I noticed that Andrew T. posted this before
The Netscape 8.0 Beta officially supports being installed and run on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP.
When attempting to run the installer on an unsupported Windows version such as Windows 95 or NT 4.0, the following dialogue immediately appears:
However, earlier I found that I was actually able to successfully run the first Netscape 8 prototype on Windows 95 OSR2 by installing it on a different system meeting the published requirements, packaging it into a ZIP archive, copying it across, and unzipping the archive:
Since I was naturally curious and still use Windows 95, I decided to do some experimentation and hacking to see if I could "fool" the installer into working. I opened the Registry Editor, and after making a backup of the branch I edited several strings in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion. I changed "ProductName" to "Microsoft Windows 98," "Version" to "Windows 98," and "VersionNumber" to "4.10.2222A." I rebooted, then tried running the Netscape 8 Beta installer.
The result was slightly interesting. The installer no longer prompted me with the "Netscape will not run on Windows 95" dialogue, and the "Please wait while setup is loading..." message actually appeared. After that, however, nothing happened and no further dialogues appeared; the Netscape installer file remained present in memory until I killed it through the Close Program dialogue box.
Perhaps it is actually the installer that requires Windows 98 (and 64MB of RAM, for that matter) to work.
Well, I finally got to try the Netscape 8.0 Beta out. As with the earlier prototype, to run it on Windows 95 I needed to have it installed on a different system, compress it into an archive, and copy it across.
My impressions:
First of all, I do think the new theme is slightly cleaner and easier on the eyes than the old one, although I would have still preferred for the program to use system colors. And the menu bar can now be positioned toward the left edge of the screen, where it belongs. Overall, the software looks much more "polished" than it did when the very first prototype was released to testers in December.
Unfortunately, I still find that the plusses are overwhelmingly outweighed by the minuses. The toolbar and overall user interface are still extremely cluttered and confusing. There are lots of extraneous and/or non-intuitive controls and widgets, such as this bank of mystery buttons in the upper left corner:
In terms of performance, Netscape 8.0 Beta remains a bit more sluggish than Mozilla Firefox in most ways.
I find it annoying that by default new tabs automatically go to Netscape.com when opened. Netscape 8.0 Beta contains a full-featured sidebar like the Mozilla application suite does, but the capability of adding tabs (such as the SillyDog701 Sidebar) is broken.
I find the whole notion of "trusted" versus "untrusted" sites confusing, and it's irritating that a few dozen sites were pre-configured in Preferences to "trusted" status and, thus, be rendered with the Internet Explorer rendering engine.
Needless to say, the IE rendering feature does not work on a system such as mine that does not have Internet Explorer installed.
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Do you still have zip files from prototype, beta, and 8.0.1? Or do you have a web adress that I can go to? If you have the files please send them to me somehow. THANKS IN ADVANCE!!
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050620 Firefox/1.0.5
by Pu7o » Fri 15 Jul, 2005 8:26 am 
