Tag Archives: netscape 9

Netscape Blog

Netstripe: Netscape 9’s Theme for Firefox

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Netscape 9 is on its way, but to tide you over until it gets here, we’re releasing Netscape 9’s theme (called Netstripe) as a separate add-on for Firefox. Here are some previews of the great work done by our designer, Andy Fraley. (You can install the theme by following the instructions at the end of this post.)

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Figure 1: Theme preview image

 

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Figure 2: Toolbar and tabs (click for full view)

 

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Figure 3: Add-ons dialog

 

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Figure 4: Bookmarks Manager

Netstripe is compatible with Firefox 2.0 through Firefox 2.0.0.*. To install the theme, you can either download it from Mozilla Addons or just complete the following steps:

1. If you are running Firefox on Windows, install the theme using this link:

Install Netstripe for Firefox 2 on Windows

If you are running Firefox on Mac OSX, use this link.

Install Netstripe for Firefox 2 on Mac

2. Restart Firefox after installing the theme.
3. Open the Addons Manager (Tools > Add-ons).
4. Click on the Themes tab.
5. Select Netstripe and press “Use Theme”
6. Restart Firefox.

On a separate note, we’ve been alerted that there are files out there masquerading as “leaked” versions of Netscape 9. You can be sure that Netscape 9 has not been leaked, and when it is available, the only legitimate (and safe) place to get it will be browser.netscape.com.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9’s Sidebar Browser

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

In Netscape 9, we’ve built upon Firefox’s option to load a bookmark in the sidebar by extending sidebar browsing to all links. (Right click on any link and choose “Open Link in Sidebar;” you can also drag and drop a link onto the sidebar if it is already open.)

In order to properly support this feature, we’ve enhanced the sidebar browser by adding a navigation menu, address bar, and link target toggle. The default link target is to have all links clicked in the sidebar launch in the main browser window, which is best suited for a single webpage that has lots of outgoing links (like your My.Netscape page, example shown below). You can also choose to toggle this and just browse in the sidebar as if it was a regular browser window.

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My.Netscape in the sidebar; click to view the full image.

The sidebar browser can be opened with a toolbar button, a hot-key combination, or via the View > Sidebar menu.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9’s Revolutionary Feature

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

What is the biggest feature lacked by Web browsers today? Security? No. Advanced privacy settings? Not even close. Full-size 24×24 activity indicators? Absolutely.

For Netscape 9, we’ve brought back the big throbber from days of old and stuck it right on the end of the toolbar – Bam! (Throbber 9.0 is not content to hide up at the end of the menubar.) So say goodbye to squinting to see if your page is still loading; this bad boy is 576 pixels of in-your-face load-status animation.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9 Mystery Menu Revealed

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Congratulations to Sebastian Moser, who correctly guessed that the new menu in Netscape 9 is “News.” The News menu (and sidebar) will display stories from the channels at Netscape.com, where the popular articles are decided by the site’s members. You can customize which channels are displayed in the menu, and since voting is built directly into the browser, clicking on any of the news items will bring you directly to the story, not to an intermediate Netscape.com page.

That’s it for browser news today, but make sure to tune in next week for the biggest browser news yet.

Side note: Take a minute to check out the new My.Netscape, which has been redesigned and is being relaunched today.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9: What’s my line?

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Rather than just posting a new browser feature or an update on Netscape 9’s development, I thought I’d switch it up this week and have a little contest.

Netscape 9 will have a new top-level menu (as in File, Edit, etc.) that does not appear in Firefox or any previous version of Netscape. The first person to correctly guess the name of the menu and its function will get their name included in the Netscape 9 credits, which you can view in the browser via the “About Netscape” dialog.

You must post your guess below, and anyone with inside knowledge of the browser (like a current or former Netscape employee) is ineligible. Your name is probably already in the credits, so you’d have nothing to gain anyway.

Let the guessing begin!

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9 and Social News

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser’s URL bar. The image below shows the state of the address bar for a page that

a) hasn’t been submitted to Netscape.com
b) has been submitted and you haven’t voted for it
c) has been submitted, and you have already voted for it.

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The vote and comment totals are shown in the tooltips for the images as well as in the status bar.

We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9 Saves You Time

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Ever tried to visit google.cmo? How about irs.gvo? I’m sure that everyone has, at one time or another, made common mistakes like these when typing addresses in the location bar. What normally happens is that you notice your mistake after waiting for the page to load and it fails. That wait is a waste of your time – your browser spell-checks everything else you type, why not URLs?

Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. For example, if you accidentally type techcrunchcom, Netscape will fix it be to techcrunch.com. If you type slashdot.orgg, Netscape will change it to slashdot.org. mozilla,cmo gets changed to mozilla.com, and so on and so forth – no fuss, no muss. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process.

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Netscape Blog

Extensions and Netscape 9

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

It has been established that Netscape 9 will be based on Firefox 2.0. One of the greatest things about Firefox is its community of extension developers – if you want a feature that is not built into the browser, chances are that someone has written an extension to add it. We’ve even released several extensions of our own for people who use Firefox with Netscape.com.

However, chances are that you’ve run into an extension you’d like to install, only to find that it’s not compatible with your browser version. This is because extension authors must test and update their extension every time a new browser version comes out to ensure that it works properly with that version of the browser.

Since Netscape 9 will share an architecture with Firefox 2, it is very likely that most Firefox 2 extensions will work in Netscape 9 without modification. This is why Netscape 9 will allow you to install extensions that list Firefox 2 as a compatible version but do not explicitly list Netscape as well. This feature will give all users of Netscape 9 immediate access to Firefox’s wealth of custom extensions without having to wait for each author to update the extension’s compatibility file.

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