netsca7.htm: Fravia's web-searching lore (¯`·.¸(¯`·.¸ Reviewing the new Netscape ver 7 ¸.·´¯)¸.·´¯)

~ Reviewing the new Netscape ver 7 ~

Published @ searchlores in December 2002

Reviewing the new Netscape ver 7
by Angela Natiash

Hehe... yep! Do not update your software unless you know what you are doing!

New versions are not only worse but also MORE DANGEROUS than old ones. Software gets CREEPIER with updates, ahi ahi...
This is true for humans, research, books, empires, and browsers... an historical law!
This is true for ANY software! For instance... Go and fetch a good codebar program on the web, dear seekers... the best one will still be the 50488 bytes codebar.zip that you will find on my tools page. I bet you found crap 100 times bigger than that, searching on your own...
Another example? Hexeditors!

In a few years (a very short timespan) noone (but us) will be able to send messages without being intercepted.. and you know how we will do it? Maybe Using old 3,5 floppies... with 32 megabytes on them :-)
Maybe using Iomega PC100s (Uh? "What's that?" ...will the agents of the darkness say), maybe using obsolete palm PDAs and their siftware... hehe! Come to think of it: simply using an older version of Opera will allow you ALREADY NOW to enter databases with quick elegance :-)

Reviewing the new Netscape ver 7

I've been using the basic Navigator ver 4 for several years now, and it has been working beautfully for me. Feeling a bit of masochist several days ago, I decided to try out the new Netscape ver 7. After fighting with it, I wrote this article in hope of warning others to STAY AWAY from this piece o' steaming shit!

The first thing I wanna mention right upfront is how much Netscape is now(sadly) trying to ape Internet Explorer in looks and in various options. I mean come on! What is this, if you can't beat them, join them thing?? The nice icons on the toolbar are gone, replaced with 4 ugly buttons - - for Back, -- for Foward, another for Refresh and an ugly X for Stop. Netscape's History has also changed, emulating IE's Today, Yesterday and so on. Sad, sad sad....

Let's dive into the gory details now.

The d/l proccess

started OK. The damn thing itself was 25 Mbs to d/l, and I ONLY chose the Netscape .exe itself, and I refused all the extras- Real Player, the extra skins, the AIM crap, the Instant Messanger crap and the WinAmp. Of course, when starting, I chose the custom install, not the default one. I ALWAYS choose the custom install anyway when installing any NEW soft, since I DO NOT trust ANY software's default installation. Even bare-boned, the .exe took me a bit over one hour to d/l on my meager 56 K modem, and I had to re-d/l some parts 'cuz the d/l ran a self-diagnostic CRC and found corrupted files.

After d/ling, I had to go inside some Windoze folder(forgot which, sorry) and hunt and save the damn .exe and SetUp files, since Netscape decided to hide all of them, JUST like IE. Do they expect me to d/l all the files every single time I wanna install Netscape now? Are they kidding me????

The installation

began by itself, and I didn't even stand a chance. Remember, I had refused Real Player, since I ALREADY got RP ver 8, yet Netscape went over my head and reinstalled it AGAIN, and ruined the way I had set up my Real Player. Damn them! Worse, it placed a nice(sarcasm) AOL icon right on mah desktop!

Of course, Netscape asked me if I wanted to register as a user. When I politely declined, it informed me it would be really nice if I registered. Nope.

Then to my surprise it placed a short-cut Netscape icon right inside the Quick Launch on the Windoze toolbar! Woo, that was the first right thing it did SO far!

The modifing game...

is where the serious troubles began. Ok, so I was an eager-beaver and I started Netscape, but not to use it, of course. What do you think, I am dumb? I needed to change and turn off ALL the options turned on by default. I run 2 browsers - netscape and IE. I have left IE as it is, but I ALWAYS use Netscape with everything turned off - Java, JavaScript, Cookies, Cascading Style Sheets, even images. This way I'm not bothered by pop ups, cookies, and other Internet nasties.

