[WEB4LIB] Re: Netscape 6.1 -- Print Preview

[rich at richardwiggins.com]

Thomas,

I think you're being too charitable to AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape-Mozilla and not charitable enough to customers.  If Ford came out with a new Explorer built entirely on a new platform, and decided to eliminate the outside rear view mirrors, automotive writers would lambaste them for the omission.  Potential buyers expect that a new model with the same name will improve overall, lose the Wilderness AT tires, and retain all the basic features everyone is used to.

The heritage of NS 6 is informative, but it's inside baseball.  NS and IE got Print Preview years too late.  IE 5.5 did it better, and it's improved in IE 6.  By contrast, NS 6.x loses the feature.  AOL presented NS 6.x as the next progression in the NS lineage. People using a Web browser on a public terminal often want to print a gem they encounter. Leaving out Print Preview encourages the few remaining NS users to stick with 4.7 or jump ship. AOL should have held off on the NS 6 label.

/rich

On Fri, 17 August 2001, "Thomas Dowling" wrote:

> 
> Bear in mind that Netscape 6 is really an implementation of Mozilla; it
> shares no code with earlier versions of Netscape (that the deity of your
> choice) and it's therefore a little misdirected to talk about features
> being eliminated.  All features in Netscape 6 have been--or still need to
> be--rewritten from scratch.
> 
...
> 
> Thomas Dowling
> OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu

_____________________________________________________

Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on the Internet
rich at richardwiggins.com  http://richardwiggins.com