The long national nightmare is over: the beta of Netscape Navigator 9.0 has finally been released to the public.

Read the official announcement here.

Read a more informal introduction to the browser here.

Download it here.

Read the release notes here.

Discuss it here.

C.K. Sample III describes the last two years of working in various start-up environments inside and outside of AOL. I found this part especially interesting:

Aside: I must take a moment here to implore everyone at AOL: release the new Netscape Browser. I’ve played with early versions of it and it’s great. The best browser out there. You will reap great rewards and good faith from the Internet community if you would simply release the bugger. The people who used to be my team worked hard on that thing and they deserve to see it released. It’s Firefox, but better.

Amen.

For the low, low price of $189,900, you could own this piece of Web software history:

This is the very building where I worked on such projects as Slashdotter, Netscape Navigator 9, OPML Support for Firefox, ScribeFire, the Digg Top Users list, and most recently, Twits Like Me. If you act now, I'll even throw in the very desk that I sit at while I work my programming magic. Deals like this don't come along every day, especially when you consider that I was named as Time Magazine's 2006 Man of the Year!

This introductory pricing won't last long, so you'd better hurry up and make an offer.

AutoAuth is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that automatically submits HTTP authentication dialogs when you've chosen to have the browser save your login information. (If you've already told the browser what your username and password are, and you've told it to remember that username and password, why not just have it automatically submit it instead of asking you each time?)

The extension is pretty simple right now (very simple, actually), but I think it has the potential to become a very useful base for enhancing the HTTP authentication process in the browser. For example, a future feature might add the ability to specify login credentials for wildcard subdomains, so that once you've entered a password for foo.com, you don't have to manually re-enter that password for a.foo.com, b.foo.com, c.foo.com, if they all take the same username/password pair. Just tell AutoAuth the username and password to use for *.foo.com, and let it do the work.

You can install AutoAuth from the AutoAuth homepage. (AutoAuth is compatible with Firefox 1.5 and 2, Netscape Navigator 9, and Flock.)

There are a lot of common programming algorithms that are built into various languages as functions: checking if an array contains a certain item, trimming a string, mapping a function to an array, etc. JavaScript doesn't have a lot of these built-ins, but with prototypical inheritance, it's easy enough to add them.

I'm thinking it might be beneficial to include with the browser a "JavaScript extension" file - that is, one JS file packaged with the browser that contains function definitions for these common tasks. It wouldn't necessarily be visible to scripts in webpages (and it would probably be a bad idea to do so, as it might break current scripts), but it could be utilized by extension developers if they choose to do so, just by adding this to their main XUL overlay file:

<script type="application/x-javascript" src="chrome://browser/content/extend.js"></script>

I know that I've had to write an Array.contains function for just about every extension I've written, so I know this kind of library would come in handy. These are the functions that got me thinking about this:

String.reverse
String.trim (and maybe ltrim and rtrim, but these tend to be used less)
String.md5
String.stripTags (not as keen on this one)
Array.contains
Array.map
Array.random
Array.shuffle
Date.format (a pseudo-port of PHP's date() function)

Any recommendations for other functions that might as well be standard?

Note: As this is being posted on my personal site, this is no guarantee or indication that Netscape Navigator 9 will be supplying this kind of library. If the feedback is positive though, I would definitely bring it up for consideration.