The new look is sleek - all metal gray in various tones reminicent of Windoze XP useless shading. The interface was still almost the same, except with a bunch of silly useless buttons, which I didn't know how to remove yet. There is a connection icon in the botton right corner, and if you click on that you will be taken offline or go online(I think, since I haven't tried it yet). A Composer logo is in the left botton corner for an easy start up. Netscape's logo is in the far right corner, and if you click on it, it will take you right to netscape's Web site. The URL window is too short for the extra large font Netscape is now using, so often I cannot see the whole address now. I really wish I KNEW how to change that. The preferences were still in Edit-- Preferences, so I clicked there and immediatly went to Smart Browsing which is inside the Navigator option. I REALLY HATE the Smart Browsing option since I read sources claming it's a hidden way that will monitor user's searching habits. I unclicked Enable Internet Keywords. Next I changed the Home Page to my personal .html file listing all my fav links. The Select the buttons you want to see in the toolbars confused me with all the various options, and no matter how much I have tried turning buttons off, they still appear. Right. Work on this later some more. Obviously I changed the Remember visited pages for the last X days to 2. I added a few other languages(Japanese and Russian) into the Language option, then since I didn't quite inderstand the Tabbed Browsing option, I left it alone.

The next order of business was to remove all the stupid default bookmarks Netscape had on the toolbar and put my own. I ran into more trouble here again. The default Search bookmark which goes to Netscape's Web site by default cannot be removed, no matter how much I have been trying for several days now.

Next I threw all the AOL and AIM icons off the desktop right into the Recycle bin. At least that was easy! Then I also removed the profile icon from Start-- Programs. That can be found inside C:\Windoze\Startup\Programs\Netscape\ folder. Then I trashed the whole folder from there, since I don't need it anyway.

Back to more modifing now...

A new Netscape's option in Preferences now called Privacy and Security caught my eye. When I clicked on it, it contained the Cookies, the Images, the Forms, the Passords, the MasterPassword, the SSL, the Certificales, and the Validation. This is the place I go to then, if I want to turn my Cookies and images off!

The next Preference option is the Advanced. You can turn Java off and on there.

New options in ver 7

File now saves web sites the same way IE does - ether 1. Complete(including images), or 2. as simple .html file or 3. as text file. Annoyingly, it changes the name of the saved file to the one found in the TITLE tag.

Edit was left the same, but lots of options were added in Preferences.

Tools has the Cookie Manager. The Cookie Manager got 3 options - Block Cookies from this Site and if you click on that while on a particular site, Netscape will ALWAYS reject the cookies from there. The second option is Unblock cookies from this site , and the third is Manage Stored Cookies. If you click on it, it will give you a list of all the stored Cookies, the site they came from, Hosts, the Path they took and when they expire. Neat, ey? Tools also contains the Password Manager option, and the name is self-explanatory.

The really irritating bugs

I got ad.doubleclick.net looping to 127.0.0.1 in my Hosts file, and now every time I hit a Web site using doubleclick(which is almost all the time, since 99% of Web sites use it), Netscape pops up a very annoying error message telling me it couldn't connect because ad.doubleclick connection was refused and I have to click on OK and close the pop up window.

Even though I run with images turned off, when I open to re-read a saved .html page, Netscape goes out and d/ls ALL the images the site has in it's IMG tags. Annoying to say the least.

I have set my desktop at 800 X 600 pixels, True Color (32 bit). I dunno why, but when I open the Netscape Properties, the applet bleeds and runs beyond the edge of my screen, and I cannot even see the OK and Cancel buttons, so when I make any changes, I'm forced to hit the Enter key on my keyboard.

Conclusions:

A giant step backwards for Netscape. Just slightly better than IE now, since it doesn't bolt into Windose, overall a fairly dissapointing efford. I don't know yet if I will keep it or remove it and go back to Navigator ver 4. I wanted to be cool and u-to-date, but I'm sorry I d/led and installed this crap.