Netscape is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Netscape Navigator 9.0 Beta 1. The release is now available for download from browser.netscape.com for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Some of Navigator 9's new features are listed below; for a complete list, see What's New in Netscape Navigator 9? at browser.netscape.com; you may want to also check out the Netscape Navigator FAQ for information on running Navigator 9 alongside previous Netscape browsers.

What's New In Navigator 9?

URL Correction

Navigator 9 will automatically correct common typos in URLs. For example, if you accidentally type googlecom, Navigator will fix it be to google.com. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation).

News Menu and Sidebar

The latest news is built right into the browser, under the News menu. Provided by Netscape.com, you can customize this menu to contain only the news sections that you want to monitor.

In-browser voting

Share your opinions with the world! The icons in Navigator's address bar let you share interesting stories you find as well as vote on stories shared by others.

Sidebar mini browser

You've always been able to have bookmarks open in the sidebar, but we've improved this functionality and extended it to all links, not just bookmarks. Additionally, we've added a navigation toolbar to the sidebar for even easier split-screened browsing. Just right-click on a link and select "Open Link in Sidebar" to get started!

Extension Compatibility

Navigator 9 shares its architecture with the latest Mozilla technologies; as such Navigator 9 will allow you to install extensions that are compatible with Firefox 2.

To avoid confusion between the different Netscape products, we have made the decision that the next Netscape-branded browser (previously known only as Netscape 9) will be named Netscape Navigator 9. What's old is new again!

You may ask, "Won't this be confusing as well, since a number of Netscape.com users are known as Navigators?" Yes, that would be confusing. We'll have to do something about that...

Netscape 9 is on its way, but to tide you over until it gets here, we're releasing Netscape 9's theme (called Netstripe) as a separate add-on for Firefox. Here are some previews of the great work done by our designer, Andy Fraley. (You can install the theme by following the instructions at the end of this post.)






Netstripe is compatible with Firefox 2.0 through Firefox 2.0.0.*. To install the theme, you can either download it from Mozilla Addons or just complete the following steps:

1. If you are running Firefox on Windows, install the theme using this link:

Install Netstripe for Firefox 2 on Windows

If you are running Firefox on Mac OSX, use this link.

Install Netstripe for Firefox 2 on Mac

2. Restart Firefox after installing the theme.
3. Open the Addons Manager (Tools > Add-ons).
4. Click on the Themes tab.
5. Select Netstripe and press "Use Theme"
6. Restart Firefox.

On a separate note, we've been alerted that there are files out there masquerading as "leaked" versions of Netscape 9. You can be sure that Netscape 9 has not been leaked, and when it is available, the only legitimate (and safe) place to get it will be browser.netscape.com.

We're pleased to announce the 8.1.3 release of the Netscape Browser (Windows only). New in this version are security updates to the 8.1.x browser line - see the Security Alerts page at browser.netscape.com for more information on the bugs fixed in this release.

Remember to uninstall your current 8.x installation from the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs dialog before installing 8.1.3. Your profile information will remain intact and will be recognized by the new 8.1.3 installation.

Download and install Netscape 8.1.3 today!

In Netscape 9, we've built upon Firefox's option to load a bookmark in the sidebar by extending sidebar browsing to all links. (Right click on any link and choose "Open Link in Sidebar;" you can also drag and drop a link onto the sidebar if it is already open.)

In order to properly support this feature, we've enhanced the sidebar browser by adding a navigation menu, address bar, and link target toggle. The default link target is to have all links clicked in the sidebar launch in the main browser window, which is best suited for a single webpage that has lots of outgoing links (like your My.Netscape page, example shown below). You can also choose to toggle this and just browse in the sidebar as if it was a regular browser window.


My.Netscape in the sidebar; click to view the full image.

The sidebar browser can be opened with a toolbar button, a hot-key combination, or via the View > Sidebar menu.

What is the biggest feature lacked by Web browsers today? Security? No. Advanced privacy settings? Not even close. Full-size 24x24 activity indicators? Absolutely.

For Netscape 9, we've brought back the big throbber from days of old and stuck it right on the end of the toolbar - Bam! (Throbber 9.0 is not content to hide up at the end of the menubar.) So say goodbye to squinting to see if your page is still loading; this bad boy is 576 pixels of in-your-face load-status animation.

Congratulations to Sebastian Moser, who correctly guessed that the new menu in Netscape 9 is "News." The News menu (and sidebar) will display stories from the channels at Netscape.com, where the popular articles are decided by the site's members. You can customize which channels are displayed in the menu, and since voting is built directly into the browser, clicking on any of the news items will bring you directly to the story, not to an intermediate Netscape.com page.

That's it for browser news today, but make sure to tune in next week for the biggest browser news yet.

Side note: Take a minute to check out the new My.Netscape, which has been redesigned and is being relaunched today.

Rather than just posting a new browser feature or an update on Netscape 9's development, I thought I'd switch it up this week and have a little contest.

Netscape 9 will have a new top-level menu (as in File, Edit, etc.) that does not appear in Firefox or any previous version of Netscape. The first person to correctly guess the name of the menu and its function will get their name included in the Netscape 9 credits, which you can view in the browser via the "About Netscape" dialog.



