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Nat Gertier has decrypted the URLs Amazon uses to automatically generate its product images. (Amazon uses a piece of software that generates image variations on the fly — size variations, discount bullets, etc.)
His write up is interesting, and it’s obvious that Amazon has spent a lot of money to make what would otherwise be a very painful procedure (creating all the image variations by hand) very simple.
Netscape has released a patch that fixes 44 vulnerabilities in the just-released Netscape 8. And we’re talking just released.
» Read a previous ZDNet story in which Mozilla reps mock the Netscape developers for launching NS8 with known vulnerabilities, for which patches already existed.
Daring Fireball is compiling a fatastic list of new features in Tiger (some of them good, some of them bad).
This is a list to keep up with, if you use Tiger, and he’s even provided an RSS feed.
I, personally, haven’t installed Tiger yet. I’m hoping to buy a new PowerBook sometime soon, but we’ll see.
Installation is the normal Netscape procedure. Download a starter file, which you open, and then it downloads the main app files (35 megs!) while you set your prefs.
There’s an interesting Advanced Setting:
For trusted sites, the Netscape Browser sometimes switches to the Internet Explorere rendering engine to ensure maximum functionality for that site.
Trusted sites? Who says they’re trusted? Why Truste and Verisign do. They maintain a whitelist of sites that Netscape 8 (if you allow it) will open using the IE engine by default, ActiveX controls and all, I presume.
You get to choose whether or not to intstall Desktop Weather by The Weather Channel, and Real Arcade (by Real). (They’re listed in a scroll box, so there’s plenty of rooom for more “partner content”… is this the business model?) I won’t be installing either of them.
Running it for the first time presents you with the typical options to import settings from other detected browsers (I choose not to import anything); it also asks if you want it to be the default browser (no thanks).
The browser opens, and you have three tabs open immediately, all with Netscape-related content. Look in the lower left-hand corner and you can see an IE icon — presumably netscape.com is a trusted site, so it defaults to the IE engine. Clicking the icon allows you to reload the page with the Firefox engine.
The default interface is pretty cluttered with browser controls, search fields, content buttons (“Weather”, “Setup Email”) and a “Security Center,” which has buttons for “Netscape Security Center,” the pop-up blocker, “Autofill,” and “Clear the history of pages visited.”
Looking closer at the toolbar, you see you can scroll through custom sets of buttons and links — Personal, Local and News are predefined. They call them Trays. You know, as a developer, that would be useful. I could set up different multi-bars for different projects (but surely there’s already a Firefox extension for this?).
Anyway, that seems to be the gist of it. AOL simply can’t leave the Netscape brand well enough alone, I guess. It’s now a portal, an ISP and (stll) a browser.
From Yahoo’s First Look: Netscape’s Two-Headed Browser:
Like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, the programmers at Netscape have resurrected a browser that most Internet users had left for dead. At the same time, they have created a two-headed monster of a browser in the new Netscape 8, which lets you choose to view pages as you would either in the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox version 1.0.3 or in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.
Is it remotely possible that this could become popular with the average user? Joe Internet Surfer has a hard time distinguishing between “a browser” and “the internet” anyway, so what interest does s/he have in a browser with multiple engines?
Of course, I’ve just read this article, I don’t know how AOL is/isn’t marketing this…
Checking…
Whoa — they are marketing it hard: Visiting netscape.com in FF/PC or IE/6 PC immediately redirects you to this page: Your Current Browser is Outdated
You can bypass it, and they cookie you so yu don’t see it again, but it’s a pretty hard sell. (Stupidly, they don’t seem to be sniffing for Mac users — I just got the message in Safari even though NS8 isn’t available for OS X.)
Let’s install it and see what happens.
More to come.