Netscape Revamps My NetscapeThursday April 26th, 2001While we normally don't post news on Netscape stuff, this is one that we wanted to talk about. Netscape today turned off customized content on My Netscape. This means that our rdf channel there, as well as our sidebar, no longer work. We have been working on a new sidebar panel for a while, and this will help push it along. As soon as it's ready, we'll let you know. Is it intentionally butt-ugly? yup! All my painfully constructed easy on the eye color schemes are gone. The bookmarks section only shows the first 5. Mozillazine is gone. And it doesn't render right in Moz. Half the buttons don't work in Opera. I hope this doesn't really reflect the thinking inside netscape: change for change's sake or provide half-broken products. Recently they redesigned Netscape WebMail for seemingly no reason, while providing zero new features. I don't think that this is the feeling of the every day worker in Netscape, however if your boss (AOL) comes and tells you to suck eggs then, well if you have a family and so on then you ask how many. steve Simce I still feel some sympathy for them (hey I grew up with their product) I would like to know what they try to reach with that move. This must be coming from AOL. First it was the watered down mail services. No filters, no import of an address book ect. Now this, channels gone, no selfdetrimed backgrounds or even colors ect. Could they really be thinking that this will drive visitors over to AOL? Just a thought. An answer is to move that to Yahoo. As much as I value using skeetersrow@netscape.net I've got all these missing features at skeetersrow@yahoo.com PLUS!!! POP3, yes, you read that right. Now, in my Mozilla mail/news program, I've got my Yahoo mail as a POP3 which means I don't even have to go there and look at all the damm ads to pick up my internet mail. This is something that AOL Netscape didn't let us do in Mozilla over the IMAP like in NS 6X Although I'm not a AOL/Netscape employee, I informally helped a little on My Netscape 1.5, so I don't have any official reasons for why it might have lost some features from the old version. However, I do know that we bent over backwards to get it to look decent for 4.x (an unfortunate but necessary task, and why I am now on a crusade to eradicate 4.x from the face of this planet), and there was a lot of work put into it by the people who worked on it. I have no idea how My Netscape does customized content, so I don't know if they will bring it back, but I would imagine that constructive criticism of the page will be taken very seriously. > However, I do know that we bent over backwards to get it to look decent for 4.x Yeah - and that's why the only browser that shows MyNetscape in a decent way is IE <grin> As soon as NN4.x has page loadad - it starts reloading again! instantly! and over and over again! That's crasy! This is the first time i've encountered this when i open a page with 5 frames (left, right, center, top, bottom) mozilla will only load the top frame and the others will be left blank. i made a test page http://195.38.200.201/something.html as I have no clue how Bugzilla works i was hoping someone would file a bug for me.. (pauses for a moment to avoid any punches thrown at him) oh, and i personally like the new page, i never use it.. but it looks slightly better, with exception of the large, in-your-face banner. heh, this is becoming a habbit.. needless to say, it loads fine in netscape 4.x. Konqueror on the other hand does seem to have trouble with it, it arranges the frames next to eachother, from left to right.Opera does the same as Mozilla, it only displays the top frame. I ran your code through the html validator and it freaked out. Try making it standards compliant and see if the code works. Not being a webdeveloper I honestly have no clue whats standard comliant and what is not. I'll write the webmaster to ask if they could change it to something standard comliant browsers wont choke on, if.. i knew what needed to be changed.. can you point that out to me? hmm, doesnt Mozilla have a "quirks mode" for this? Mozilla has a quirks mode... but this thing is really bad. I mean really bad. I cleaned it up and the whole thing displayed correctly... When you go to this page with Internet Explorer, the windows can be repositioned by dragging them with the mouse. This does not work with Mozilla or Netscape. Is this a bug or is Netscape giving Interent Explorer users more features? My Netscape sends back different HTML depending on the client. For example, Netscape 4.x uses LAYERs (blecch), whereas they are rendered as table cells in Mozilla/NS6. Mozilla can do this using XBL - Netscape just needs to write the support. