I am currently using Netscape 4.61, and there are many things that annoy me
that I think could be done better, including:

* When I am viewing a document that is expired, the network connection is
off-line and I choose save, Netscape can not save the document.
Also, if I accidentally click a link and then press back the document is lost.
It shouldn't be this way. The document is in the browser's memory damnit!
Most of the documents on the web that people read are dynamically generated and
therefore always expired and never in the cache. That sucks.

* Option for disallowing animation of GIFs images. Rapid movement is very annoying
when trying to read something. Because most animated GIFs are ads, I use a proxy
server right now to filter them out. That shouldn't be necessary.
There should be a button or menu item that says "Stop animations" which really
DOES stop animations and nothing else. Netscape 4.xx ALSO stops loading, which
in most cases is the opposite of what you want.

* "Load images"-button is only available if image loading is turned off in the
preferences. What about interrupted transmissions?

* Image loading is an option available only in the preferences for ALL windows.
Image loading is no longer a low-bandwidth vs. high-bandwidth issue. It is a
well-designed site vs. badly-designed site issue. Therefore, the best would be
to let the option be per window instead, as in Netscape 3.xx.

* Netscape spawns as many simultaneous TCP connections as it can, saturating the
bandwidth both at the client and at the server, slowing itself down to a crawl,
killing responsiveness. What I think it should do instead is to do what a
text-mode browser for Unix called "Links" does: have a user-defined maximum
number of simultaneous connections and queue up the remaining requests.
When the connections are saturated, use a good sheduling algorithm
to divide the bandwidth fairly between web pages.

* A minimum text size, as a user-defined value in screen pixels or points.
When Netscape introduced the FONT tag, most platforms were 72 DPI and the
default sizes made sense. Windows, however, has 96 DPI per default and many
sites designed for Windows use the font tag (or stylesheets) to lower
the font size, making these sites barely readable with default settings on
other platforms.

* A good browser should use multiple processes, and use shared memory for
communication. If done well, it would be great. Netscape 4.xx uses a SINGLE process
for ALL windows and ALL connections, being totally unresponsive in DNS lookups
and closing down all windows when it crashes (which it frequently does, and which
Mozilla/Gecko does even more frequently).

* Let's a browser be a browser and keep mail/news/instant messaging outside.
Concentrate on producing a good browser and communicating with other programs,
not doing poorly what they do.

You should also improve on new stupidities in Mozilla:
* File listings don't show up in the history.

Features I would like:
* Save an entire page, including images and embedded objects into a new ZIP file
with a different extension. Double-clicking the file would bring up a new
browser window with the entire web page.

* A single window for all downloads in progress. Each download should have a frame
containing a progress bar, a few labels and a STOP-button.
When a download is complete, its frame should not collapse if the mouse pointer
is hovering above it.

* Oh yes. Something available in Netscape for Unix but not for Windows and MacOS is
that you can open a New Window by clicking the middle button.

did you ever see opera?
i mean, i dont want to put thm out of business (or encourage it), but the browser they make is better than ns and ie combined. we should try to make a product comaprable to that instead of stupid bloatware.

--
etoffi

Things that tick me off about Mozilla:

1) The way it handles FTP sites. The old Netscape stile was to make an html page out of an FTP site, with the site message on top, and the files represented as links. I vastly prefer this to the new Mozilla method, which looks like an FTP client, but isn't, and takes up a lot of memory/cpu cycles in the process.

2) The "back" button in general doesn't work. Try using Mozilla's back button in a page with frames: instead of going to the last page within a frame, it goes to the last page before frames, or the first page with frames. I especially dislike that fact that the "back" button doesn't work right in FTP mode. The back button apparently takes you to the last page before entering FTP, instead of the FTP directory you were in before. It also seems to do this with directories on the local hard drive.

3) I'm writing this in notepad and copying it into Mozilla, because of the crummy way Mozilla code handles text windows. Whole sections of text tends to dissapear without explanation, and typing more than one paragraph slows down the system.

Resizing windows in Netscape would reload the page from the server... I always found this to be a pain on pages with large images embedded.

identity0:

Please report those as bugs in Bugzilla (or add your comments to the existing bugs), particular #2. I think #3 has been fixed since then, but I'm not sure.

Moses