Mozilla

[cellio]

At a coworker's suggestion, I just installed Mozilla on my machine here at work. (Until now my primary browser has been Netscape, though I sometimes use IE too.) I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mozilla found my Netscape preferences, bookmarks, etc and adopted them. I do hope, however, that it is not silently using the same files as

Comments

[geekosaur]

I think Mozilla imports the Netscape disk cache --- but Netscape 4.x corrupts its disk cache on a regular basis, so what got imported may be rather broken.

Also, if you've used Netscape 6.x, it is (not "is descended from") Mozilla and it will use the same configuration files etc. And if you install a recent Mozilla on a machine which formerly had Netscape 6.0 on it it may encounter leftover configuration files from the older install and get rather confused.

[cellio]

Also, if you've used Netscape 6.x, it is (not "is descended from") Mozilla and it will use the same configuration files etc.

Ah, I didn't realize that. I have Netscape 6.2 on the machine, which was probably upgraded from 4.7 a while back, and I just installed Mozilla 1.0. Now that I've used Mozilla, does that mean that Netscape would see incompatable changes if I went back? (So far I've seen no reason to revert to Netscape, but I've only had Mozilla on the machine for a couple hours.)

[geekosaur]

From Mozilla 1.0 to Netscape 6.2 *should* be okay, but I won't make any guarantees. I tend to assume that once you upgrade you need to stay there because the Mozilla folks have tended to break backwards compatibility as they went along....

[johno]

Might be OK.

Netscape 6.2 is based on Mozilla betas of a few months ago.

[steven]

I was glad to see someone write about their experience with Mozilla. I just started using Opera at work, because IE took forever to display certain pages -- search results, for example, like on aa.com. I'm always open to trying other things, and I used to be a Netscape devotee.

[cellio]

I've been a Netscape user for years, going back to my Unix days when it was pretty much the only choice other than Lynx. My first browser was Mosaic, in 1994 (or maybe late 93; I've lost track). In my personal experience, IE was a late-comer that never grabbed me. (And besides, most of the virii out there seem to be designed to exploit Microsoft products. Why expose myself unduly?)

Netscape seems to be somewhat unstable, though; I get random crashes and odd behavior a little too frequently (in both 4.7 and 6.x, so it's not just one bad release). Mozilla seems to be behaving better, at least so far. Unless that changes, I'm not going back.

[steven]

I used Mosaic, too, around that time period!

I went to IE only after it seemed like so many pages were designed for it, and they didn't display correctly in Netscape. Before that, I do recall thinking, "Why would anyone need to bother with IE?"