Netscape 8 based on Mozilla Firefox goes into Beta

Netscape 8 based on Mozilla Firefox goes into Beta

Mozilla Foundation’s efforts with Firefox have started to show its effects. They have seen millions of downloads by the web users ever since the first final version was launched a couple of months back. Now the browser has taken up around 5% of the web browsers market and reports say that for the first time in many years, Microsoft Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop to below 90%.

The results are quite amazing. Microsoft has felt the pressure and have announced the plans to release an updated Internet Explorer which would be released as version 7 for current versions of Microsoft Windows. Opera is almost ready with the final version 8 of their browser, which comes with advanced features to knock off phishing attempts by malicious websites. In all, it all is creating a problem for Microsoft as the users are beginning to look towards alternative browsers.

Latest news in is even more interesting. It can be considered as a possible revival of the demised Netscape Browser as the parent company AOL has opened its doors to the public by releasing the first beta of the Netscape 8 Browser.

They have based the updated browser on the popular Firefox engine and are focusing on security and user privacy. The interesting point is that it supports both the Internet Explorer engine along with Gecko engine for webpage rendering. Therefore, users stuck with banking and other websites, which works only with Internet Explorer, now have an added option for a web browser.

This beta was supposed to be released last month but got delayed, as the company needed more time to finish the beta version. They had released a prototype last year and the company claims that numerous fixes and additions have entered this beta of the Netscape 8.

Netscape developers have even claimed that the earlier prototype and the current beta are two different applications altogether. However, the updates released in the recently launched update to the Firefox browser (version 1.0.1) have not yet been incorporated in this beta release. They plan to incorporate all the security and feature upgrades related to that before the final version is released in the coming months.