Netscape 6.1

getting better all the time

I made no secret of my irritation with Netscape 6.0 when it was released. Netscape 6.1, however, is significantly better — it isn’t perfect, but it does seem sufficiently finished and polished to be a proper release of a professionally designed browser (something which couldn’t be said of 6.0).

One aspect of Netscape 6.0 which particularly seemed shoddy was the menu items which either did not work or were permanently ghosted. This has now been fixed — admittedly, by the excision of most of the ghosted items.

Netscape 6.0 did improve greatly on the preview releases in one area: the appearance of the “modern theme” chrome. This has been tweaked again for Netscape 6.1 and is even better: Netscape 6.1 one (in its modern skin, anyway) is one of the classiest browsers around.

As far as performance goes, it is noticeably faster than Netscape 6.0 was — but that still makes it slower than any other browser around at the moment; it’s even a bit more sluggish than the Mozilla build it is based upon! Still, you no longer get the feeling that the machine has crashed every time you try to load a page.

One oddity about Netscape 6 which remains with the new release is that every so often it will not load a page. Hitting refresh or selecting the address bar and hitting RETURN usually solves this, but it is irritating. Again, curiously, this seems to happen more often with N6 than Mozilla.

Page rendering is excellent, assuming well-formed markup; the ability to select an alternate stylesheet is very useful. For example, this site’s main article pages use a fixed menu. It is possible, though, that some pages might cause problems on systems running at a low screen resolution — but the solution is in the View menu where you can select the “Scrolling Menu” stylesheet, which makes the menu scroll with the page.

Initially I was dismissive of the sidebar:

Just about everything in the sidebar is completely pointless — buddy list, stocks, what’s related (nothing that I have ever seen), and news at CNN.com. How exciting. The only useful item in the sidebar is search results. When you consider how IE 5 for the Mac makes use of the sidebar … the Netscape 6 sidebar looks more than a bit stale.

Well, I spoke too soon. What I had not seen in action was the flexibility of the Mozilla/Netscape 6 sidebar. Yes, everything I mentioned as being totally useless is totally useless — but the sidebar’s potential goes well beyond those items.

What webmasters can do, if they are switched on enough, is provide a small web page — 144px wide will avoid a horizontal scroll bar at the sidebar’s default width — with regularly updated links to material on their site. The next step is to put a link on the site which uses some JavaScript to add the small page to the user’s sidebar. On this site’s home page you will find a button which does just that:

Clicking this button will add a tab to the Netscape 6 (or Mozilla) sidebar which gives links to the latest articles on the site (equivalent to what is available via the What’s New link on the home page) plus a search box. Full information on how to create your own sidebar tab is available at Netscape’s site.

There is also a selection of tabs available from the “My Sidebar” directory and, for the web author, some useful tabs at the Netscape 6 Evangelism page.

Netscape 6.1 is not by any means ideal, but it is a very nice browser to use. It is more stable than Netscape 4.7, and it renders pages much better than the fourth-generation Netscape browsers did; it looks good, better than MSIE6; and it has some very nice features which actually help the user.

Where it needs to improve: too many actions open a new browser window (clicking on a link in an e-mail, for example) rather than loading the page into the already open window — in fact, there should be some user control over this, along the lines of the facility provided by iCab to stop pages opening new windows. Also, the contextual menu for links includes the option to open the link in a new window; there should be an option to open the link in this window. A user-specified stylesheet would be a bonus, plus some ability to change the size of text in the current page without having to go to Preferences and change the default setting.

Plus, and there is no getting away from it, it needs to run faster and be less greedy for memory.

Such grumbles aside, this is a nice browser, and one I am using more and more for the simple reason it makes surfing the Net easier and more flexible. That’s no bad thing to say about a browser.