Netscape in the NewsTuesday September 15th, 1998George Giannukos writes in with a link to an article at News.com discussing the latest pre-release of Communicator 4.5. George correctly points out that the reporters fail to mention that many of these new features can be disabled -- a lack of exculpatory evidence which leaves the story decidedly one-sided. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to draw any parallels to current events. Me? I'm keeping my mouth shut! I email the person at cnet asking him why he bashed NN and why he didn't say that you can turn those features off... He said that the article wasn't his. He could only talk to 2 analysts and they are the ones responsible for the bashing of N4.5P2. Personally, i think the person at Cnet could have atlest put in his own words? Oh, well.. I don't like the fact that when you type in "scripting" you don't get scripting.com. If there is no such thing as a www.whatever.com, then netscape should go to the search page but it should first assume you know what you're doing. True Netscape should send people to www.scripting.com if they type scripting but the fact of the matter is the only people that effects are people who type just 'scripting' to goto www.scripting.com Netscape isn't stealing readers? How would netscape stealing readers? What's happening is the people that just typed scripting are now going to have to type the full address. I see this more as a bug than Netscape being greedy, but thats just me... email Netscape and tell them to fix this bug... i have also noticed when i type 'news' in the location bar it takes me nowhare. So i have to type the full address (www.news.com) which becomes a pain... I also emailed the author of the C|Net story on 4.5 PR2. If you're interested, here is his reply: --- Thanks Joel--it's a good point that another reader brought up as well--and one I'll be sure to include in the next go-around. But I would be willing to bet a lot that the vast majority of users (who would never read a News.com article anyway) a) don't know they can turn those features off and b) wouldn't know what to do with that information if they had it. I think it's easy to underestimate how clueless people are in general about the software they use--they are no more likely to change their preferences than they are to give their own car a tune-up. I'm just thinking about people like my mother here, who probably make up the majority of browser users. But your point is well taken, and thanks for writing. Best, pf This is an excellent point. We here not only know how to adjust prefs, we are making new one for 5.0. It is a good thing to remember that most users don't even change their startup page let alone be messing with "Active Desktop Integration Settings" or other prefs. The majority of the users I see still have an AOL IMer message come up every time asking them if they would like to try it and still have the default buttons on the Personal toolbar. This is a key thing to remember. It is still a minority of people who know what they are doing as far as configuring software. While the prefs ARE one of the easiest to configure, I've talked to users who can't even find their prefrences. This must be kept in mind while discussing this. Jason Kersey MozBin - mozilla.asimov.net I've never seen this proposed or implemented anywhere, so here goes: There should be a preferences button on the toolbar. OK, I've said it! I don't care if I burn in Hell for it, either! :) --chris Hmmm. I never thought of that, Chris. But I think it's an excellent idea. Newbies are generally curious and would probably click that button and could change the preferences to their liking. Joel Caris Not a bad idea to have a pref. button...I dont know awhole lot about Mozilla5 but it also looks like you can edit buttons and change their name, so maybe advance users could delete that button, while newsbee will keep it for changing pref.? Cause when you right click on a button it in Mozilla5 it gives you different properties for all the buttons.. Having Navigator go to www.word.com if it exists on typing "word" but otherwise look it up from the directory would be opening a veritable can of worms... All such words are either already taken, or would end up getting taken quickly by enterprising web-advertisers for their site, whether or not their site even had anything to do with the keyword in question. Thus I'm wondering, how much extra trouble would it be - for Netscape and for the users - if the dorectory-page would list links to all registered domain-named of www.word.* or the like at top of the reply? I have created a new site that gathers some of the best news links about Netscape on the internet. http://members.tripod.com/~CowboyBob1998/index.html btw is there any way to turn off pop-out advertisements via Netscape's Browser? GO NSCP! z |
