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There's still some life in old faithful yet. I have lately been using Mozilla 0.9.2 as my #2 browser instead of Netscape 4.77, but while Mozilla is now a reasonable choice for day-to-day browsing (and very stable -- I have experienced no crashes) the older Netscape 4.x still has a lot more slickness and polish.

While the Mozilla team works at getting the bugs out of Netscape 6, development has continued on Communicator 4.7, with the latest upgrade to version 4.78 released this week.

Despite a few annoying ideosyncracies, like the way it handles history data (ie: you lose it if you close the browser window), and the fact that it insists on loading images before you see any text, Netscape becomes more polished with each incremental upgrade.

I find Netscape is still the most dependable all-round browser with integrated Java support (albeit slower than Mac Runtime For Java) and 128 bit encryption.

Netscape Communicator 4.78 is essentially a refinement and bugswat release, but probably well worth the download for fans of this browser.

I am very pleased that Netscape is continuing to update Communicator, as it is definitely a better choice for older PPC Macs that don't have the processor muscle, RAM, or hard drive space to run Netscape 6.1/Mozilla.

Communicator also of course still incorporates a capable email client, Messenger, and a WYSIWYG html editor, Composer.

I have never understood the exodus from Netscape to Internet Explorer, at least since Netscape 4.5 was released. Netscape is just plain nicer -- a very solid and refined browsing platform.

New in 4.78:
• Improved Mousewheel support on Windows platforms.
• Improved support for Sun Java plug-in.
• Support for Solaris2.8.
• Support for AIX5.x.
• Various Bug Fixes.

System requirements:
• PPC
• System 7.6.1 or higher

Netscape Communicator is freeware

For more information, visit:
http://home.netscape.com/download/

Incidentally, if you're having trouble downloading a Netscape product from the WWW download page, try downloading directly from Netscape's FTP servers, which also let you download varieties of Netscape software that aren't available on the download page.

To download a Netscape product directly from an FTP server, use the following steps:

1. Go to ftp://ftp.netscape.com.
2. Click on /pub/ so you are at ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/.
3. Choose your product, version, language, and operating system.
4. Choose file and be sure to read the license agreement before downloading the software.

• The filenames for the Macintosh version of Netscape Navigator end with bin.

Here's the URL:
ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/

Charles W. Moore

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