(This is part of an ongoing series that seeks to answer the question: What’s wrong with Netscape 8?)

The first thing I want to do when I start Netscape 8 is close it. So I’m disheartened to discover that even in this latest beta, closing Netscape 8 is still about difficult as cancelling an AOL account. Let’s review how the average Windows user is accustomed to closing her applications, then examine the comically depressing obstacles that Netscape 8 puts in her way:

• Double clicking in the top left corner. In nearly every other Windows application in the world (get used to hearing this expression over the next week), the top left corner of the window is occupied by the application icon. Clicking this icon opens the application system menu offering options like “Maximize” or “Close". Double clicking this icon closes the application. In the case of Netscape, this space is occupied by a larger version of the icon, and not only does double clicking it not close it, but in fact it takes you to Netscape.com. That’s pretty clever. And maybe in the next version of Windows, Microsoft can charge you a nickel every time you hit the start button.
  
• Clicking in the top right corner. Okay, so the top left corner is a non-starter. But the top right corner has an X button, so problem solved—right? Not quite. In other (maximized) Windows applications, the window close button is flush with the corner of the screen because that’s the most usable placement—since it’s against the very edges of the screen, you can just jam your mouse in the corner and click to close the application. In Netscape, the close button is surrounded by margins of dead space, ensuring that closing the application will take at least a second longer each and every time.
  
• Choosing “Close” from the File menu. Most applications offer a “Close” item in their File menus, and Netscape 8 is no exception. But the menu bar in Netscape 8 is located on the right side of the window, as if to spit at all the muscle memory you’ve built up over the past decade. (Yes, I know you can change the position; no, most people won’t.) Given that all of the other applications you continue to use on a daily basis have the menu bar at the left side of the window, you can be reasonably assured that in fact you’ll never actually be comfortable with using Netscape’s menus. But that’s probably a good thing anyways: unlike every other method of closing Netscape 8, using the “Close Window” menu item inexplicably doesn’t warn you about losing all your open tabs. Oops.
  
• Pressing Ctrl+W. This works in almost every other browser, including prior versions of Netscape. But Netscape 8 is “special.” You can use Ctrl+W to close all tabs until you get to the last remaining one, at which point Ctrl+W ceases to do anything and (naturally) you must hit Ctrl+Shift+W to close the window.
  
• Right clicking on the titlebar and choosing “Close". In almost every other Windows application, right clicking on the application titlebar opens the application system menu that offers a “Close” item. In Netscape 8, you get a menu that lets you show and hide toolbars.
  
• Right clicking on the taskbar item and choosing “Close". It’s hard to believe, but Netscape even managed to bungle one of the more obscure ways to close a window. All of the above can be chalked up to mere incompetence, but this one actually required some work to accomplish. To close virtually every other Windows application, you can right click on an application in the Windows taskbar and instinctively choose the last item (the item closest to the taskbar) in the context menu that appears, because it’s the “Close” item. Imagine my surprise when I did this habitually (without reading the menu item) and instead Netscape 8 just took window focus. You see, Netscape 8 has instead decided to offer a list of all the open tabs at the bottom of its application menu.

As far as I can tell, there is exactly one way of closing Netscape 8 in a standard Windows way, and not an end-user in the world knows it, because nobody’s had to use it in ten years: good old Alt+F4.

And sorry, but that won’t cancel your AOL account.

Dean over at the IE team blog asked what I thought of the new Netscape 8.0 beta. My first reaction was that it’s better than the alpha. But that’s like saying that orange Starburst are better than lemon. At the end of the day, everyone hates both of them.

As usual, Walt Mossberg says it best:

“I found its user interface dense and cluttered. The toolbars are packed with annoying boxes containing scrolling text, objects Netscape calls ‘widgets.’ These display automatically updated news headlines and weather forecasts. Adding to the clutter are built-in search boxes for shopping and yellow pages. Some of these things are built into the browser because AOL makes money when you click on them. You can delete these irritating toolbar objects, but that takes effort. It would have been better if Netscape had followed the lead of Firefox, and of Apple Computer’s Safari browser, in presenting a clean, spare look”

It’s sad how many lessons the crufty old Firefox manifesto from 2002 still holds for Netscape, but let’s pull it out again. Firefox rule #6: “The personal toolbar is the personal toolbar, not the whorebar.”