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xbl/test5/test.html Gerv No need for XBL - you can write the same repositioning code in DHTML quite easily by using absolute positioning in CSS and changing the left and top properties with JavaScript mouse event handlers. I wrote a cross-browser DHTML library when I wanted to learn DHTML some years ago and the stuff includes drag support for window-look-alikes and it works just fine on IE, Netscape 4 and Mozilla with nothing more than a couple of thin wrapper methods that branch based on the browser. What I read on this forum so far is, "customized features for IE", "Doesn't display properly on Netscape 6.01".... Hmmm. this is it people, I give up waiting for Netscape (yea, the browser geez) itself to wake up from dead. I selected page as my homepage and IE showed Netscape logo on page... They worked on that crap, but didn't make same features (I talk about window positioning etc.) on Netscape 4.x or 6.x, I am really sad for the work of Mozillazine and other content providers wasted too much. Netscape's browser bit and Netscape.com are now seperate subsiduries of AOL Time Warner (I believe the browser bit is with AOL's technology division), so I guess they've got no reason to make My Netscape work 'best' on Netscape browsers. But, you're right, it does seem stupid. In fact, it is stupid. Alex In Opera 5 if I ID as Opera. Apparantly I have to use IE or NS. It's a shame to see a company that did a great deal to popularise the web forget what it's about in the first place. Look at the source of their index page. It's laughable: http://homepages.tig.com.au/~mcgarry/crappage.txt You're taking time to download the source and put up on your own page for people to look and laugh at? I'd say THAT'S laughable. And besides, I think the new My Netscape is quite nice. The source is obviously a mix of massive inline CSS, which is no doubt included from another file at compile time, JavaScript and HTML, which is all generated by something, probably JSP judging from some of the tags that are visible because of comments on the fly. Laughing at other people's code & work is what's laughable. I'm pretty sure you couldn't put together a DHTML drag-drop-snap-update-to-web-server web page no matter how hard you tried. Some of the tricks they are using on the new My Netscape page are quite cool if you bother to look at it more closely. It must be doing some good, I just visited 'My Netscape' and the frames are now working. Perhaps such posts are having an effect. Critical is one thing. "Look at that! It's laughable.", which is implying that the people who put a lot of effort into making the service are idiots, is quite another. Going through the trouble to save the source code, put it on your own site and post here, telling people to go and look at it because it's laughable is taking things too far. No where did I read that these people were not knowledgeable. I believe what was the meaning is that they (the people) who wrote these online programs have played a \'joke\' on joe user and are using their skills to disenchant those whom have used this \'free\' service (do you go back to the days that NS was not a free browser?). That is what is laughable in the since of who do they think they are kidding and of course they already know that we (Mozilla users) are so small in numbers that to them it is not important if we can have Mozilla or Mozillazine channels. This was already shown when Netcenter Apps left \'My Sidebar\', Instant Messenger (Buddies) did not work in Mozilla and and and. Wake up and smell the coffee. If you don\'t install AOL then you don\'t count anymore at Netscape and that is laughable to tears. steve The service is intended to work with all browsers and failure to do so are just bugs and will most likely be worked out shortly. It already runs perfectly fine with Internet Explorer and Netscape 4, which covers about 98% of all web users. Mozilla is not finished yet and is therefore not a very high priority. Netscape 6.0 on the other hand is and I'm sure that if there are any issues with it, they will be worked out. The downloading of the source happened automatically. I viewed it because I had to back out of the silly badbrowser page so I could fake my way in and doing so left simply \"OSCRIPT>\" in my window. I have no problem publically ridiculing a site that discriminates against me because of the browser I use. They clearly don\'t get it. Their DHTML tricks may be cool, but what\'s the point if you can\'t get the basics right? And as for me doing a similar thing, I doubt it\'s outside my abilities (with a reference or two at my side and nothing better to do). it took years to find and collected channels i needed and now they're all gone. I have to go look for them again! :( I send them 20 e-mail so far. Same for me. They're really trying very hard to lose all their users. When I look at My Netscape now there hardly is any interesting content on it, so what's the point? I find the situation pretty comical. Usually, people on MozillaZine are praising Mozilla and I'm awe-struck by it because I think it's *CURRENTLY* totally unusable because of the millions of bugs and quirks in it. My Netscape was really strange for me. I couldn't understand how many of the bugs there would persist for such a long time. There were simple things like button images that were stretched by WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in IMG tags to dimension that were other than the actual image was. This was very obvious in some cases.. I complained about it several times MONTHS ago and no change. In the end, I was so disgusted by the whole thing that I just stopped using it. It felt like