You must post your guess below, and anyone with inside knowledge of the browser (like a current or former Netscape employee) is ineligible. Your name is probably already in the credits, so you'd have nothing to gain anyway.

Let the guessing begin!

Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser's URL bar. The image below shows the state of the address bar for a page that

a) hasn't been submitted to Netscape.com
b) has been submitted and you haven't voted for it
c) has been submitted, and you have already voted for it.


The vote and comment totals are shown in the tooltips for the images as well as in the status bar.

We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept.

Ever tried to visit google.cmo? How about irs.gvo? I'm sure that everyone has, at one time or another, made common mistakes like these when typing addresses in the location bar. What normally happens is that you notice your mistake after waiting for the page to load and it fails. That wait is a waste of your time - your browser spell-checks everything else you type, why not URLs?

Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. For example, if you accidentally type techcrunchcom, Netscape will fix it be to techcrunch.com. If you type slashdot.orgg, Netscape will change it to slashdot.org. mozilla,cmo gets changed to mozilla.com, and so on and so forth - no fuss, no muss. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process.

It has been established that Netscape 9 will be based on Firefox 2.0. One of the greatest things about Firefox is its community of extension developers - if you want a feature that is not built into the browser, chances are that someone has written an extension to add it. We've even released several extensions of our own for people who use Firefox with Netscape.com.

However, chances are that you've run into an extension you'd like to install, only to find that it's not compatible with your browser version. This is because extension authors must test and update their extension every time a new browser version comes out to ensure that it works properly with that version of the browser.

Since Netscape 9 will share an architecture with Firefox 2, it is very likely that most Firefox 2 extensions will work in Netscape 9 without modification. This is why Netscape 9 will allow you to install extensions that list Firefox 2 as a compatible version but do not explicitly list Netscape as well. This feature will give all users of Netscape 9 immediate access to Firefox's wealth of custom extensions without having to wait for each author to update the extension's compatibility file.

After last week's announcement, many of you inquired about the target platforms for Netscape 9. The previous version of Netscape (8.x) was only available for Windows, but the news that I have to bring this week is that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Because there's not much else to say on the topic of operating system compatibility, here is a bonus teaser: Below is a screenshot of an FTP page rendered in two different browsers. Can you guess which one is Netscape 9? :-)

What you are looking at is a draft of the main toolbar of Netscape 9.0, running on Windows XP.

Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, and from this screenshot, you can infer several things: unlike Netscape 8, Netscape 9 will contain more standardized support for newsfeeds (a.k.a. Live Bookmarks); it will also have tight integration with the Netscape.com service, as evidenced by the icons for the two available Netscape.com extensions (Friends' Activity Sidebar and the Sitemail Notifier). Several Netscape.com-based extensions will be built into the browser; only these two have been previously announced.

I'll be posting a new announcement, feature teaser, or progress report right here each Tuesday, so stay tuned.

Earlier this week, I wrote about our decision to stop hosting the DTD for RSS 0.91 after July 1, 2007. Since then, we have received a torrent of feedback from users in both support and opposition to our plan. Based on this feedback, we have decided to host this file indefinitely. We apologize for any headaches our initial announcement might have caused.

Nonetheless, if you're a content producer using RSS 0.91 and you are at all concerned about your feeds being dependent upon an external file, we recommend that you consider upgrading to RSS 2.0, which does not require a DTD. While we're proud of it's history as a Netscape innovation, RSS 0.91 is deprecated, and its use should be avoided when possible.

Over the weekend, the tech community noticed that a file crucial to the operation of certain RSS readers was MIA. This file, the DTD for RSS 0.91, had been hosted at my.netscape.com, and its purpose was essentially to explain the structure of RSS 0.91 documents and to provide definitions for a set of character entities that could be used in such documents.

Theoretically, RSS readers load this file when parsing an RSS 0.91 feed. However, In practice, most readers (including those built into Firefox and Internet Explorer) either just ignore the file or load their own cached copy.

my.netscape.com is undergoing a redesign, and when we announced the redesign about 10 days ago, the DNS entry for my.netscape.com was changed to point to the new server where My Netscape will be living. This had the effect of making anything under the old my.netscape.com unavailable, since the only thing public on the new server is a splash page. So, ipso facto, the DTD was no longer available.

The unavailability of this file had the effect of causing certain feed readers - Microsoft's Live.com RSS gadget, for one - to refuse to display RSS 0.91 feeds. This is what we call in the technical community "not good." So, we've restored the file (along with the DTD for RSS 0.9) for the time being, but this experience has raised a few important questions: should feed readers be relying on the availability of a static document on a third-party Web server (and thus a connection to the Internet)? Is it truly necessary to request this document every time an RSS 0.91 feed is being parsed? (The RSS 0.91 DTD is requested over four million times per day - that's a lot of wasted bandwidth for a file that won't ever change.) In our opinion, the answer to both of these questions is no.

So until July 1, 2007, the DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91 will be available via my.netscape.com. If you are a software developer, use this time to ensure that your RSS software is capable of displaying RSS feeds even if the DTD is unavailable, or have a backup copy cached locally for your parser to use in the absence of the specified DTD. If you are a content provider, either update your feeds to point to another copy of the DTD, or accept the fact that your feed may not be available through feed readers that don't have a backup plan in the case of a missing DTD.