All of Walt’s criticisms are sad echoes of the very complaints reviewers had 4 years ago when Netscape released 6.0, demonstrating Netscape’s stunning reluctance to learn from the mistakes that drove its marketshare to virtually nothing. But you knew that already, so let’s move on to the more interesting stuff. There’s too much wrong in Netscape 8 to cover it all in one post, so I’m going to tackle the various issues in daily posts over the next week.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that Yahoo chose Firefox as one of the 100 most important moments on the Web as part of its retrospective on the last decade. And I’m thrilled that they chose to spotlight it with seven others on the front page.

I’m less thrilled that the Firefox logo is being displayed on my HP laptop, which—I kid you not—has actually worked approximately 80 out of the 400 days I’ve owned it.

The problems began in earnest when the pin inside the power port broke off. Weeks later, HP customer service shipped the laptop back (to the wrong address) with the port fixed. The service was free of charge, except that it cost me the use of my screen, which was now so dim as to be unreadable. Of course, the backlight worked some of the time, so when I brought it in and it happened to work, I was pat-patted on the head, given a lesson in screen brightening, and sent home to bed. I returned on a day that it was broken and off it went again to the great HP customer service in the sky. This final trek cost me the use of the laptop itself, which simply refuses to turn on about 60% of the time. Another 20% of the time, the laptop goes on but the original backlight problem returns. And the final 20%?

That’s when you see it actually on and working in press photos.

You’ve heard how much fun it is to work on Firefox. But as with everything, there are ugly sides. One of these sides has been enjoying some buzz around the web lately, especially on Slashdot.

Every so often, word breaks that another site has bypassed Firefox’s popup blocker. The problem also afflicts Internet Explorer. This is only mildly depressing in terms of the additional headache it causes the talented Gecko engineers. What’s extremely depressing is having to clean up the messes of braindead companies who won’t be in business soon anyways.

Hint: If you are trying to display a popup ad to someone who doesn’t want one, you won’t be around in two years. Because if your complete and total disregard for customers doesn’t do you in, the short-sightedness you’re exhibiting in trying to make a quick buck will surely bite you in the ass in other ways—like being completely blindsided by smarter, more human competitors.

Why is this so hard? Is there some rationale I’m missing in my anger?

The rationalization that browsers include popup blockers by default and therefore not everyone is “opting in” to block popups doesn’t fly: browsers include popup blockers because people want them. Much as it might help you sleep at night, you’re not defeating the Firefox or IE popup blockers—you’re defeating your own customers. I tend not to give my money to people who engage me in a fight, let alone win.

The rationalization that some tiny subset of the population will actually click your ads and generate enough revenue to justify them is certainly true enough— it is, after all, the same one that spammers use. Is that the company you want to keep? When will you realize that over the long run, a healther brand image will help you more than a quick fix? Google figured that out and seems to be doing quite well for themselves. At a time when Yahoo was teaming up to explode a Flash Pizza Hut pizza in the middle of its front page and rain pepperonis all over the place, Google was telling its users that, uh, we’re human too and we hate swatting at popup ads. Google seems to be doing quite well for itself now, and Yahoo is following its lead.

At the end of the day, the deceit doesn’t scale. You can slyly bypass popup blockers (until Microsoft and we plug the holes). You can fool people into clicking the ads by choosing advertisers that design them to look like Windows error messages or impel viewers to shoot the monkey and win a prize. But at the end of the day, users are going to discover that there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. And they will be left staring at your unmasked company in disgust.

If your product had a feature that everyone hated, you’d remove it without pause—because refusing to do so would impact your bottom line. Can you really not see how this is ten times worse for your business?