the whole site was dead. So.. now they updated it and I'm jumping in joy because it looks good, and works well. It doesn't have all the channels it used to have, but I'm sure they are working on it. So I come here and what do I see? Everyone is complaining that it sucks, looks bad etc. How is it possible that my oppinions and those of the average MozillaZine user (is there such a thing?) can differ so radically? "It doesn't have all the channels it used to have, but I'm sure they are working on it. " Um, no. They are not "working on it". This is not a bug. This is a discontinuation of the only feature that made my.netscape actually my netscape and now it is their.netscape. I actually used that page to get work done I used to get mozillazine updates, slashdot updates, a useful list of bookmarks (more than 5), a channel that had my webmail notification (and not 3 other services I _don't_ use). These are not bugs macpeep. These are marketing decisions in action. I'm not going to complain too much about the browser support because that's not the issue (although it would have been politically more savvy to have incorporated featurity parity for other browsers into the design and implimentation). The issue here is that the one thing that made my.netscape different (and in my opinion, better) than my.yahoo or msn or any of those others was the custom channels. Those are gone from my.netscape and so am I. --Asa I wrote in and asked for the URL to the RDF file (I have no interest in using MyNetscape) and never heard back. I wrote in and asked for the URL to the RDF file (I have no interest in using MyNetscape) and never heard back. How can you expect people to care about the MyNetscape channel when you won't even tell them how to get the data themselves?!?! http://www.mozillazine.org/contents.rdf. Found it on another RSS/RDF portal site. This must be coming from AOL. First it was the watered down mail services. No filters, no import of an address book ect. Now this, channels gone, no self-deterimed backgrounds or even colors ect. Could they really be thinking that this will drive visitors over to AOL? Just a thought. An answer is to move that to Yahoo. As much as I value using skeetersrow@netscape.net I've got all these missing features at skeetersrow@yahoo.com PLUS!!! POP3, yes, you read that right. Now, in my Mozilla mail/news program, I've got my Yahoo mail as a POP3 which means I don't even have to go there and look at all the damm ads to pick up my internet mail. This is something that AOL Netscape didn't let us do in Mozilla over the IMAP like in NS 6X. This can only be their logic and I really feel sorry for the Netscape employ who has to go to work everyday and see what is next on the list to destroy. steve Ugh, I have my timezone on my.netscape set to US/Canada Eastern (I'm in Toronto) yet it's giving me the local news in San Fransisco. Aparently It's Fag Friday there and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade & Festival is on. Okaaaaay! spent the morning setting up a new my yahoo page. ...already sent netscape mail to that effect. heh. i dunno what they were thinking. their custom channels, layout, and color options *were* the best out there. now they've become one of the worst. looks like aol may be in the process of transforming their online brand into a "wesayso corp" leviathan across all their new holdings (note: subtle changes to cnn site with the netscape toolbar etc). just another one of my highly OT posts, I agree with the person who mentioned something about a general discussion forum, anyhow.... I\'m curious, why does mozilla sometimes wait to display a page when it already has downloaded it instead of building it piece by piece? It seems that the only time it does render before the page is d/l-ed is when it\'s missing some images, which will be loaded after Gecko laysout the page. Does this have something to do with tables? Also, IE tends to render pages \'column\' by \'column\'. does anyone know why this is? I personally like it.. and wouldnt mind seeing it in Mozilla instead of the pauses. mm, what else.. oh, opera has something very nice that would be nice to see in Mozilla, when you press the \"back\" button the page appears instantaneously, could this be done in Mozilla or is this purely a tweaking thing? Sorry for being extreemly vague, but i\'m no developer so i cant supply any good explainations... I noticed some odd behavior using konqueror today, when i moved the mouse to the top of the page it would start to scroll, and accelerate the higher the cursor went.. wouldnt this be a good idea, ofcourse.. not quite like that but something like the middle button, or right button when dragging? i know the middle button can be used in IE for such things.. but i'd prefer using the right mouse button because a) not everyone has a wheelmouse (no clue why not though...) and b) most middle buttons are the scrollwheel of the mouse, which is annoying to press. this would be a good alternative for the people who dont have a wheelmouse or those who are uncomfortable using it allot (like myself) anyway, just another random thought Many of these are already logged as bugs. There's a choice between loading and showing the page