SillyDog701

[visitor]

Since the code for Netscape Communicator 5 is available would it be possible to incorporate the current Gecko parsing engine code into it making a browse suite with the web standards support of Netscape 7/Mozilla 1.x and the speed of Netscape Communicator 4.x. This would be great since Netscape 7/Mozilla 1.x with all of its XUL/skins/themes/chrome/whatever is really SLOOOOOOOOW and a major HOG.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win98; U)

[DJGM]

As far as I can remember, that was the whole idea originally, when Netscape
released their source code to the open source community. Problem was that
the code was in a shambolic and unworkable mess, so they eventually took
the decision to scrap that old code, and go back to the old drawing board,
to completely rewrite a brand new browser package from the ground up,
therefore effectively cancelling out Netscape 5.0, and leaving all users
of Netscape stuck with the 4.x range of browsers for quite some time.

That as much as I can currently recall on this subject, but there is a better
explanation elsewhere on this website: What Happened To Netscape 5.0?
Bear in mind, that at about the same time, give or take a couple of months
eitherway, the Netscape company and all it's assets, were in the process
of being purchased outright by AOL, which in turn is now part of the giant
multimedia and software conglomerate that is known as AOL Time Warner.

As for any possibility of their ever being a Netscape Communicator 5.0
that features the Netscape Gecko rendering engine, that is extremely
slim to non-existant. Unless of course, some bright spark grabs the
current source code of Mozilla, and either combines it with his own
user interface based on that of Netscape Communicator 4.x, or
the GUI code from Netscape originally released source code.

Other than that, IMO, there will never be a Netscape Communicator 5.0.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0