Netscape 6 Preview Release 3

Last winter, when Netscape released a Preview 1 version of Netscape 6, I eagerly downloaded and tried it. I would love to see Netscape regain some of the market share it has lost to Microsoft Internet Explorer, partly because I believe its unhealthy for one brand of software to dominate any category to the extent that IE now does, and partly because I dislike IE 5.

Unfortunately, the Netscape 6 Preview 1 build was very rough -- buggy, and with a plug-ugly window interface. Its underlying Gecko browser engine developed by the Mozilla group seemed fast enough at rendering Web pages, but the browser's interface features still needed a lot of work.

I skipped Netscape 6 Preview 2, but when Preview 3 was released, a month or so ago, I decided to check. Netscape's new browser out once again. I've been using Preview 3 fairly regularly since then, and my assessment is that while it is definitely improved from the Preview 1 release, it's still not ready for use as a principal, everyday browser yet.

First, the good stuff. The most noticeable improvement to Preview 3 is its Windows interface, which now supports "skins." The two provided include "Modern," a blue theme that I find quite attractive and much easier on the eyes then IE 5's interface, and a "Classic" Netscape theme that resembles the appearance of Netscape Communicator 4.7.

Netscape 6 Preview 3 feels even faster than Preview 1 did. Another thing I like about Netscape 6, is that it supports the drag and drop to all text fields on the Applelinks CGI news posting engine, which has five separate fields, four which I use daily. No other browser does this.

On the downside, Netscape 6 Preview 3 still takes forever to start up, although there is some improvement over preview one here. Netscape 6 Preview 3 is less stable in my experience then Preview 1 was. I don't think I have yet been able to surf for more than half an hour or so without the program crashing to the debugger. Fortunately, it doesn't take the System down with it, but there is substantial work to do to make this a stable browser.

Bookmarks are better implemented in Preview 3 . The installer imported my Communicator 4.7 Bookmarks smoothly, and they work lot better than they did in Preview 1, but there is still a double clutch when you first pull down the Bookmark menu after startup. Save dialog options and contextual menu support are still limited.

One of the most maddening bugs in Netscape 6, at least for someone like myself on a dial up Internet connection, is that if you log off the Net and then log on again, Preview 3 will no longer respond. Netscape is aware of this and offers quitting in restarting the program as the only current work around. That can get pretty tiresome, especially given the long drawn out startup time.

Another deficiency is that the Mac OS double (up/down) scrolling arrows at the bottom of the browser window scroll bar are not supported. There was an undocumented workaround for this in the Preview 1 preferences, but I can't find it in Preview 3 . I work on a PowerBook with at 12.1 in. 800 X 600 display, and I keep the Application Switcher menu open as a floating palette on the right hand margin of my screen and it blocks the "up" button at the top of the scroll slider, so it is a pain to have to shift the palette in order to scroll up in a browser window.

Scrolling on some Web pages is excruciatingly slow, making Netscape 6 too frustrating to use on a particular newspaper's Web page that I visit every day. iCab scrolls on that page with normal (fast) speed so there is some problem with Netscape 6 there.

These are just the issues I've personally encountered with Netscape 6 PR3. Several others have been noted in forum threads on other Websites.

I think that Netscape 6, once the bugs are ironed out, will be an excellent browser, and a worthy successor to the venerable Communicator 4.x. However, at its current stage of development it is not really a reliable tool. If you like it experimenting with new, not quite ready for primetime software, by all means download Netscape 6 and check it out. However, don't think of it yet as a replacement for whatever browser you are currently using.

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Charles W. Moore

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