Nyetscape has been going downhill since it was acquired by AOL. The latest
instalment in this sorry saga is
the
Netscape 6 installation process. No longer can you download a tarball at
work, put it on a ZIP disk and take it home and install it; the download is now
a proprietary, closed-source installer, which you have to run as root no less,
which fetches Netscape 6 over your modem link (all 10-20Mb or however large
it is) and installs it. Since it's closed-source, there's no telling what
else it might do; for all you know, it may surreptitiously patch your kernel
to report your browsing habits to AOL (in the interests of serving you
better, of course), or to report MP3 downloads to the RIAA at the behest of
merger partner Time Warner. Illegal? Possibly, though under
UCITA and the DMCA, maybe less so than in the past. And then there is the
NSA, who work closely with large high-tech companies.
The possibilities are endless.