The latest version of Netscape, Netscape 6 (they’ve finally dropped the “Communicator” title), is finally ready for primetime—or at least Netscape thinks so. Since I was very critical of its early attempts, I’ve intentionally waited until NS 6 was out of its beta (pre-release) stages to review this unique new browser.

The “ready for prime-time” version of NS 6 appeared on Netscape’s web site today. The fanfare was noticeably less than for previous Netscape releases, no doubt in part due to the national attention in the U.S. being currently focused elsewhere. But a couple of Internet news organizations advertised for the new browser starting early this morning.

Netscape 6 sports a host of new features, aimed both at the web-browsing novice and the experienced user. For the novice segment—users of the American Online (AOL) browser and the Microsoft Network (MSN) Explorer browser, many features have been trimmed down and made easier to access and utilize. NS 6 also offers improved functionality of more advanced features for the experienced user.

But just what has changed? And more importantly, do these changes actually work the way they’re supposed to?

New Look

One of the biggest and most obvious changes to the new version of Netscape is its look and feel. While NS 6 retains the ability to look and operate in much the same way as its previous versions, it now has the ability to look like anything. NS 6 supports “skinning”, a term for using custom graphics and animations to completely customize the look and feel of the browser windows. Skinning has become quite popular for many of the softwares released over the Internet in the past couple of years—so much so that the next consumer Microsoft operating system, Windows 2001 (slated to be released next summer), plans to have a completely customizable skinnable interface. By adding a skinnable interface to NS 6, Netscape becomes the first mainstream application to jump on the skinning bandwagon.

Like any skinnable program, NS 6 has some very pretty—but practically unusable—skins, and some simple, straightforward and easy to use skins. Initially, NS 6 offers 6 custom skins on its “Theme Park” web site, ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque. The advantage here, though, is that skins can make use of large, easy to recognize buttons, making the program potentially very user-friendly to newbies, and ultimately configurable for advanced users.

Tabs

In yet another effort to make the process of web-browsing easier for surfers, NS 6 supports Internet “tabs”. Along the left side of the browser window, an easy-to-hide slide-out pane offers the user tabs, each containing its own custom content. This is similar to the buttons along the left side of the new MSN Explorer window, and to the failed “Channels” initiative of Internet Explorer a few years ago. It remains to be seen how Tabs will fare, but the potential here is to have web sites offer breaking and up-to-the-minute news and information through this unobtrusive pane.

Searches can be performed from within the Tabs pane. And the search features of NS 6 are a dramatic improvement over those offered by the 4.x versions of Netscape Communicator. The search engine can be customized from within the Properties dialog of the program, and the display of the results is logical and easy to read and navigate, even from within the left pane of the window.

Mail & News

The mail and news features of NS 6 have also gotten a pretty hefty overhaul. The size and positions, and even the presence or absence, of preview panes and folder lists are now configurable. Further, NS 6 now offers support for multiple email and newsgroup accounts from within a single profile, making managing several email addresses and newsgroup servers much easier than in previous versions. You can now manage POP3 email, AOL mail, and Netscape mail from within the same window, as well as any number newsgroup accounts.

NS 6 gives users the ability to sort messages in various accounts by a large selection of methods. It even intelligently offsets quoted text in messages, making it much easier to identify and read new material in a long thread. HTML support within email messages is available, though HTML-formatted messages are becoming increasingly unpopular on the Internet.

As always, NS supports attachments to email and newsgroup messages, although the new interface makes it particularly difficult to identify which messages have files attached, and makes opening or saving those attachments an exercise in frustration. Inline attachments, like images, are supposedly supported, although my experience with them so far has been that these images show up as garbled text, and cause the program to crash after a few minutes.

Instant Messages

Netscape 6 supports Instant Messenger, an online chat and messaging program made popular by AOL a few years back. NS 6’s Messenger integrates both the Netscape version and the AOL version, making things a bit easier for users. Further, NS 6 will show you whether the recipient of an email message you’re writing is online and available for instant messaging.

Composer

Composer is Netscape’s HTML-editing application, and is available as part of the NS 6 download. It is simple, which makes it fairly easy to use. But advanced users will probably want to stick with a full-featured editor, like Hotmetal Pro or Microsoft FrontPage.

Compatibility

Netscape claims its NS 6 browser offers the most widespread support for HTML (hypertext mark-up language), XML (extensible mark-up language), and CSS (cascading style-sheets). These are the main programming languages used throughout the Internet. What I’ve noticed, however, after browsing the Internet with NS 6 for a few hours, is that many sites have minor display problems from within Netscape’s new browser. Most notable are the download pages for the Netscape site, which has problems lining up table borders in the browser. Ironic, isn’t it, that Netscape’s own site would show some of the inconsistencies in its new browser’s ability to display pages correctly?

It should also be pointed out that there is one glaring bug in the Mail portion of the program. Out of ten attempts, the preview pane for messages correctly displayed inline images (images that appear within the message itself) only twice. Six of the eight remaining times, the program crashed completely, taking the Mail and browser programs down completely. The other two times, the program just refused to display any text or images in any message in the preview pane until the program was shut down and restarted.

Performance

Older versions of Netscape have often been criticized for their performance in relation to other Internet browsers, specifically Microsoft's Internet Explorer. NS 6 will not likely escape that criticism. The browser itself takes quite a while to load upon the start of the application, roughly five to six times as long as Internet Explorer on the same PC. This may very well have to do with the fact that it must load a separate Java engine to operate properly, and must construct its windows using XML; this takes quite a bit longer to do than the painting of windows from the internal engine of the operating system.

Other Netscape windows, like Instant Messenger and Mail, take similarly long to load. While the Java engine needs not load upon the starting of these extra windows (as long as the browser window is already open), these programs still use XML to draw their images on the screen, which takes longer than traditional windows.

As for loading web pages, NS 6 seems to perform fairly close to IE 5.5 in terms of its speed at loading text and images from web pages. IE still gets the edge here, though, as it is moderately faster.

Download

One nice thing about this new version of Netscape is its small footprint. The total download size, even with all the advanced features selected, is less than 9 Mb. This is a huge improvement over the bloated downloads of previous versions, which often ranged from 20 MB to 30 MB.

Verdict

The features and performance of Netscape 6 are a mixed bag. It takes a while to start up and has problems displaying certain pages in the browser and inline images in the mail client. But its sleek new interface and additional support for new useful features may convert some AOL, MSN and Internet Explorer diehards. My opinion: wait for version 6.0x, when some of the performance issues might be addressed and the final bugs exterminated.




Recommended: No