Netscape 8.0.4 and Site Controls Options

[bwelford]

I never thought I would start such a thread, but I'm really quite impressed by the latest version of the Netscape browser (version 8.0.4) that I downloaded yesterday.

It can basically be set up to show web pages either as they would be seen in Internet Explorer or in Mozilla Firefox. You can switch to the other by clicking on a small icon in the tab. If you want to check how web pages might look in the "other" browser, that's great functionality. It's all part of what is called Site Controls.

I also have the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera, but I don't think that switching functionality is in any of them as far as I know.

Just thought I'd mention it.

[Brandon_Cstone]

wow, I'm VERY impressed to see that. I expected that feature from FF honestly, but I was hoping that it'd come eventually.

Thanks, I'm installing it now

[bearmugs]

Barry

If it could give you previews of the site as viewed on Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows, and different browsers, that would be impressive. Does it include a quick preview for different screen resolutions as well?

John EH!

[bwelford]

John

I haven't found anything among your wish list in Netscape. For different screen resolutions, I use the Web Developer options with Firefox.

[Ron Carnell]

It might be okay for a quick check now and then, but I don't think I'd personally trust it much beyond that. Assuming they didn't steal source code, we're talking about reverse engineering functionality, much in the same way Linux set out to duplicate the features of AT&T's copyrighted Unix operating system.

It does raise an interest question, however.

When reverse engineered software fails to exactly duplicate a function, it's usually considered a bug. If reverse engineered software fails to exactly duplicate a bug . . . what are we going to call that???

[Respree]

Intellectual property copyright infringement. :wink:

[bearmugs]

I think they called it WINDOWS 95 back then.

John EH!

[TheManBehindTheCurtain]

For Windows, there's no need to "reverse engineer" anything. The explore.exe file itself is just 91K. It calls a whole slew of DLLs or COM objects or whatever-the-hey they're called these days. One of them draws the Windows GUI frame. Another adds toolbar functionality. And one that I call the "rendering engine" actually draws the content inside the browser window.

The same component is used in Outlook to display HTML email content. Within the Help system to display content of .chm help files. Third-party developers routinely use it for other projects. Years ago I used it in Director projects to do embedded browsers, and you can now do the same with Flash. So, I don't know what Netscape is doing, but my heavy heavy hunch is that they can't possibly be so weird as to believe they could recode IE with all its bugs and quirks! They're just using the native HTML rendering engine like dozens of other apps, and thus the preview is probably pretty high fidelity with IE. Again, I don't know this firsthand, but I'd suspect Dreamweaver and other programs use it for browser preview.

Tangent: Remember the Microsoft versus Netscape suit, in which Microsoft contended that the browser was part of the operating system and it just couldn't be ripped out? Well, they weren't entirely dissembling. They *could* remove a few other DLLs/COM/whatevers and effectively disable it. But removing the rendering engine, which is the "soul" of the browser, would have been ruinous. In fact, the file system browser and the web browser are the same stub component, explore.exe. The main difference is that, depending on what file path is being read in the address bar, the content pane is being drawn by the HTML rendering engine or by a file-system-tree control.

[Ron Carnell]

They're just using the native HTML rendering engine like dozens of other apps, and thus the preview is probably pretty high fidelity with IE.

In retrospect, Frank, you're absolutely right. I knew that, too, having used the IE engine myself in a few database applications several years ago. Thanks for reminding me.