I installed the latest incarnation of
Netscape's web browser yesterday afternoon, and I've got to be quite honest with you here and tell you that it actually
pretty good.
Netscape lost me around the release of version Nutscrape 4. It's bloated size (17MB up form 3.5MB for Netscape 3 Gold) combined with its total ignorance of the HTML standard left a sour taste in my mouth. There was great hope however for the release of Netscape 6. Unfortunately it turned out to be the biggest embarrassment Netscape has ever suffered. Well, I'm here to tell you that the Big N has heard the cry of the people and thus redeemed themselves with this latest update. Here's a quick breakdown:
- File Size: The average download is about 20MB, pretty small compared to IE's latest release.
- Combatibility: Web pages seem to be displaying reletively well. No more of this botched up tisplaying of tables and background images. It's new Gekko engine really seems to be doing the trick.
- Speed: Compared to Netscape 6.0's startup time, Netscape 6.1 starts up from a cold boot at around 10 seconds. It may seem a while, but once it's loaded, it's every bit as zippy as IE. Impressive seeing as IE is embedded into the very heart of windows.
- Features: Its skinable (the default skin is very nice), the AutoComplete is non-intrusive and FAST (quicker than IE's), Netscape Composer is still one of the best free webpage editors around, AIM and Google is nicely integrated into the side-bar, and a whole bunch of other surprises.
I dont know if I'm going to be using it instead of IE, but I do know that you shouldn't be writing Netscape off just yet, and if you already have, maybe you should reconsider after giving this a go, especially if you used to LOVE using Netscape before they went askew. I don't know who started the rumours that Netscape were out of the Browser Wars, but it couldn't be further from the truth at this stage.
