide the ability to view HTML and to activate links contained in email messages? Is it easy, or even possible, to convert Netscape mail archives to Kmail?
Don't know about the netscape archives but the rest is YES. It will launch konqueror on links and you can view HTML if you want.
- Does Mozilla have the ability to handle Web sites for commercial transactions (banks, etc.)?
IMHO with some sites it works with some it doesn't. I'm not sure why.
Nick
This cannot be stressed enough. Netscape/Mozilla (the code name NN has always had) is the poster-child for the victims of *the* monopoly. I was working closely with Netscape in the days when IE was dumped on the marked in an effort to destroy Netscape Communications corp. Netscape has its roots in OSS from way back when. I haven't been able to do the comparison, but it looks to me as though Netscape/Mozilla is really XEmacs on steroids.
You really muddy the waters by confusing Netscape, the company consumed by AOL, with the Mozilla project, which is still largely financed by AOL (i.e. many Netscape employees are still paid to hack the project). The Mozilla project has been, and will definitely continue to be open source (they even recently relicensed Mozilla under the GPL). Netscape, the company (and product) were never open source until they spawned the Mozilla project. Netscape the company was seeded by VCs who wanted to cash in on this "new thing" known as the Internet. Their business model all along was closed commercial software. Starting the Mozilla project wasn't really a charitable gesture to the Internet community (it was a last-gasp effort for the reasons below). What Netscape (the company) was hoping for was to leverage open-source developers in the spirit of _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, to quickly create a high-quality next generation product to succeed Netscape 4.x. By this time, IE5 was already near release, and Netscape 5 code was just a mess that was nowhere near an actual product. You are right that this model ultimately failed because Microsoft, the monopoly, essentially tied its browser into its OS. By giving MSIE away for "free," it cut out one leg of Netscape's business. Note that there's nothing "free" about IE in reality since consumers incur a cost whenever they pay for a Microsoft OS license. Nearly equally importantly, IIS was "given away" to companies who bought expensive NT Server licenses. This largely shut Netscape out of the lucrative web server business as well (the other leg). Out of desperation, Netscape even retargeted its netscape.com web site as a "portal." I don't know definitively whether this was a sucessful move, but it's known today the 3 dominant portals are Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Mozilla has nothing to do with XEmacs.
It is continuing to mature and improve. I've been pushing for improvements in the core performance, and it is getting much tighter. Unfortunately sometimes they give me what I asked for and I then regret it because it changes the way I'm approaching things.
The reason why there are problems with many bank sites is because they build to IE/NN4 and don't care about w3c conformance. Well monied major corporations really should put some resources back into projects such as Mozilla and Linux. You know, the kind of idea that goes, by helping the whole of society and not counting every bean, we will reap intangible rewards. In other words, I need a job, and I want to hack Mozilla.
Netscape Navigator is Open Sourcs Software. Netscape Navigator is GPLd. Please (everybody) read the sig tag. It's OK to b!tch when things don't go right, but if a person doesn't report a bug once in a while, or make some other kind of contribution, that person is a leech if he or she uses OSS.
Please call it Mozilla, so it's clear to all people what you're referring to. The Netscape browser is a commercialized release of the Mozilla project. Whether Netscape under AOL/Time-Warner is commercially viable does not interest me much (although they do pay hackers to shepherd the Mozilla project). However, the success of the Mozilla project is highly important to me. I've used it very frequently since 0.9.3, and it's worked rather well. I've used a large number of secure sites (HTTPS), including banking. If you want all the benefits of Netscape 6.1, without all the extra commercial baggage, use Mozilla instead. The only substantial loss (IIRC) is that Mozilla lacks a dictionary for spell checking, because the dictionary is a licensed component. Generally speaking, the only sites that don't support Mozilla are the braindead sites that sniff the User-Agent HTTP header, and block out anything but IE or Netscape Navigator. Although I can fake the header using Mozilla, I'd rather not visit any site with such a STUPID policy. To get Java support under Mozilla, you want to download the Blackdown Java2 SDK/JRE (http://java.blackdown.org). Finally, to finish off my somewhat opinionated post, SuSE users will want to get Mozilla here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla The Red Hat 7.0 RPMs from mozilla.org work just as well. :ml