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AOL Turning Netscape Into IE With Netscape Brand?
from the ouch dept
Samuel French writes "A few users have discovered, thanks to an AOL poll and "invitation" to try some experimental software, about AOL's plans to release "a 'new desktop companion application' code-named "Netscape Navigator". The application itself is nothing more than a round-shaped "browser wrapper" that in turn calls IE. Netscape 7.1 users (with AOL continues distributing, and is based off Mozilla 1.4) are furious. Ex-Netscaper Jamie Zawinsky called recent actions by AOL with the Netscape brand name "brand necrophilia". Netscape advocates have organized a petition where a screen shot of the experimental application can be seen. The petition is asking the AOL giant to either give up/license the brand name back to the Mozilla foundation, or do the right thing and continue releasing "branded" Netscape browsers, by simply using as a base the "stable" releases put out by the (ironically, AOL-funded) Mozilla Foundation." Be interesting to hear the full story on this one, but it could be people just jumping to conclusions.
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MS/AOL/TW
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Netscape Brand is owned by AOL!?!
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No Subject Given
Netscape is crap anyway, I'm using 7.1 to type this on Solaris, ooh, the cursor has just disappeared and I've lost input focus to the textarea!
It's a shame they can't just use a stable (1.4) build of Mozilla and call it Netscape 9 or something to please the Marketing scum (oh and can you not remove the good features from Mozilla like you did with NS7?)
I don't think they should call it Netscape Navigator if it's just a wrapper around your default browser, but I'm not fussed that they're not still bundling Netscape.
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Re: No Subject Given
Oops, used the wrong word there...didn't mean illegal, just "wrong". I agree though, I am using Mozilla 1.5 right now, and have been using Mozilla since 0.9, and I cannot see any reason to use anything other than Mozilla. I cannot stand IE, but if AOL wants to trash the Netscape brand, how is this "wrong", despite being stupid, and the traditional "doing what your customers don't want you to do," that some of our large "American" corporations and organizations seem to be following lately.
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