quote:
Originally posted by Guido
*cough* Netscape IS Mozilla with some AOL apps bundled, nothing more.
On the big picture yes... In detail, no... Netscape's code is Mozilla with some alterations (more stability, some bugfixes).
Netscape only uses Mozilla code if it the code is stable enough. That's why Mozilla/FireFox/Whatever will have a more recent buildnumber then Netscape. But a more recent buildnumber isn't always better. (new bugs etc...) And that is exactly the reason why I use Netscape (7.1) instead of Mozilla/Firefox. (oh, and also, because I used Netscape since version 4 and never -mark my words- never had problems with it on all kind of systems.)
Mozilla is open source, and like Patchou once said, that isn't always a good thing (he can explain it better than me, so find his post about it
); The company Netscape takes the most recent stable Mozilla code, fixes some bugs, add some stability, add some more features, and a new Netscape Browser is born. Sad part is, Netscape is owned by AOL (well not anymore now, so I've read in a recent article), they have to add some AOL things (like AOL IM)...
But these "things" can easly taken out (which I did of course
).
AOL has ditched the Netscape team, so who knows what will happen next. I don't... I'll see, and if nothing good comes up, I'll switch to the Mozilla Suite...
About the startup time of Netscape: Like some people already said in this thread. Every browser starts up roughly at the same speed. Yes even MSIE has that startup time if you consider that MSIE uses many resources from Windows itself, so they are kind of "preloaded". (actually, it's the other way around, Windows needs those resources to work. That's why MSIE is "integrated" into Windows.) Now Netscape (and other Mozilla based browsers) uses the new Gecko-engine. For the startup time this is a real benefit. The first time your start up Netscape the engine is loaded. When you close Netscape, a part of the engine stays "active" for a while. This makes that when you start Netscape a second time, the loading time will be very fast (as fast as MSIE or even faster).
Everybody has his own reasons to use a certain browser. As long as you're happy with it, and you know about other browsers and their pro's, cons and features (very important!).
/ 
