[thelist] Netscape 4/5/6 - who's on first or who's down for the count? [was what happened to browserwatch.com?]

Peter-Paul Koch gassinaumasis at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 4 04:21:03 CDT 2002


>Interesting. Now am really confused.

Creating the most confusing version numbers possible is definitely an
important goal of the Mozilla project. So I'm glad to see it has succeeded
<g>.

>So, Netscape 5 is (are) beta versions of Netscape 6? I head last year that
>Netscape 6.0 was the alpha version, Netscape 6.1 was the beta version, and
>Netscape 6.2 was THE release. And TheCounter doesn't actually say whether
>to include your count of 5 as 4 or 6. Could you enlighten me as to the
>validity of my "facts"? Sorta like, who's on first?

Netscape 4's browser string started with 'Mozilla/4.' to indicate it uses
Version 4 of the Mozilla code engine.

The Mozilla Project is responsible for creating Version 5 of this code
engine, hence the browser strings of all Netscape's above 4 starts with
'Mozilla/5.0'. Some browser detects use this version number, so they will
always report any Netscape/Mozilla above 4 as 'Netscape 5'.

Early in the Mozilla project it was assumed that the eventual result would
be the Netscape 5 browser. However, when the project went overdue for many
years, AOL upgraded the version number.

The first official Netscape release thus had a version number of 6, and 6.0,
6.1 and 6.2 followed in succession. They were based on Mozilla pre-releases
that weren't perfect yet. Netscape 6.2 is *not* a final release, there
hasn't yet been any final release. Netscape 6.2 was the first one that could
actually be used as a browser, though there were some problems still.

Recently AOL has once again upgraded the version number to Netscape 7.
Basically this is Netscape 6.3, the next pre-release in an increasingly long
line of pre-releases. The advantage is that the Netscape version number is
now equal to the version number of the AOL skin it will (presumably) be used
with: AOL 7 uses Netscape 7.

Some browser detects look for the official Netscape version number, so they
will report visitors as using Netscape 6 or 7, but never 5.

Mozilla still hasn't produced a stable, working code engine. But it has
decided that, confusingly, this code engine will be named 'Mozilla 1.0' and
not 'Mozilla 5.0' as one would expect. The current version is Mozilla 1.0
Release Candidate 3. Nobody knows what 'Release Candidate' means, except
that it means that Mozilla 1.0 isn't ready yet.

Hope this helps a bit, but yes, the situation is very confusing.

ppk

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