[lug] how secure is Netscape 6.x?

[Peter Hutnick]

On Saturday 09 February 2002 12:28 pm, qqq1one at yahoo.com wrote:
> Just wondering.  NS 4.x was open source, correct?  

No.

> Not so of NS 6.x,
> right?  I know it's based on mozilla, which is OS, but AOL/Netscape has
> changed code and not released it, no?

No and no.  Some modules (like the spell checker) are not available in source 
form, but but AFAIK the complete browser, mail/news, etc parts are available 
just as AOL built them in source form.  I think that they stripped some 
features that weren't stable enough yet.

I believe that these are available at 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/ and are the releases that have 
an extra .1 at the end of the version (0.9.2.1 and 0.9.4.1).

See http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ particularly the note that says that 
NS6.2 was built from 0.9.4.1.

> What I getting at is, if there's an exploitable bug, are we or are we
> not as likely to hear about it along with a patch forthcoming?   Anybody?

Well, you are at their mercy if you use NS6.  The simple answer to that is to 
use Mozilla.  This approach gives you the side benefit of getting the latest 
features and bugfixes.

If anyone has information to the contrary of anything I have said here I'd 
love to hear it.  I'm not 100% confident of any of it ;-)

-Peter