Monday, March 21, 2011

What's left of sidebars for Netscape

Ed Mullen has a great page on Netscape and Mozilla tips and even a page that includes installable links to sidebars that can still be added to SeaMonkey 1.1.xx, a successor to Netscape 7/8 and Mozilla Application Suite.

Unfortunately, some of the sidebars are now outdated, half-work, redirect, cannot be found anymore or are completely offline.

Below is a selection of sidebars I found to be interesting to check them out.

Sidebars that still work:

  • The Google sidebar works! Yay!
  • The Real.com Guide sidebar only offers search for audio, video, and radio stations (no actual Guide to speak of).

...That are outdated:

The CNN Expanded Sidebar is still live, but stopped having updates since two years ago on March 2, 2009: The Dow Jones index dropped below 7000 on that day, because AIG had a record loss, tech gadgets had become a luxury, and "Twilight" stars were huge.

The links to news sites don't work, because they use a redirect via info.netscape.com (which now redirects to netscape.aol.com ).

In terms of context, the "Last updated" text in the sidebar is inaccurate, because it's most likely a script. That sidebar page is now a virtual time capsule of World news.

Netscape Sidebars

...that redirect:

  • Netscape WebCenter Travel (webcenter.travel.netscape.com) — Ah, well, this at least redirects to travel.aol.com, but that's it. At least it's topical.
  • Netscape Celebrities (celebrities.netscape.com) — redirects within the sidebar to netscape.aol.com.
  • Netscape TV Listings (tv.netscape.com) — redirects in-sidebar to netscape.aol.com.

...that don't work anymore:

(in descending order of importance)
  • Netscape Time Zone Converter (cgi.netscape.com) — "Not found" — Ed Mullen's screenshot of it is now a historical artifact;
  • Netscape Netbusiness — because netbusiness.netscape.com is completely offline (no 404 page, even);
  • Netscape Netbusiness Industry Headlines (netbusiness.netscape.com) — domain is offline;
  • Netscape Netbusiness Search (netbusiness.netscape.com) — offline;
  • Netscape DevEdge (developer.netscape.com): "This tab is not available right now." — Taken offline since about 11.10.2004 and then moved to devedge-temp.mozilla.org/index_en.html
     
  • Netscape Home Improvement (homeimprovement.netscape.com) — "Not Found";
  • Netscape Home Improvement House and Home (homeimprovement.netscape.com) — "Not Found";
  • Netscape Lifestyles Pet tools (lifestyles.netscape.com) — "Not Found".
     
  • American Greetings (lifestyles.netscape.com) — "Not Found"
• The OS/2 sidebar does not work either, because os2.org cannot be reached.

Speaking of which — OS/2 has officially outlived Windows 9x, because according to screenshots, Mozilla Firefox 3.5.4 works in it. OS/2 can also run OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 and OS/2 now lives on as eComStation, where Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 (beta) can also be run.

eComStation is capable of running OpenOffice.org 3.2, VLC Media Player 1.1.4, and CUPS, a free software printer framework (modern printer support).

While Windows 9x only supports Mozilla Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice.org 2.4, and has ageing support for printers (I admit as much that some printers useless with CUPS are supported in Windows 9x)...