With the recent announcement from AOL that they will end support for Netscape in February, many loyal Netscape users will be looking for a new browser. Since Netscape 9 is based off of Firefox 2 with a few extensions built-in, it would seem moving to Firefox 2 would be the logical choice. However once users Get Firefox, they are going to discover that the social networking features that came with Netscape 9 are not included. While it is not too difficult to get these features installed in Firefox 2, locating them on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) isn’t as easy. The Guru has made this part a lot easier. Back in March, shortly after the time Netscape 9 was announced, the Netscape Add-ons Team registered on AMO and posted the Netscape theme and the 4 standard extensions for Firefox 2. These can be obtained here and include:
- Netstripe- Netscape Navigator 9’s default theme, packaged for Firefox.
- Propeller.com Friends’ Activity Sidebar – The Friends’ Activity Sidebar (FAS) extension helps you keep tabs on what stories your Propeller.com friends are submitting, commenting, and voting on.
- Propeller.com News – Displays the latest news stories from Propeller.com in a top-level News menu and sidebar.
- Propeller.com Sitemail Notifier – The Propeller.com Sitemail Notifier extension adds a button (shown above in the preview image) to your toolbar that indicates when you have new sitemail messages at Propeller.com.
- Propeller.com Tracker – Follow the latest news, votes, and comments on the news at Propeller.com with this auto-updating sidebar.
So, what about your Netscape bookmarks? Firefox will not automatically pull your bookmarks over from Netscape. However, it only takes a couple minutes to manually bring them over:
- In Netscape 9 go to the Bookmarks Menu and select ‘Organize Bookmarks…’
- A new Bookmarks Manager window will pop-up, go to the File Menu and select ‘Export Bookmarks…’
- Select HTML (standard) from the list
- Choose an easy to find location such as the Desktop to save the bookmarks.html file and click ‘Save’
- Close any open Netscape 9 Windows
- In Firefox 2 go to the Bookmarks Menu and select ‘Organize Bookmarks…’
- A new Bookmarks Manager window will pop-up, go to the File Menu and select ‘Import…’
- Select From File and click ‘Next >’
- Locate the Bookmarks.html file you saved from Step 4 and click ‘Open’
- All your bookmarks from Netscape have been imported into Firefox 2. Close the Bookmarks Manager window
Hopefully this guide will make your transition from Netscape 9 to Firefox 2 a little smoother.
It might be easier to transition to Seamonkey. You know, the continuation of Mozilla’s integrated suite…
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
But what about the Link Pad, Mini Browser, Restart Menu Item, Tab Preferences and URL Correction features?
Go to http://archive.netscape.com/addons. That will lead you to a list of add-ons that will give Firefox some of those Netscape features that you mentioned.