Netscape 6 revisited
My first impressions of Netscape 6 were decidedly ambivalent. Some features of the program were quite pleasing, and I did feel that it could be a browser I would like to use most of the time. Other aspects left the impression that this was very much an unfinished product.
I liked it better than Netscape 4 — but that says more, really, about Netscape 4 than anything else. A few weeks later, and I have been using Netscape 6 on and off — the fact that I have not been able to use it for all my surfing should tell you something — and some impressions have altered, some new points have become apparent. This column will summarise what I’ve found, including some points mentioned last time. Unless otherwise noted, I’m talking about the MacOS version.
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Downloading the software.
I noted before that the Netscape Installer used to download the software is poorly designed: a checkbox, which defaults to the unchecked state, must be checked or clicking “Install” will download the software but not save it to your hard disk! The design of the dialogue box concerned gives no indication that this is the case — in fact, quite the opposite: it suggests that clicking “install” is all that is needed. Sloppy. - Downloading the Linux version.
The Netscape site correctly identified the browser in use as Netscape 4.3/Linux. Clicking Download Now! very helpfully then led to a page where you could choose which version you wanted: the one for Windows 98, or the one for Windows NT. Yet again the impression is of sloppiness. -
Launching the program.
Netscape 6 takes forever to start up. Well, forever is not tremendously accurate as a measurement — so I dug out a chronometer. It takes Netscape 6 six and a half times longer than Internet Explorer 5 to start up! By the time N6 has got around to asking about “user profiles”, IE5 has already got the browser window open and started to load the Web page. This SUCKS. - Memory
The first time I ran N6 it grabbed an enormous amount of memory, over 60Mb. Subsequent use suggests it does not always grab quite that much, but it does take a sizeable chunk and if memory is tight (which it is likely to be, if it uses such quantities) the program does not cope well: some of the buttons may not be visible, images may not be rendered, everything becomes even more sluggish. Multi-tasking? Forget it — everything else slows to a crawl. Did I say this sucks? -
Loading a page.
My first impression was that N6 was a lot faster at loading Web pages than IE5 or N4. However, it very soon became a lot more sluggish than either; I don’t think I have ever seen a browser take so long to load quite simple pages. Clearing the cache did nothing to restore the initial speed. -
Surfing the Web.
Pages look so much better than they did in N4, largely because the text seems to be better handled. IE users probably won’t see anything to get excited about, though. Ignoring the topic of some pages not working in N6, it is worth repeating that it is much more standards-compliant than most other browsers and non-standard code, including Netscape proprietary tags, is no longer supported. One unpleasant surprise, though, is that N6 still supports the egregious<blink>tag. -
Text
Many pages on the Web use font sizes which are frankly too small for high-res screens (yes, we have talked about this before, too). Netscape 6 offers no mechanism to increase the size of text in a page. The Communicator versions of Netscape 4 had it, Internet Explorer’s recent versions had it — the ommission of it from Netscape 6 is inexplicable and would make the program impossible to use for anyone with poor eyesight. Preferences includes, I assume only for Mac users, the option to switch between a resolution of 72dpi (usual for Mac browsers) and 96dpi (Windows browsers). The only problem is it doesn’t work, and seems to be fixed at 96dpi whatever you do with the setting.
There is a very tempting option on the View menu, shown here. “Use stylesheet” clearly implies that you as the user can define a stylesheet of your own for use when looking at Web pages. As you can see, the submenu shows the single option, “None”. There is no other option, and searching through Preferences and Help failed to turn up any way in which the user could actually select a stylesheet.
[NOTE: Since writing this I have found out what that menu option is actually supposed to do. It allows the selection of alternative stylesheets specified by the author and does not, apparently, have anything to do with user-specified stylesheets. If this is explained anywhere in the Help or at Netscape’s site it is bloody well hidden.] -
Translation
Note in the illustration above the menu option “Translate.” This is a very good idea — one of the few. Visit a site written in a foreign language then select this and you will be taken to a third-party site where the page will be translated into more-or-less English (layout as in the original). The language options are limited, though probably sufficient for most people in Britain. The integration could be better, but it is one feature that N6 has which other browsers don’t. -
History.
It says something about just how much Netscape understands what users need and want from browsers that Netscape 6 is the first version of a Netscape browser to incorporate a History! It is hidden away in the “Tools” submenu of the “Tasks” menu. Selecting it opens the History window in which the oldest items are at the top, the most recent at the bottom — this doesn’t seem well thought-out, and you can’t change it. Worse, clicking on an item in the History window always opens it in a new browser window. Given how memory-hungry N6 is, this is the last thing you need. The user may not even be aware that a new window has opened since it opens precisely over the already open one(s) — no cascading here. Of course, the steeply declining speed of the software gives a bit of a clue. -
Bookmarks.
One pleasant surprise was that the first time N6 was run, it detected that IE5 was the default browser and automatically added IE’s favourites — all of them — to a submenu of the Bookmarks menu, as well as including the items from the bookmarks of N4.7 which also was on the hard drive. The downside is that the menu takes a very noticeable time to appear after selecting it. In fact, it’s the sort of delay I have only ever seen using software on emulators. Perhaps it is because there are a lot of items there — but there are similar numbers of items in the Bookmarks or Favourites or Hotlist menus of every browser I use regularly and none of the others have any problems at all. Even more peculiar is that the only way to add an item to the Bookmarks menu is to actually select “Add current page” (or use the shortcut, COMMAND–D). You can click on the bookmark symbol or drag it anywhere you like, it won’t do a thing. How can I say what I think without repeating myself? Let’s settle for this: the Bookmarks in Netscape 6 are actually less useable than in Netscape 4. - Add search results to bookmarks.
