MozillaZine

Problems with Netscape 6?

Wednesday April 5th, 2000

We felt one of the items in the previous article's talkback forum was important enough to mention here. Asa Doltzer writes:

"Mozilla testers should continue to report bugs to Bugzilla. Netscape 6.0 PR1 testers should not report bugs to Bugzilla. Users of Netscape 6 can at any time open the Help menu and choose Feedback Center to fill out a Feedback form. This form will be submitted to Netscape rather than Mozilla. I repeat, please do not submit bugs you discover in the preview release of the Netscape browser to Bugzilla, use Help -> Feedback Center. "

This is something very important to remember, as Netscape 6 bugs could be because of Netscape branding, and thus do not apply to Mozilla, or the bugs may have been already fixed in the current Mozilla nightlies.

#1 Need Clarification

by briank

Thursday April 6th, 2000 8:33 AM

I think there has been little if any mention of this anywhere on Mozilla or Netscape, and a major announcement and posting to the newsgroups is needed. Has the code forked? If so, will it merge again at some point in the future to take advantage of fixes and new features in both versions? These and other questions need clarification.... -Brian

#8 Re: Need Clarification

by kerz

Thursday April 6th, 2000 9:20 AM

There has been no fork. Netscape took a branch of Mozilla, stabilized it, and added in their branding and proprietary features to it. They will do the same for each release, as far as I know.

#2 I Tried That

by fish62858

Thursday April 6th, 2000 8:34 AM

i tried four times to use feedback center, twice in 6 and twice in 4.6 and each time got a server error. makes it hard to report problems. my logitc scroll mouse doesn't scroll, and ms natural keyboard page up/down keys don't work. i find it slow and sluggish.. just thought i'd mention that.

#14 Re: I Tried That

by Terrigena

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:08 AM

I got the server error as well. If they expect us to be reporting bugs so that they can improve the product, they better allow us to report the bugs.

#28 Server errors....

by dhickey

Friday April 7th, 2000 8:49 AM

yeah, i am having real trouple trying to get to the home.netscape.com, www.netcenter.com and www.netscape.com The site is realy slow and I keep getting the error - "Your client is not allowed access" or something like that. And that is in all my browsers.

#3 I Tried That

by fish62858

Thursday April 6th, 2000 8:34 AM

i tried four times to use feedback center, twice in 6 and twice in 4.6 and each time got a server error. makes it hard to report problems. my logitc scroll mouse doesn't scroll, and ms natural keyboard page up/down keys don't work. i find it slow and sluggish.. just thought i'd mention that.

#7 Re: I Tried That

by space

Thursday April 6th, 2000 9:16 AM

I turned off graphical scrollbars and my scroll mouse worked

#23 Cheap hack!

by Dan6992

Thursday April 6th, 2000 1:39 PM

That's just a cheap hack that uses the Windows native scrollbars rather then Mozilla's internal ones. It may be good for now, but eventualy that debug menu will be gone and you'll have to deal with the gfx scrollbars. According to the bugzilla report they have checked in some ne code that may help this problem, but we'll have to wait for M15 to see.

#4 What if the program won't start up?

by hkrause

Thursday April 6th, 2000 8:36 AM

That's assuming one *can* open the Help menu in N6 and choose feedback center.

Big assumption.

#5 I have a bugzilla link

by NathanK

Thursday April 6th, 2000 8:42 AM

The top of my window has a bugzilla link in the Netscape version. Is this because I already had Mozilla installed.

Why can't you just move the Netscape bugs over automatically? you know the submitting user agent to that should be enough to do it.

#21 Re: I have a bugzilla link

by gerbilpower

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:56 AM

Yes, if you have previously installed Mozilla it will do this, I noticed it on mine.

<:3)~~

#6 Netscape, Mozilla and Open Source

by feel

Thursday April 6th, 2000 9:11 AM

I guest that the distinction between the too identity are not enough made, it should be more said that Mozilla is a different project then Netscape. I think that we have here a little mystake. Netscape is using the Mozilla browser like any other company can(could) do it, even if the most of the developper are working for Netscape it should be clear, now I'm sure that they are more developper working on Netscape then on Mozilla (who are paid by Netscape). And don't put the same UI in both of them, it's to much easy for people to put them together, to link them.

