Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
I must have been bored.
After the discussion of browsers and email clients in another thread just now, I tok it into my head to take another look at Netscape. OK, I know it's based on the Mozilla engine and I already have Moz, but I was curious. After the dreadful 6.0, could they have made it better? Would Netscape's team manage to make it look nicer than Moz (NS 4.x always looked OK), or would it be more like the dreadful old 6.0 - a product that had been hit very hard indeed with the ugly stick.
So, what do you get? A whole lot of commercial AOL-flavoured bullshitto wade through on install, most of which you can skip with a little determination. After that, it's more or less Moz all the way, though my first impression is that it's had a little gloss painted on, and that it's noticably slower than my Mozilla 0.9.9. Just now I installed Moz 1.2A (a closer equivalent to NS7.0, which is based on Moz 1.1, I believe) and my impression is confirmed: Moz is substantially faster loading than NS 7. Indeed, the most recent Mozilla versions must be making the Opera people sit up and worry, because it's getting close to Opera speeds.
Anyway, spent five minutes setting the prefferences the way I like them, and logged onto Storage Review. Right away I noticed a new "Last post by" test field over on the right-hand side - rather ugly, I thought, but it's his website he can do what he likes with it. Oh, and Netscape wanted me to download the Flash crap, of course, but once told to shup up and ignore it it behaved OK. Cruised around for a while, posted a long picture post, then went back to Mozilla for a while. The new SR layout looked just as ugly in Mozilla - not that I was paying a great deal of attention. Flicked over to Storage Forum and noticed that Handruin had done the same thing with his layout ....
Hey... Wait a minute? That seemed like a bit too much of a coincidence. A quick look with Opera confirmed it: neither site had changed anything. A moment's thought and some comparisons between different browsers looking at the same page soon showed that the problem was that Netscape 7.0 was failing to display the small navigation graphics. (Look over on the right of the thread index here at Storage Forum (or at any site that used phpBB). You will notice a small white recangular graphic just after the name of the last poster, and on the far left there is another one showing if the thread has any unread posts yet. These were being rendered as text, and making a right mess of the layout widths in the process. The "last post" field, for example, had two text entries:
Sun Oct 13, 2002 5:10 am
Tea - View last post
Notice the funny font size - that's what it looked like.
OK, I figured, I must have done something silly with the settings, such as switched the images off. Nope. And besides, there were other images in my post that were showing up just fine. Perhaps they had changed the location of the buttons so that they were now being blocked by the image blocker? Nope, I checked that: the properties of the little images (as accessed through IE or Opera) said quite clearly that they were located in a sub-dir of storagereview.net, where the blocked domain was ads.storagereview.net.
In the end, there was only one rational explanation: Netscape 7.0 had buggered itself up, and buggered Mozilla up in the process!
Anyway, I saved my Mozilla bookmarks (why do they have to put them in such a stupid damn location?), uninstalled Moz 0.9.9, and then downloaded and installed Moz 1.2A. My Mozilla works just fine now, and it's fixed up Netscape too. Not that it matters, I guess, I can't imaging that I'll be using it much.
And now for the $64,000 question. I was bored and curious - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. But that aside, why would anyone want to install Netscape these days?
After the discussion of browsers and email clients in another thread just now, I tok it into my head to take another look at Netscape. OK, I know it's based on the Mozilla engine and I already have Moz, but I was curious. After the dreadful 6.0, could they have made it better? Would Netscape's team manage to make it look nicer than Moz (NS 4.x always looked OK), or would it be more like the dreadful old 6.0 - a product that had been hit very hard indeed with the ugly stick.
So, what do you get? A whole lot of commercial AOL-flavoured bullshitto wade through on install, most of which you can skip with a little determination. After that, it's more or less Moz all the way, though my first impression is that it's had a little gloss painted on, and that it's noticably slower than my Mozilla 0.9.9. Just now I installed Moz 1.2A (a closer equivalent to NS7.0, which is based on Moz 1.1, I believe) and my impression is confirmed: Moz is substantially faster loading than NS 7. Indeed, the most recent Mozilla versions must be making the Opera people sit up and worry, because it's getting close to Opera speeds.
Anyway, spent five minutes setting the prefferences the way I like them, and logged onto Storage Review. Right away I noticed a new "Last post by" test field over on the right-hand side - rather ugly, I thought, but it's his website he can do what he likes with it. Oh, and Netscape wanted me to download the Flash crap, of course, but once told to shup up and ignore it it behaved OK. Cruised around for a while, posted a long picture post, then went back to Mozilla for a while. The new SR layout looked just as ugly in Mozilla - not that I was paying a great deal of attention. Flicked over to Storage Forum and noticed that Handruin had done the same thing with his layout ....
Hey... Wait a minute? That seemed like a bit too much of a coincidence. A quick look with Opera confirmed it: neither site had changed anything. A moment's thought and some comparisons between different browsers looking at the same page soon showed that the problem was that Netscape 7.0 was failing to display the small navigation graphics. (Look over on the right of the thread index here at Storage Forum (or at any site that used phpBB). You will notice a small white recangular graphic just after the name of the last poster, and on the far left there is another one showing if the thread has any unread posts yet. These were being rendered as text, and making a right mess of the layout widths in the process. The "last post" field, for example, had two text entries:
Sun Oct 13, 2002 5:10 am
Tea - View last post
Notice the funny font size - that's what it looked like.
OK, I figured, I must have done something silly with the settings, such as switched the images off. Nope. And besides, there were other images in my post that were showing up just fine. Perhaps they had changed the location of the buttons so that they were now being blocked by the image blocker? Nope, I checked that: the properties of the little images (as accessed through IE or Opera) said quite clearly that they were located in a sub-dir of storagereview.net, where the blocked domain was ads.storagereview.net.
In the end, there was only one rational explanation: Netscape 7.0 had buggered itself up, and buggered Mozilla up in the process!
Anyway, I saved my Mozilla bookmarks (why do they have to put them in such a stupid damn location?), uninstalled Moz 0.9.9, and then downloaded and installed Moz 1.2A. My Mozilla works just fine now, and it's fixed up Netscape too. Not that it matters, I guess, I can't imaging that I'll be using it much.
And now for the $64,000 question. I was bored and curious - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. But that aside, why would anyone want to install Netscape these days?
