Netscape Navigator 6.0: Better?

I use my browser all the time. It’s one of the pro­grams on my sys­tem that just stays open most of the time.

I used to love Netscape but was seduced by Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer 4.0 and never went back to Netscape on a reg­u­lar basis since. How­ever, some­thing told me that a browser that was two years in devel­op­ment could outdo the Inter­net Explorer 5.0 browser I have on my machine. So I down­loaded Netscape 6.0, the first browser to be released by Netscape since it was acquired by AOL.

The first thing that strikes me in this browser is that it seems very me-too’ish. A lot of the fea­tures that made IE a bet­ter browser are now there: small install pro­gram, not hav­ing to install the mail client (I use Eudora any­way), faster page pre­sen­ta­tion. All those were among the fea­tures that lured me into Microsoft’s camp when they released their browser.

Sure, hav­ing them try to reg­is­ter me to Net­cen­ter was annoy­ing (I man­aged to bypass that) and it’s true that the browser color scheme (hor­ri­ble blue) was ter­ri­ble but I fig­ured that this were only tem­po­rary pains.

I loaded the 10–20 sites I hit most of the time and they loaded almost as fast as they do in IE 5 and much faster than they used to in Netscape 4.7 (which still leaves me to won­der where Netscape 5.0 went…)

Some nice fea­tures include the “remem­ber this deci­sion” box when you tell Netscape to refuse or accept a cookie, allow­ing you to select which cook­ies you want to receive and which ones you don’t and, over time, have to do so less and less. The same should have been done for the pass­word fea­ture (another fea­ture that was in IE before NN).

So far so good. Yes, this ver­sion is a vast improve­ment over the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the browser. But is it as good as IE? I fig­ured that the dif­fer­ences would prob­a­bly appear over time.

But then I tried to start cus­tomiz­ing it. That’s when the prob­lems began.

The first thing that was annoy­ing was when I wanted to cus­tomize my book­marks bar. The browser con­nected to a page on Netscape’s site… Unfor­tu­nately, the page was not there and I got a 404 mes­sage. In other words, I can’t cus­tomize my book­marks bar: Major prob­lem as I usu­ally get rid of the links that are on there and replace them with my own choices.

Then I fig­ured I would try to get rid of the blue bar, by cus­tomiz­ing it. After some search­ing on Mozilla.org, I dis­cov­ered that it is cus­tomiz­able… if you’re will­ing to go and add and remove some files in the Netscape direc­tory. Great if you’re a pro­gram­mer, not so good if you’re a con­sumer. Another score for IE, which has a browser acces­sory to do so easily.

On the stan­dard com­pli­ance end, Netscape took the high road and did a good job at sup­port­ing most of the W3C stan­dards. Prob­lem is: very few other peo­ple on the net did and, as a result, pages that were once “Best viewed with Netscape Nav­i­ga­tor” now can’t load because Netscape no longer fully sup­ports its non-standard ver­sion of DHTML. Ouch! This lack of back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity could be dis­tress­ing. Netscape can’t afford moves like that now that it doesn’t own a 90% marketshare.

The next test was on the plug-ins end. Sure, IE has a def­i­nite advan­tage with some of its ActiveX plu­g­ins but that was resolved by Netscape with its easy plug-in setups in the 4.0 ver­sion of the browser. Well, we’re now going back to the old days, when you had to down­load a plug-in, stop Netscape, install the plug-in, and restart Netscape.

Except, you can’t find the plug-in. I fig­ured the first one I’d go for was Macro­me­dia Flash. I fig­ured a lot of site use Flash, might as well get the plug-in. Oops… I was informed by Macro­me­dia that they

a href=“http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash” mce_href=“http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash” title=“If Macro­me­dia can’t find it…”>are unable to locate a sin­gle Web player that best matches your plat­form and oper­at­ing system

. Well, I guess I’ll live with­out Flash but that pushes Netscape back. Another score for IE.

An hour into my Netscape expe­ri­ence, I went back to the AOL site and then it hap­pened, the sight that I now remem­ber fondly from my days as a Netscape user:

This pro­gram has per­formed an ille­gal oper­a­tion and will be shut down.

I fig­ured that it was a pre­view release and that it would get bet­ter and, after shut­ting the pro­gram down, didn’t go back to it. But I found it wor­ri­some that AOL (now Netscape’s par­ent) would be the site to crash this browser.

It’s such a shame, when I think about it. This browser could have been good but it wasn’t and as, a result, only served to empha­size why Netscape lost the browser war: it just wasn’t good enough to com­pete in the marketplace.

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