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

Bill Mason evolt at accessibleinter.net
Tue Jun 4 03:23:01 CDT 2002


At 12:29 AM 06/04/2002, Sharon F. Malone wrote:
>So, Netscape 5 is (are) beta versions of Netscape 6?

Netscape 5, if I recall correctly, was another iteration of 4.x coding.  It
was not based on the current Mozilla code so really isn't a 6.x beta.

>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.

Inasmuch as 6.0 was based on very early Mozilla work (pre 0.6), you could
call it alpha-quality.

Netscape 6.1 is based on Mozilla 0.9.2, and Netscape 6.2 is based on
Mozilla 0.9.4.  So in a way, it's still in beta.  The current "preview
release 1" of Netscape 7 is based on Mozilla 1.0 RC2.

>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?

All Netscape 6.x releases have "Mozilla/5.0" at the start of their user
agent string, so can be identified as "Netscape 5" depending how much the
user agent string is examined/parsed.

"Netscape 5" up until recently could be considered a 6.x release, but the
user agent string of Netscape 7 also has "Mozilla/5.0" at the start.  So
unless you parse the user agent string further ("Netscape 6" and "Netscape
7" appear later in the string of the respective browsers), "Netscape 5"
will soon be indistinguishable as to whether it represents Netscape 6.x or 7.x.

Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
evolt at accessibleinter.net
http://www.accessibleinter.net/





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