Netscape (which is amazingly enough still in business) has released a new version of their browser. Netscape 8.0 is built on the Firefox engine, but can switch to the IE engine for certain sites that use crap markup and won’t work on a real browser.
First of all, the new Netscape is ugly. I mean real ugly. I mean this baby was whacked with the ugly stick until it was black and blue. It’s uglier than I am, and that’s saying a lot. It looks like a browser that suddenly grew a bunch of ugly nodules for buttons. Whoever designed the UI not only violated Windows GUI design principles, but also the rules of good taste.
That being said, at least it’s based off a solid core. The sooner people abandon the crapware that is IE (and the malware, spyware, and viruses that feed off it) the better. Furthermore, once browsers start following standards again, the more cool things web developers can do. Rather than fixing broken box models (models which were agreed upon nearly a decade ago), developers can spend their time advancing the web rather than being forced to work around annoying browser limitations.
Better ugly than evil, I say.
