It Wasn’t Dead Already?

Just read at Wired that AOL has announced the end of life for Netscape.

Personally, I thought that Netscape had gone away years ago. I certainly knew of it in its heyday though. In fact, I remember when my family paid something like $30 for Netscape Navigator 4.6 Communications Suite.

Remember those days? When we actually paid for web browsers. Oh, there are still some browsers out there that cost money (although OmniWeb is the only one that I can think of, now that Opera has gone free).

Personally, Netscape 3 was my favorite. Back then it was competing against the miserably unstable Internet Explorer 2. And it was free. But then came Communicator Suite, and suddenly Netscape cost money and was loaded with extra features that did little more than slow everything down.

Of course, I cannot say anything about Netscape without mentioning that it formed the basis of the Mozilla Project which, among other things, spawned the Firefox web browser. 

Flocking

I have decided to try out Flock, a variant on Firefox that focuses on blogging and social networking.
Not sure about it yet… While I like the built-in blogging and think that the RSS support is equal to that in Safari (and far better than in Firefox), we’ll have to see if I stick with it.

Three things stand against Flock from the outset:

1. Built on Firefox.
   Now don’t get me wrong: I love Firefox. Back in the Beta and 1.5 days, Firefox was my favorite browser, mainly because it was so fast. Sadly, ever since Firefox2 came out the memory leak “feature” makes the whole browser run so darn slow and bog down the whole system after about 2 hours or when I have about a dozen tabs open.
2. Social Networking.
   Frankly, I don’t do much “social networking.” I do not like myspace at all, only use Facebook to track college friends, and don’t share photos or videos on public sites.
3. Not Safari.
   OK, this is both good and bad. I really like the speed of Safari, and with the Inquisitor
   plugin, it has the best search of all web browsers. That said, I am looking around because Safari and WordPress do not get along well.

I’ll let you know how things go.

EDIT: OK, issue number 1 found… the “tags” link to technorati, not the wordpress tagging system.