before all the images are in and having it bounce around when they load or having it solid when it does load. Sometimes web developers can improve this by making sure images have width and height attributes in the HTML so Mozilla doesn't have to get the size from downloading the image. There have been tweaks to Mozilla's performance lately. See bug 77002 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77002 and the ones referenced in it. I'm not sure what you mean by column by column. The IE back buton performance comparison is bug 33269 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33269 . > I'm not sure what you mean by column by column. hard to explain. instead of the page appearing all of a sudden in its whole like with mozilla, or drawing the page with the tables and all and then waiting for the images, IE seems to 'print' the pages. what i meant with column by column was that it 'prints' a portion of the page (say, from the top down 4 cm's) and another, and another. erm, i doubt i made it much clearer. maybe its just some oddity i've come across with one or two pages. I never use IE except for a few very rare exceptions, so maybe my minds playing tricks on me. If I have the opportunity and it still int clear I'll see if i can make a screenshot. Do you mean row by row? He surely means row by row. I get the same feeling. With large websites, you can see this better with Opera. While Mozilla loads the whole page at once before displaying it (or at least most of it), opera already shows the first line, like headers, etc. That's not very usefull, cause you can read the page with mozilla and opera at the same time (if it's almost done), but opera feels just way faster, because you click something and get almost immidiatly a feedback. oops, sorry i dont speak english as my native language. yup, i meant row.. it would be nice to see this in mozilla. it seems as if the part of the page is buffered until it can display a row, then once the rest of the page is in it displays another.. and so on.. the way mozilla now handles pages i dont really like, that is.. when it waits for the entire page. konqueror has its own way of doing this also. it renders the moment it has something causing tables and such to be shifted and resized as the images and text are d/l-ed. still, the IE way seems best because the way konqueror does things cost more cpu cycles making the browser unresponsive while its resizing/shifting the tables. can this be filed as a bug? While there's no Web-based forum available, you can use netscape.public.mozilla.general on news.mozilla.org Mozilla.org might want to create a web based archive of the newsgroups/(mailing lists). currently the web based newsgroup archive (ie. google.com http://groups.google.com/ ) of the mozilla groups are not complete. Has anyone tried creating sidebars for my.userland.com channels? Spent 5 minutes and couldn't figure out how to change one's my.netscape password. Not good. Also, it's rather ironic that the DHTML only works in IE, considering My Netscape was originally a showpiece for document.layers. shameless link: http://www.newsisfree.com/ Drop MyNetscape, come to NewsIsFree! Features 1400+ channels, easy layout, all feeds can be displayed in the mozilla sidebar, and exported to others website in many formats. Be cool to get it on my iPaq. It is dead easy to set up and its free. Just a thought. I'd happily do it all for you guys if you wanted to. I suspect the Mozillazine RDF file could be used as well... Since this seems to be the currently most active news thread right now, I'll post this here to get people all jumpy and everything: Bug 75865 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75865 to get PSM to work through proxy has been fixed in both the 0.9 branch and the 0.9.1 main trunk. This should make some people happy. The first builds with these should come later today (Sunday) or tomorrow. ..the bug concerning moving the cursor over GUI button and it shifting a pixel or two, has been fixed :) does anyone know if this will make 0.9? 'cause it gives a far more polished appearance.. well, more 'correct' :) What's the bug number on it? The bug report will specify what milestone it is target for, and normally the person who checked the fix in will mention in the report if it was checked into the branch (0.9) or the trunk (0.9.1) or both. Alex ..just noticed it in the nightly builds, i still have no idea how to use bugzilla, heh BugZilla is easy since you do not have to worry about or fill out 98% of the forms. They do make BugZilla looks scarey but you don't have to worry about most of them. By default, Bugzilla searches for bugs that have not been fixed. Since this bug has been recently fixed, so unselect all the items in "Status" (this means that Bugzilla won't search for open bugs) then select FIXED in Resolution (Bugzilla will search for bugs that have been marked fixed). Scroll all the way down, and enter the keywords you want to search for in "Summary." Then click on "Submit Query" and that's it! The other forms are completely optional, and if you familiarize yourself with them you can do much more specific and complicated searches. This is a good question for my site NewZilla