[thelist] Netscape 7.0 Prerelease 1

[Liorean]

At 09:36 2002-05-22 -0700, James Aylard wrote:
>Jonathan,
> > Interesting. Does anyone know where the NS7PR1 branch comes off the
>Mozilla
> > code tree?
>     It's an RC2 variant:
>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020512/7.0b1
>     The Mozilla 1.0 RC2 release had a date of 20020510, so presumably
>Netscape 7 PR1 is from a nightly build shortly thereafter.

It's forked from the RC2 trunk... which means it separated from the main
development at the same time RC2 did, but from that it's had a few days of
independent development.

>     In my guesstimation, the reason for the new version number is tied to
>AOL's version number, and would seem to be further evidence that Netscape
>will eventually be integrated into AOL software. But Netscape has shown a
>penchant to play loose with version numbers in the past, so it may just be
>marketing.

Netscape realised the 6.x version was ruined long before this version, and
planned to go with 7.0 for their version based on Mozilla 1.0 before they
released 6.1. They still had to make updates to show that they were making
progress though, and to keep the few users they had. The final 7.0 version
will be based on whatever Moz version is deemed stable and user friendly
enough, likely 1.0 or 1.01.

Their mistake was to release a beta version as a full version in the first
place, and not fixing the design and usability at that. The general public
that Netscape wants to reach is those that wants a browser they can use,
not those that want the most standards compliant browser with the most
complex settings for the most amount of user configurability. Those would
only go with Mozilla instead anyway.

The problem really lies in that people see the major version number - 6 -
and conclude that it's a bad browser, since the 6.0 version was, instead of
realising that the minor version, what ever it might be, is what really
differentiates the bad browser from the good browser. Thus, 6.0 and all
minor version will take on the "badwill" that 6.0 got, and 7.0 will get
more goodwill simply since they tell the public "Look here, it's a new and
improved version, that we want you to try out and use!".
And, in fact, I think the browser deserves a major version change.
Differences between 6.0 and 7.0 are far bigger than those between 2.0 and
3.0 or even 3.0 and 4.0.



As for the browser itself, what I'm disappointed about is that Netscape
when releasing 6.01 promised that the 7.0 version would bundle with
JavaScript 2.0, Netscape's version of the upcoming ECMA-262 4ed. No such
thing seems to be within reach of this version. In fact, version 1.5 of
JavaScript is not yet frozen. The getters and setters syntax for instance
have been changed since the 1.5 core reference and guide were released, and
the shorthand syntax for some literals such as /regexp/(string) for
/regexp/.exec(string) has been removed. Not to speak of the lack of a
client guide and reference.

// Liorean