Just my 2 cents.

#35 Re: Netscape, Mozilla and Open Source

by michaj

Sunday April 9th, 2000 1:24 PM

I think you`re right - for me it was not (and even is not) really clear what the difference between Netscape and Mozilla is. I thought, that Netscape _is_ Mozilla. So maybe someone at Mozilla.org could write something about that ?

#9 the skin

by ywwg

Thursday April 6th, 2000 10:00 AM

not to be offtopic, but I had always thought that the gray area in the skin was going to be filled in with something. It looks like the "undrawn" shade of gray that shows up a lot. Now it seems like it is actually supposed to be part of the skin, even though it is blank and ugly. The rest of the skin is fine, but is this space going to be filled or at least beveled in some way?

#10 Re: the skin

by gerbilpower

Thursday April 6th, 2000 10:21 AM

It's an intended effect, you'll see things like that in magazines and other design media. The problem is, at least in my opinion, that the colors for the skin were poorly selected which makes that grey area with the buttons overlapping into it stand out in a less than pleasing manner.

#11 Skin

by basic

Thursday April 6th, 2000 10:39 AM

I'm glad that not too much effort was put into the netscape skin, as XUL is going through widget/XBL overhaul. Hope we will see "REAL" skinability by Netscape Beta 2 (Mozilla beta?)

(Posting this with NS6 Beta.)

#12 Installation

by smahood

Thursday April 6th, 2000 10:40 AM

I was installing Netscape 6 on a Windows 95 system, the browser was installed, but when it went to install Net2Phone the installation program gave me a -255 error, anybody know what this is or how to finish the installation?

#13 Re: Installation

by doron

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:00 AM

simple - choose not to install netphone by choosing custom install (if you are on win32 and mac)

#15 theme switcher?

by drfickle

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:09 AM

I noticed the Netscape6PR1 along with the latest Mozilla build both have the theme switcher taken out....I thought the code was already integrated. Is this going to be back any time soon?

#17 Re: theme switcher?

by gerbilpower

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:35 AM

From my knowledge, there was never any real theme switcher code in Mozilla, and that was just a mock up in the preferences for show.

As someone posted earlier, XUL is going through a major overhaul, so skinnability (including skin management) won't be here until that's done.

Although I love Alphanumerica's latest skin, Sullivan: http://www.alphanumerica.com/projects/mozilla/skins/sullivan/

#24 Re: theme switcher?

by drfickle

Thursday April 6th, 2000 1:39 PM

I must be drunk then. I could have sworn that it was posted somewhere on this site that someone integrated the code. I can see why they took it out of NS6 since it wasn't fully functional, but I'm surprised that the mozilla builds yanked it. Oh well, guess it doesn't matter as long as it ends up in the long run.

Sullivan makes me happy :)

#18 Re: theme switcher?

by basic

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:39 AM

Some of the theme switching code is in, but not all of it. The UI for is not for example...

#16 NS6 vs. Mozilla

by Pyro

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:30 AM

I believe that it was a bonehead idea for Netscape to branch B1 from the Mozilla tree instead of keeping the code base. Now they will probably diverge and the NS version will just become a buggy, regressive, and out of date compared to Mozilla. The same bugs will have to be fixed twice due to this code branching. Look at the website bar - in Mozilla its a nice variable width font, while in NS6 it is still this old Courier. Since Netscape developers are the backbone of Mozilla, they should redirect Mozilla efforts more towards (but not completely) to what Netscape needs. Not the Net2Phone crap and stuff like that, but the core Netscape stuff (like the website bar).

#19 Re: NS6 vs. Mozilla

by basic

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:48 AM

I don't know where you got that idea from, but there has been lots of efforts to get Moz's code base meet some of the goals where Moz and NS6 have in common. NS6 beta1 is just like another milestone build except with AOL/NS fluf. When NS releases beta2, it would have to get another branch from Moz. It would be real dumb to use NS6b1 as a code base for NS6 as many of the features that is still to come is in the Moz code base.