http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/ , since Bugzilla only looks intimidating and that might be scaring people off. Alex ..i've been using mozilla since i heard about netscape 'releasing' a browser that could fit on a floppy. Yet i just filed my first bug today (which ironically was a duplicate of another..). I've never done so in the past simply because the bugzilla page isnt very beginners friendly, contains too many links to possibly helpful references and seems very complicated because of all the fields that can be filled in. I'm sure if there was an easy guide to filing bugs (not hidden somewhere on bugzilla.mozilla.org amoungst all the other docs..) more people would bother doing so. Bugzilla is an excellent tool but, since it is needed for tracking every bug's aspect, it's a bit complicated for newcomers. Here are at least a few things to worry about when filing a bug. 1. Resist temptation to contribute anything "premature" to Mozilla project. Your bug report must be something useful to the developers / q&a people. Personally, sometimes I failed in that. 2. Read carefully what Gerv suggests in "Report A Bug" page and use his Helper step-by-step procedure instead of the more advanced direct bug entry form. 3. Try to locate the exact component and also search for already existing bugs, to avoid duplicates. Duplicates are not deadly mistakes (they are useful bug popularity indicators, see "mostfreq" keyword) but it's better to avoid them. 4. Follow Alex Bishop's advice and make a list of the most important (to you) bugs. Most chances are your ready-to-file- bugs are already in Bugzilla, and possibly on a better form. That will make you be more specific and clear in your reports (personally, I am still in the learning stage). Besides, when you "play" with Bugzilla's Query Form, you will realize how straghtforward and easy to use it is. 5. Read some well written reports and constructive comments. 6. Definitely avoid saying "Mozilla is TOTALLY UNUSABLE" because that's not true (hey, I'm kidding, you never stated that, your aren't a macpeep). "Follow Alex Bishop's advice and make a list of the most important (to you) bugs." That's a great suggestion, but as far as I can recall, it wasn't mine. I seem to remember reading that advice, but I don't remember writing it! Perhaps you are getting me confused with the NewZilla Alex or someone else? Alex (not the NewZilla guy) ..loved how the .sigs changed to compliment eachother. Are you sure you meant "compliment" (praise) and not "complement" (completes a pair)? Alex (with compliments) yeah yeah, rub it in will you ;) -Brendon, the guy from holland who can't spell and has no knowledge of grammar. but tries to speak english anyhow.. "Brendon, the guy from holland who can't spell and has no knowledge of grammar. but tries to speak english anyhow.." In that case, I'll forgive you. :-) Your English is certainly better than my Dutch. And I'll admit that I did have to look up "complement" and "compliment" in the dictionary just to check which way round their meanings were! Alex <<insert complementary signature here>> lol, maybe I should just stick to my nickname, gerbil Alex, or gerbil, the NewZilla guy http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/ Why is your nickname gerbil? Alex (neither a rodent nor maintainer of NewZilla) Well it's a story: It was the summer of '98 and trying to be the typical teen that I wasn't, I decided to shave my head for the experience of it. Anyway, after a few months my hair was a uniform fuzz, and while at a friends' house, my best friend remarked that I looked like a gerbil. Other than the jokes about Richard Gere, it's the most benign nickname I've ever been bestowed, so I kept it :) Alex, the gerbil/NewZilla guy http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/ Now that there is no deformation when moving the cursor over a bookmark/bookmark folder on the personal toolbar the classic skin seems a little too.. solid? anyhow, i think it might be a good idea to have the name of the bookmark/bookmark folder to be underlined (like it was done in previous versions?) so that it feels more like part of the interface. it kind of looks like they are trying to differentiate the behavior from a button like home, as the bookmarks is more of a menu. if that is the case then they should probably make it gets poped out button look like the File and Edit menu get on mouseover... Just letting people know that the builds in the latest directory have the new autocomplete and modern skins in them. ..on linux (don't know about the other platforms) theres a prob with the URLbar. typing in an url and pressing [enter] does nothing, didnt bother turning on the "Go" button to see if that worked so.... 'part from that little but annoying bug (and the various skin related ones) everythings fine in mozillaLand. Yea, same thing happened with the Win98 build. The problem, for some reason, didn't seem to affect the Windows NT build. I believe I'll stick with the previous build for the time being, until they make autocomplete work more in accordance with the suggestions all of us put forth a week or so ago. I just can't stand all that extra junk it generates. |