influenced by Firefox

http://browser.netscape.com/nsb/download/default.jsp

why at this point do you think that Netscape would do that? It is really arrogant to think that 25million people will just jump from firefox/mozilla to a new netscape which I assume you'd eventually have to pay for... Really, from a coding perspective Netscape is Mozilla in a different skin. Apparently Microsoft has a new IE in the works with a summer release in mind that curiously has tabbed browsing, an rss feed, and a bevy of other Mozilla/FireFox components...

I had heard they were stopping at v.7.2 ... ? Hmm.

The beta is only for Winboxes. Hmm.

Of course it's influenced by Firefox! :) They share the Gecko engine along with Mozilla.

Please do not assume that regular folks will pay for the new browser. For personal use, Netscape has always been free ... always. I know this because I was involved with the original beta testing, back in the day, and have had one installation or another of Netscape running on all of my systems since. The only people who have ever paid for Netscape are groups that wanted to brand it and people who didn't want to tax their dialup so they bought the boxed version. Other than that, it's always been free. More than that, the source code has been free for about the past 5 years ... see next paragraph:

Did you know that you can build your own browser based on the OpenSource Gecko engine? Get the source here. (http://www.mozilla.org/source.html) Mozilla also has a brief tutorial on embedding the Gecko engine within another app of your design. Find the tutorial here. (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/embedoverview/EmbeddingBasics.html)

It's fun and will occupy many thousands of hours of otherwise wasted time. ;)