Netscape: It’s Baaaack! Kind Of

I just downloaded the preview of the new Netscape browser, based on Firefox 0.9.3. Screenshot:

New Netscape browser

God damn, but that thing is ugly. (Click the screenshot to see a larger version with the window widened, so you can get a sense for how much violence they’ve done to Firefox’s interface.)

On the up side, it does have a nice “View like Internet Explorer” option in the context menu that reloads the page using the IE engine so that you can see how it looks in that terrible browser (and inherit all its security flaws — fun!).

On the down side… well, there’s pretty much everything else.

The crashing irony, of course, is that Firefox was born specifically as a repudiation of Netscape’s “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” philosophy (which held back the Mozilla Project for a long time). And now “Netscape” is… Firefox, made ugly. How the wheels of fate turn…


Comments

Christian Blackburn

December 2, 2004
9:22 pm

Don’t be ridiculous netscape’s new browser is breath-taking. I stopped using Netscape at about 4.7 and hadn’t missed it since, but frankly this is a very impressive product that finally features the one thing that seemed obvious to me for years, Mozilla’s need to recognize that some pages load better in IE and some functionality to facilitiate that. There are two problems with the new interface the menu bar is right justified and there isn’t a Toolbar portion to their bookmarking system.
Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

Jason Lefkowitz

December 2, 2004
9:57 pm

Hey, to each their own, I suppose 🙂

Molly Moloney

December 3, 2004
6:30 pm

With an extension, firefox can handle that problem too. Using the extension ieview (http://ieview.mozdev.org/)you can quickly shift to IE from a right-click menu for those times when you really must have IE to get a page to load.