In the sidebar is a search facility which includes the option to add the search results to the Bookmark menu. These are grouped in submenus — this is a good idea. That is, it would be a good idea, but, when you select “manage your bookmarks”, you cannot drag the resulting bookmarks elsewhere in the Bookmarks or to the wastebasket; nor can you delete them. All the other bookmarks can be moved and deleted easily, but not those added from the search results. They can be copied using COMMAND–C and COMMAND–V to elsewhere in the Bookmarks menu, and the copy can be moved and deleted — but it only consists of a bookmark symbol and a couple of blank fields: there is no title, no URL. What’s more, some time after initially saving some of these I went back to have another look — and the submenu was there, but all the items were gone! In Preferences, you can choose to have Bookmarks and Home buttons displayed in the program’s toolbars — they in fact show up in the “Personal Toolbar”. Clicking on the Bookmark button brings up a Bookmark pop-up menu — in which none of the new submenus are accessible! -
Printing.
Well, there's a “Print” item on the File menu, which brings up the standard Print dialogue. That’s it. Seriously. There is no “Page Setup” option — or rather, there is, but it is always ghosted. I would have said that I was astonished that a piece of software could be shipped without something as basic as this working, but by the time I saw this I had already realised that we’re not exactly dealing with the crème de la crème of programming here. On the File menu, grouped with Print, there is a submenu called “Print Plus” which has three items, none of which are useful. They are, in fact, links to the Netscape Web site where they want to sell you stuff. Maybe kitchen salesmen aren’t so bad after all. -
Sidebar.
IE5 for the Mac is the first time I have seen a browser which provides a sidebar — called the “explorer bar” — which is actually useful, incorporating favourites, search results, history, and the very useful scrapbook feature. Netscape 6 provides a sidebar which also features search results, plus a lot of stuff which is pretty useless: “buddy list” — how is that useful to someone who hasn’t installed anything other than the browser?; “stocks” & “market news” — gee, I’d never manage without them; “news” — from CNN, that is (as three US-related stories aren’t terribly relevant, I think I’ll stick to the BBC and various newspapers); “what’s related” — is anything, ever?; “ ‘local’ entertainment” (maybe “local” means something different to Netscape, but I don’t think a list of places in the USA exactly counts); at least the “weather” option allows you pick the city of your choice — but it doesn’t really compete with the Met. Office for detail or accuracy. The sidebar is as “useful” as was the “Shop” button in Communicator 4.7 — if that. -
Taskbar.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, since almost everything here is irrelevant if you live outside the USA. To the left are three icons which allow you to select Navigator, Composer or the Address Book. Since I didn’t install the e-mail component, the Address Book isn’t there — but its icon is! Composer, unfortunately, is there, and I can’t see why Netscape doesn’t give users the option not to install it. (My experience with the last version of Composer on the one occasion I tried it made me swear never to touch any version of this pile of crap again.) In the middle-ish part of the Taskbar are four items: “Business”, “Tech”, “Fun” and “Interact”. As far as I can see, every item in these takes you to a section of the Netscape site. One thing which amused me was the TV section of the Fun option: USA TV, of course, but there is an international option — which covers absolutely nowhere outside of the Americas and the Caribbean. Just above the Taskbar is a bar showing (but not very well) progress in loading the page; what is very confusing is that beside it are the words Document: Done no matter what stage of loading the page is at. -
Menus.
The very first menu item, in the Apple menu, is “About Netscape”, which is very interesting, because it doesn’t work! The Address Book crops up again in the Tasks menu — if the software can detect the e-mail client isn’t present, why can’t it do the same with the Address Book? I’ve already mentioned the non-functional Page Setup and Use Stylesheet, and the delay before the Bookmarks menu appears. -
Crashes.
I don’t think, so far, that N6 crashes more frequently in use than IE5, excepting three crashes which occurred when launching the program and may have been related to lack of memory (i.e. not having huge quantities available). -
Mac gripes.
Other Mac browsers I have used all support drag-and-drop downloading of images: grab it, drag it to the desktop, it gets downloaded. Try with Netscape 6, and you get a text clipping containing the filename! So the next thing you want to do is bring up the contextual menu. After a while of holding down the mouse button, you realise that the menu just isn’t going to pop up. The only way to get the contextual menu is to use the CONTROL key along with the mouse button. -
Weird.
Every so often, and for no reason that I have spotted, the Web page starts to scroll all over the place — following the mouse pointer around. I have not been able deliberately to cause this, but it has happened three or four times with different Web pages.
In my first impressions of Netscape 6, I said that I preferred it to Netscape 4. I still think Web pages look better in Netscape 6 than in any other version of Netscape I have seen. On the downside — and it’s a big downside — even if nothing else were wrong with it, it is just too slow. You can feel death getting ever closer while you wait… and wait… and wait…
This is the slowest piece of software I have seen in years — not since processors were either 80286 or 68000 chips, RAM was a few megabytes and hard disks were 10–50Mb. To make a program this slow on a modern computer has to mean that the programming really sucks — an impression strengthened by the various parts of the program which don’t work properly (or in some cases, at all), and the incredible amount of memory the program snatches.
The more I used it, the more I felt it was unfinished — a beta, not a release version. That’s not how it is presented at Netscape’s site, where the talk is all of “a revolutionary new browser”. That refers to its standards-compliance, which is certainly exceptional. But it is not really good enough to preen oneself about this advance in browser design when the browser is not fully working and runs as fast as an arthritic sloth. It really does say something about Netscape 6 that, looking for something good to say, I came up with, “Well, the form completion works.” See John 11:35.
© DC 2001. All rights reserved.