I might get worried about NS6b2 though. That's when the supposed feature freeze is suppost to happen.

#20 Re: websitebar

by basic

Thursday April 6th, 2000 11:52 AM

XUL is being overhaul and improved as we post. It would be real dumb for them not to include it in later betas and final release. The reason it is still using the "old" fonts is that it takes time to pakage it (as this is the first beta).

#26 You have to branch

by locka

Friday April 7th, 2000 5:06 AM

There's no way that Netscape can release a beta from what is essentially a moving target - the Mozilla build tree.

They have to branch it at some point, stabilise it, add their features and release. Once the release is over, they can resync somewhere further along the main line and repeat.

The next beta will like branch from M16, the next after that M18 and so on.

#22 ROLF!!!

by gerbilpower

Thursday April 6th, 2000 1:05 PM

I just tried logging into DialPad with NS6 PR1 and I get a message saying "Windows is not supported. Please refer to the FAQ."

Okay, just because I'm using NS6 DialPad ignores an entire platform ... I just think this is funny for some reason.

<:3)~~

#25 LOL!

by jesusX

Thursday April 6th, 2000 10:53 PM

Sounds like Dialpad's web guys need to rewrite their user agent string recognition code! WRONG PART GUYS!

#34 totally Offtopic: dialpad

by damian

Friday April 7th, 2000 11:21 PM

i REALLY wish Dialpad would get their stuff together and completely rewrite their Java applet so that i can use it on linux. i would never pay my phone bill again ...

#27 Re: User agent

by locka

Friday April 7th, 2000 5:11 AM

Probably it doesn't recognize the browser type from it's user-agent string. This is sent in the http request to tell the server what client it is talking to. If you use NS6 through the Junkbuster proxy, you can set it to change the user agent string to something more palatable such as NS4.x.

#29 can't connect

by cheekycj

Friday April 7th, 2000 11:33 AM

I have a automatic proxy config and I can't surf the web... any ideas???

CJ

#30 Re: can't connect

by drfickle

Friday April 7th, 2000 11:43 AM

I couldn't get auto-proxy to work either. I manually set the proxy server and port, and it worked. :(

#31 JAR

by basic

Friday April 7th, 2000 5:35 PM

recently saw on one of the dev newsgroups that jar files will no longer be supported. Is that true? I thought I heard they were going to be. Can anyone confirm this?

#32 Win 2000

by phitaly

Friday April 7th, 2000 9:57 PM

I am currently using Windows 2000 and was able to install correctly. The problems comes when you try to execute it. It comes up with that quick splash screen ... then it quits. Is anyone having the same problem?

#33 Fast Browsing

by juan376

Friday April 7th, 2000 10:02 PM

One thing that is lacking in the linux version that is really needed is the middle click on a link to open the link in a new window. This is a very important feature that everyone I know who uses linux must have. This feature speeds up looking at multiple pages exponentually. Please put it back in...also the highlight and click copy feature that is also a must have is having a couple of problems.

#36 no jpegs in linux

by justbig

Monday April 10th, 2000 3:02 AM

my problem is that jpegs are not displayed in ns6...gifs are displayed... does anyone know what could be the resaon and have a solution to this problem?...thx in advance

#37 Slashdot article

by basic

Monday April 10th, 2000 10:59 AM

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/04/08/1110208

#38 Skins and NS6PR1

by kmansfield

Tuesday April 11th, 2000 7:38 PM

When I try to start NS6 (under Windows 98)with another skin most of the time NS6 freezes and I have to use ctrl/alt/delete to close the program. Only once have has NS6 started succesfully with a different skin. Is this a common problem?

#39 User denied! Developers wanted!

by IndpdntMind

Friday April 14th, 2000 5:16 PM

It seems that the mozilla.org project has so far served the developer community and denied what the common users need in a modern BROWSER. What USER needs something that was supposed to be a browser but is now primarily called an OS by the people who created it? I would have served the USER first and then the DEVELOPER, but mozilla.org did it all backwards. Why?