Mozilla TidbitsThursday November 11th, 1999A new book, "Netscape Mozilla Soure Code Guide" by William Stanek, is available now at Amazon.com. In the author's words, the book contains "hundreds of useful 'from the source' listings that demonstrate key programming concepts." If you pick it up, we'd love to hear what you have to say about it. Also, some of you may have seen the new Netcenter designs. They don't show up all the time, so you may need to reload Netcenter a number of times to see them. They also bear a striking resemblance to the current Mozilla skin. Each new design has a link to a survey where you can give Netscape your opinions on the design. Thanks to the many readers who submitted these news items... Could someone post images of the new Netcenter designs? I've been reloading like a madman, and I haven't seen one yet. I've seen the new design the two times I've used Netscape 4.7 in Linux, but only once in Windows. And only on home.netscape.com. I thought I was going nuts. Glad to see others have seen it too. ;) Here are some links to the new designs: http://netscape.com/index_a.html http://netscape.com/index_b.html http://netscape.com/index_c.html The author of the Mozilla book has quite an unusual bit tacked onto the end of his resume. He's a gulf war veteran with medals to prove it ... Thanks, SDM. I really like index_c better. Did anyone else notice the mention of "Netscape Instant Messenger"? A hint of things to come? (Most certainly a branded version of AOL IM, but nonetheless interesting.) Netscape AOL Instant Messenger...I'm so used to (and tired of) seeing AOL Netscape. I like index_c too. Maybe there are other designs floating around? Arielb : On the new pages, it says "Netscape Instant Messenger", not "Netscape AOL" or "AOL Netscape". New name, same old product? index_c is my favorite design also, and I got one of the new designs on my first visit! HEHE <:3)~~ ...gets my vote asd well. It's nice to see Netcenter getting a 'touch-up' in preparation for the beta. I'm not sure if I these new Netcenter looks are that good... I think if Netcenter looks all the same as Mozilla does, everybody would automatically think Netscape == Mozilla, which is somehow misleading I wonder if it would be worth having a "mozilla" skin distinct from the one that netscape will be shipping with Communicator. That would be one very obvious distinction which might make people aware of the difference who wouldn't otherwise bother to learn. Stuart. I would go for C. Apart from a few obvious cosmetic fixes, I would move the About Netcenter|Add Site... and the copyright notice back to centered bottom and use an enlarged version of the Netcenter logo from page A. Worst is page B, and on page A I think those sections down the left should each have a rounded header. Other than that, I can't see a problem. I think it would be great if Netcenter could look the same as Netscape 5 (and I personally like that skin, though there should be a dialog box offering a boring Windows skin ala Netscape 4, an IE style skin for people migrating and the new skin selected by default). BUT, I don't think it should be used for Netcenter before at least Beta, if not final release. And that title was terrible, wasn't it? C is the one, with little fixes somewhere and it's great. The colors could be a little different from Mozilla's. Some CSS color changing in the links and voila! I just had a look at the C page in Netscape 4.6 (I had always used Mozilla before) and it looked fine. Seemes it either wasn't tested in Mozilla or they thought it was a bug in Mozilla. Does anybody know how I can contact the developers? Lemming Not bad, not bad at all. Haven't been to Netcenter for ages, because the content is totally irrelevant to me (I prefer www.yahoo.com.au) C is the best by far, but why do they bother to have those International links there that do bugger all? They should roll all the intl sites together, selectable via your Netcenter login. And ADJUST THE MY NETSCAPE CONTENT FOR THE USERS COUNTRY!!!!!!!! It can't be THAT hard ... I don't care as long as they don't do the same as Lycos: lycos presents me with a swedish page each time I go there. Though I'm in Sweden I'm not swedish. I'm running an english OS&browser with dutch (my native language) selected as the prefered language. Yet it insists on addressing me in swedish. I'm too lazy to remember the link to the english lycos, so I try to avoid lycos instead. If only they hadn't got this nice ftp search engine ... The content from Netcenter isn't that great. I say they should just focus on services like email, web hosting, skins for N5 & upgrades, calendar services, ect..and make them good. I'll goto fool.com for stocks and Cnet for computer news. Whether most people realize it or not, appearance will get people's attention or even attract them to something and that's what these redesigns are trying to take advantage of. Plus we're talking about web designers here, their job is to design and layout pages, not provide content. Hopefully the content peopel for Netcenter are working on changes since Netcenter really lacks decent content. Well, as Windows 98 has shown us, if something looks good, it really doesn't have to do anything. People will like it because it looks like it does something. I saw the new Netcenter designs and like everyone else I find C the most appealing. In one comment here somebody said Netscape was preparing for the Mozilla Beta, thus the redesign to the new skin's look. This seems pre-mature. I checked this http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milestones/index.html and it says that Beta isn't scheduled until 2/15/00 with the Alpha being M12. Am I misinterpreting the chart or is a Netscape branded beta coming in December? If it's the later, what's the difference? Mike S. Mike, i'm not sure but you may be referring to my earlier posting listed above. When I wrote that, I think i just assumed from discussions here that either Netscape or Mozilla would have a December or February beta. I could only tell that Netcenter is getting dressed up for some sort of release. I'm still getting confused by all the dates too, but I'll side with you about the alpha broswer release. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for clearing that up. I know alot of the visitors here are taking part in the browser's development so I thought maybe you knew something I didn't or the charts were out of date. I was thinking of waiting for the Beta but since it's been moved so far into the future now I guess I'll try M11 when it hits. The last Milestone I tried ran too slow and crashed too often for me to keep but I like to stay up-to-date with the project. I try new Milestones based on peoples comments. Thanks again. Mike S.
I know it should be out soon and it sounds redundant but when is M11 coming out? <:3)~~ well, the Seamonkey milestone portion of the mozilla.org website mentions M11 being on the wire around 11/5, so I would guess that they're still tying up some loose ends on it now. =) no problem, i am just amongst the end users keeping on top of the development news here. I want to be the last person to ever cause a DISinformation storm around here! =) Adam According to the chat a couple days ago, someone Netscape said that the release on 12/15 will be called an alpha as a Beta implies that its feature complete. So they are still aiming at the 12/15 date but the name has changed. Does anyone know if the Feb 2000 date is the full or Beta? I can't remember. I really don't like the new Netcenter design. Sure, it has some good points. It makes better use of Netscape's blue/green color scheme. It doesn't look as boringly rectangular as the old Netcenter does. And the links to various sections aren't *quite* as full of forwarding-tracking crap as they used to be. But the layout is a complete mess. There's no logical arrangement to the various components (although design C http://netscape.com/index_c.html is slightly better than the others in this regard). The designers are obviously confident of both their bandwidth and our patience -- the new home page consists has 11 graphics, as opposed to the old site http://home.netscape.com/ , which -- like Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/ -- has only three. The designers show arrogance, assuming that everyone has their browser window set to at least 800*600 (it scrolls if you make it smaller), and ignorance, in that they don't seem to know how to use the <UL> tag. And for a company building a browser which prides itself on standards compliance, it's ironic that the suggested design contains no fewer than 87 HTML errors. http://htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnetscape.com%2Findex_c.html But that's not the main reason I don't like the new design of Netcenter. The main reason I don't like it is that it signals that the new Mozilla chrome is going to be the default chrome for Netscape Communicator. And despite its kewlness factor, I just *know* the usability problems with the Mozilla skin are going to cost Communicator -- and therefore Mozilla -- market share. And when that happens, Mozilla will suffer. -- mpt |