Back in the Netscape 6 days I found lots of geeks were switching to Mozilla. My understanding was that Mozilla is the Netscape suite, but it's the latest bleeding edge version. Every once and a while Netscape scoops it up, slaps Netscape branding in, including several Netscape only features and releases it.
Later Mozilla split in two.. Mozilla and Firefox. My understanding was that Firefox is a slimmer cleaner version of the browser in the Mozilla suite. Why is there still a Mozilla if there is a Firefox now? Are these competing browsers?!
Today I read that Netscape 8 beta will have neat features such as switching rendering engines from Gecko to IE's engine if a page you are viewing isn't being rendered properly. That's neat. They also say it obtains blacklists of scam and spam sites which will be denied access to ActiveX and cookies. It will also have RSS capabilities.
I feel drawn to try Netscape 8. It's based on the same engine that Mozilla and Firefox use, and ultimately Mozilla gets branded as Netscape. What I want to know is WHY use a specific one of these? What makes one better than the other? The one thing I know Firefox has that's cool is tools that let web developers view and change CSS settings of the current page on the fly, etc... but that "plugin" is probably usable in Mozilla and Netscape as well. If you can help answer some of my questions please email me.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
