I don't get it .. wouldn't it be more efficient for netscape to just brand .7/.8 than to maintain a seperate branch?

hmmm, I just think that the mozilla is moslty in bugfix mode anyway, and that keeping the netscape branch is kind of pointless ... a netscape point release based on every mozilla milestone would make more sense ... then again, I'm not a developer, so I'm probably wrong ... :)

netscape should have waited until mozilla 1.0 is ready. They should have spent the time between november and whenever M1.0 comes out to whip up a bunch of hype and expectation about M1.0/N6.

That way N6 would have gotten all kinds of media attention and on release would have wowed everyone.

As they did it, it probably lost many users. A crying shame.

I tried it since I like to have it installed for reference purposes and I have to say it was a totally different experience. The install was very straightforward now they've dropped that god awful proxy downloading weirdness. It correctly found my previous install and removed it and I got Java to work first time.

Much better. The install put of soooo many people its good tosee it sorted.

There is still a HUGE gap between the code of Netscape 6.01 and the latest Mozilla builds. The Jabberzilla client has many problems in Netscape 6 that are not present in Mozilla.

Looks like I need to update my requirements...

NS6 sure disappoints as a .0 release... but, Moz 0.7 is pretty usable, except for the memory footprint. We're conducting more and more tests and our developers have started running their sites through Moz, and will probably begin to submit more extensive bug reports after 0.8 ships next week.

If I'm ever going to switch to a Mozilla based browser it is definately not going to be Netscape. The 6.0 release was premature and I simply don't think I can trust the Netscape company to come up with something stable and well tested anymore. No self respecting software company should ever release that kind of software on ordinary users. I know of at least one user who, unaware of Mozilla's development process, decided to install Netscape 6 and was shocked at how buggy it was. There's simply no excuse.

On the other hand, most nightly builds of Mozilla since late september have been much better than netscape 6.0 (my friend is now running 0.7). The point of wasting energy on maintaining obsolete branches of Mozilla is beyond me. Can't they just put those developers on a more recent branch (e.g. the upcoming 0.8 release)?

I'm now seriously considering migrating to mozilla 1.0, once it is released. Currently I find it suits most of my browsing needs already. However, my IE favorites are still not imported properly (though there seems to be some activity on this issue lately), which is a showstopper as far as I'm concerned. Secondly, the mail app is simply too slow. I want to scroll messages in real time. However, no doubt this will improve over the coming few weeks.

BTW. The roadmap is getting out of sync before its first deadline. 0.8 was due around 8 februari. It is now 12 februari and still no Mozilla 0.8. I understand these are projections rather than hard deadlines but I imagine third party projects are waiting for 0.8.