Netscape couldn’t. Have you heard the one about how they whitelisted themselves? This is one of my favorite anecdotes, and though my memory is fuzzy about the exact timeline and versions involved, it goes something like this: Mozilla implements popup blocking and releases a milestone to great acclaim. Netscape soon follows with its own release based on the Mozilla offering. Because Netscape is Mozilla at its core, the press is naturally expecting it to have popup blocking. It doesn’t, because—lo and behold—some AOL/Netscape web properties use popup ads, and heaven forbid those get blocked! After a thorough public lashing, Netscape goes back to the drawing board and finally puts out a release that blocks popups. The catch: a whitelist, buried in preferences and thus out of reach of most users, that permits AOL web properties to continue opening popup ads. One of these properties just so happened to be Netscape.com.

Guess what the browser’s default homepage was.

The user started up his shiny new browser—NOW WITH POPUP BLOCKING!—and got a popup ad.

Netscape isn’t doing too well these days.

I’ve been out of town.

I’ve posted some pictures from tonight’s Rave Awards under Photos.

Posting will be light over the next few days as I finish up some end-of-quarter class projects.

You’re in the gym working out to some lively music (I like Franz Ferdinand or Linkin Park) when it comes time to put up that impossible last rep. As you sweat and struggle and call on every last ounce of strength in your body, the music swells and consumes you, seemingly reflecting your inner turmoil. Up, up, up—just a little bit more—and now the weight is almost there, and the music has reached a crescendo, and it looks like you just…might……

Then Fur Elise comes on.

Only half of that last rep is strength. The other half is psychological, and music can provide a much needed psychological boost—when the right notes are playing. When they’re not, nothing brings you down faster.

The problem isn’t limited to the iPod Shuffle. The same jarring shifts in tempo also occur within a single song as it alternates between the chorus (which is typically rousing) and the instrumental accompaniment (which is more mellow).

We need an iPod that can monitor your body’s exertion level and flip on Eye of the Tiger when you need it most. This will go well with the gym of the future I asked for.

Earlier this month, I wrote about a project I started with Dan Boneh in 2003 called PwdHash. A draft of our paper is now available. A couple people had questions about how the plug-in works, so hopefully this takes care of those.

Nokia employees are now using Firefox—all 55,000 of them [Swedish]. Nokia exec Christian Lindholm says the deployment went smoothly. Thanks to Frederik for the link.

In other news, earlier this month I did an interview about Firefox with the German television program “Neues.” I’m told this will air today at 6:30 PM on 3sat, so if you’re in Germany, let me know how it goes.

Update: Looks like streaming video of the interview is now available, as well as an article—why do I look like a criminal leaving a courtroom in that picture? (That’s the front of Stanford.)

Yahoo announced last month that Firefox had made the big leagues, consistently ranking in their top 500 searches.

Google agrees: Firefox was its 4th most popular “technology” search term in the U.S. last month after hot generics like “mp3″ and “chat” and in the company of such explosive products as the iPod and Skype.

It was also the 3rd most popular term overall in Germany after none other than George Bush himself.

Meanwhile, our overall top ten reads like the top fifth of People’s annual Fifty Most Beautiful People. Perhaps this says it best: Germany’s #8 is a bastion of collaborative scholarly learning that seeks to expand the depths of human knowledge and protect the original democratic vision of the World Wide Web by wresting control of information from the powerful elite and delivering it to your fingertips. Ours is “games.” ‘Nuff said?

(I’m just glad “tsunami” managed to come in first, because I’m not sure where I would have moved if Britney Spears (or Pritney Spears) topped the list. Maybe to ikea in Germany—they seem to like it over there and it certainly looks more comfortable than my dorm room.)

Mark Fletcher takes home the 2005 Wired Technology Rave Award for his fantastic Bloglines service, which was recently purchased by Ask Jeeves. Congratulations, Mark!

Other notable winners include Kevin Sites for Blogs and Brad Bird for Film.

Full disclosure: I was nominated along with Ben for the Renegade award, which Howard Stern won.