On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 09:25:58PM -0600, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> >for my dad. Alsa is installed and working fine, as is Mozilla, but there
> >are a lot of data types that aren't getting played by Plugger-4.0.
> >Fredrik's page says to check problems with Netscape first before
> >reporting a bug, so I started looking at trying out Navigator, but what
> >I find is that emerge has version 4.79-r1, while the Netscape download
> >page has version 7.1.
> >
> > Why are these revisions so different? Is it significantly more than a
> >numbering change?
>
> Netscape 7.1 is nothing more than a repackaged Mozilla 1.2.
The whole story is a bit complicated, really. A quick summary, from
my (possibly faulty) memory:
Netscape 4.79 is the last of the Netscape 4 series. Somewhere around
4.5 the people writing Netscape decided that A) the browser was simply
getting too complicated to be able to debug properly, and B) maybe they
could tap into this 'open source' phenomenon. This started the Mozilla
project, which, unfortunately, took a _LOT_ longer than expected, as they
kept rewriting parts of it as they went along.
There never was a Netscape 5.x.
Netscape 6 was a response to the complaints about nothing new coming
out of Netscape, and so they took a pre-1.0 Mozilla, rebranded it, and
added in all the commercial elements such as AIM (at least on Windows).
It unfortunately had several serious problems. The numbering jump was
mostly so as to appear 'ahead' of Internet Explorer, which was at 5.5 or so.
Netscape 7 and 7.1 are also re-branded versions of Mozilla, but based
on the 1.2 series, and are thus significantly more complete and stable
than Netscape 6.
Anyhow, if you want a recent Netscape, 'emerge mozilla' instead. If you
emerge both, you can still use either fairly easily, since they'll have
different names. And while Mozilla is a lot more standards-compliant
(the CSS handling in Netscape 4.7x is notoriously bad) there are still sites
out there that expect the older Netscape.
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Bryan Feir VA3GBF|"Many a man in love with a dimple has made the
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| -- Stephen Leacock
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