Tr> Tr>> quirks these days. NN 4.x was such hot garbage to work with.
Tr> PF> I'm running SeaMonkey on the BBS now, feels akin to Netscape Communic
Tr> PF> 4.x bit with a modern rendering engine.
Tr> Yeah, it was the rendering that was the biggest issue... was writing
Tr> web-ui charting and literally had to cover the entire screen when doing
Tr> so, or it would send someone into a seizure with the flickering. IIRC
Tr> NN4.07 was required support for the company I was at around 1999 or so,
Tr> as Novel was a major client and it was their "standard" browser
Tr> internally.

I think the moment when Netscape was rewritten into Java killed the adoption completely. It was NN6 if I recall. Looked fancy from UI/UX perspective as we call it today, but slow as hell and unbearable for daily use comparing to sleek IE integrated with the OS.

That was also one of the reasons for fanboyism and complaints against MSFT that there is no way browser can be so fast unless put into lower levels of the OS, which was unfair. But I believe NN fucked up implementation and choosing Java as front-end was way premature by the end of 90s.

-h1

.... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a copy.

Re: Re: Microsoft
By: hollowone to Tracker1 on Tue Mar 21 2023 03:52 am

>
> I think the moment when Netscape was rewritten into Java killed the adoption
> completely. It was NN6 if I recall. Looked fancy from UI/UX perspective as
> we call it today, but slow as hell and unbearable for daily use comparing to
> sleek IE integrated with the OS.
>

i used netscape and i don't even remember that happening. i looked it up and it said it was using the gecko engine.

i think people ditched nutscrape long before 6 if that really happened.
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Re: Re: Microsoft
By: hollowone to Tracker1 on Tue Mar 21 2023 03:52:00

ho> But I believe NN fucked up implementation and choosing Java as
ho> front-end was way premature by the end of 90s.

To be clear, Java isn't JavaScript. The JS UI was started with NN6 using an XML UI templating language called XUL. Riff on Ghostbusters, "There is no data. There is only XUL!"

XUL itself had a lot of really cool features, and by 2002 most PCs were more than fast enough. There was a standalone Application toolkit called XULRunner and quite few third party apps used it... Mozilla kind of left it to die though, and eventually nuked XUL support and left it to die. It was pretty much Electron a decade and a half before Electron existed.

They also added JS support for E4X (ecmascript for xml), the only other implementation was in ActionScript 3 for Flash/Flex.


--
Michael J. Ryan
+o roughneckbbs.com
tracker1@roughneckbbs.com

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Re: Re: Microsoft
By: MRO to hollowone on Thu Mar 23 2023 00:22:30

>> I think the moment when Netscape was rewritten into Java killed the
>> adoption completely. It was NN6 if I recall. Looked fancy from UI/UX
>> perspective as we call it today, but slow as hell and unbearable for

MR> i used netscape and i don't even remember that happening. i looked it up
MR> and it said it was using the gecko engine.

Gecko is Mozilla's (formerly Netscape) HTML rendering engine... XUL was the templating language used for the UI/Chrome around that (the browser's UI, not the web page). It was also JavaScript, not Java.


--
Michael J. Ryan
+o roughneckbbs.com
tracker1@roughneckbbs.com

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-=> Tracker1 wrote to hollowone <=-

Tr> To be clear, Java isn't JavaScript. The JS UI was started with NN6
Tr> using an XML UI templating language called XUL. Riff on Ghostbusters,
Tr> "There is no data. There is only XUL!"

Tr> XUL itself had a lot of really cool features, and by 2002 most PCs were
Tr> more than fast enough. There was a standalone Application toolkit
Tr> called XULRunner and quite few third party apps used it... Mozilla kind
Tr> of left it to die though, and eventually nuked XUL support and left it
Tr> to die. It was pretty much Electron a decade and a half before
Tr> Electron existed.

Tr> They also added JS support for E4X (ecmascript for xml), the only other
Tr> implementation was in ActionScript 3 for Flash/Flex.

This is bringing up bad memories of HotJava, the java browser for
Solaris.

.... What does this mean?
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