Netscape 6
Difficult as it may be to believe, a full version of Netscape 6 is finally shipping. It’s been a long time coming. As far as I can tell from a glance at Netscape’s Web site, versions are available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. I’ve just spent a few hours trying out the MacOS version, so here are some of my first impressions.
Note: I know some of the problems I mention are because the program is based closely upon Mozilla, and current builds of Mozilla haven’t fixed these problems. However, Mozilla is a browser under development; Netscape 6 is being presented as a finished product.
First thoughts
The first thing anyone spots about a new piece of software are the niggly little things which irritate from the word go. To a Mac user, the first niggle is that holding down the mouse button does not bring up a menu. The only way to get the pop-up menu is to use the CONTROL key as you press the mouse button. This is a distinct pain.
Other irritants: some of the Preferences settings don’t seem to work. There is, in common with IE 5 for the Mac, an option to change the display resolution, so that 96dpi (as with Windows browsers) is used instead of the usual Mac 72dpi. However, it does not matter what is entered in Preferences, the resolution seems stuck at 96dpi.
I was at first puzzled by the fact that the option to add a “Home” button to the toolbar did not do so, but then found that some of the buttons get added to the personal toolbar.
Page Setup in the file menu is perpetually ghosted. This is inexplicable in a release version of a piece of software.
It is also worth noting one peculiarity of the installation procedure. Having downloaded the installer and started it, you come to this point:
You will note the instruction “Click install to proceed…” If you do click the Install button, you will sit there for more than half an hour while the software is downloaded but not installed on your computer!
The check box “Save installer modules upon download” (which defaults, as you can see, to the unchecked state) needs to be checked in order for the software to be actually installed; otherwise you find you have successfully installed an empty folder. Well done, Netscape, another advance in usability.
One good point about the procedure is that you can choose not to install e-mail, newsgroup, and (especially!) AOL Instant Messenger components if you don’t want them. You still get Composer as well as the browser, but that is easily ignored.
If the installation is successful, Netscape 6 launches once it is completed. The first impression I had was that it took quite a while to load, although perhaps not as long as the preview releases did. The default appearance of the browser is the “Modern” theme:
As you can see, it looks rather better than the “we got a seven-year-old to draw it” look of the preview versions. However, Netscape has clearly listened to critics who pointed out that the first preview’s interface sucked and recognised that people like to stick with what is familiar. If you still don’t like it, you can switch the browser’s appearance to “Classic”:
This is enough like the Netscape 4 look that longtime Netscape users will be reassured that the beast in front of them is still Netscape. (On the other hand, those who detest Netscape 4, and they are many, may well be disturbed by the suggestion that the beast in front of them is still Netscape.)
A new beast
In fact, Netscape 6 is very different. I have previously referred to Netscape 6’s adoption of the DOM and its greater adherence to W3C standards than any other browser.
Whereas Netscape 4 often seemed to be a deliberately contrary animal, Netscape 6 renders pages pretty much as you would expect them to be. Most of the time, anyway. There are little exceptions: if a small CSS-positioned <div> contains text surrounded by paragraph or header elements, the positioning may be displaced. Whatever the reason for this, it has not been changed from the preview versions.
This is not in fact an error; Netscape 6 is respecting the default margins for the p and hx elements.
What Netscape 6 will not do is render what has until now been “Netscape-specific” code — or so we had been led to believe. In fact, Netscape 6 still supports <blink>, an evil we could do without. However, the <layer> tag has been consigned to outer darkness and, as we have already noted, N6 complies with the W3C DOM standard — so some pages using JavaScript will break in Netscape 6.
So far, in some fairly random surfing, I have only found one page which did not function properly in the browser, and that was one of mine: part of a site no longer maintained, I would not have expected that page to work.
My impression is that there would probably be not a great deal of trouble in using Netscape 6 for everyday surfing, certainly no more than using IE 5 for the Mac (despite blithe statements such as “best viewed with Internet Explorer” there are quite a few sites, which have been created by people who can’t see beyond their Wintel boxes, that fail catastrophically in IE 5 for the Mac).
Because Netscape 6 is standards compliant, it now supports code which was previously IE-specific but is now incorporated in the W3C recommendation. One obvious element which can now be rendered by Netscape is inline, or floating, frames.
In fact, in a lot of sites with two sets of pages, one for Netscape and one for IE, it will be the IE pages which work best — possibly even perfectly (JavaScript excepted) — in Netscape 6. If it is taken up by most users of Netscape 4, that will greatly lessen the headaches for Web designers trying to cope with cross-browser problems. But will it be taken up by most users of Netscape 4? What is it like to use?
How does it run?
The first thing which struck me about Netscape 6 was that the program might be sluggish in launching, but it seems a lot zippier than either Internet Explorer or Netscape 4 in loading pages from the Web. However, it does grab an enormous chunk of memory — over 60Mb if I am to believe the computer’s information, well in excess of Netscape’s settings. Not surprisingly, every other program running became more than a little bit sluggish.
One peculiar thing, which is a lot less than impressive, is that the Address Book option remains on the Tasks menu although I did not install the e-mail components. It does not do anything, but it remains there, unghosted. Similarly, in a (fairly useless, I must say) drop-down menu to the left of the address bar the “check your email” option remains.
A feature I had liked in the previews was a taskbar button which brought up a list of the open windows — that is now gone, unfortunately. Otherwise, all the noticeable changes from the previews seem to be for the better.
There is one point about the browser which must be mentioned, and is perhaps obvious from the screenshots above: an enormous amount of the browser window is given over to displaying the Web page. This is such an obvious thing to do it is astonishing that it has taken until now to get a major browser which as its default devotes almost all of its screen space to the display. Getting rid of most of the crap from the button bar and shifting the address bar to beside the four most-used buttons — back, forward, reload and stop — is the one truly brilliant idea in Netscape 6.
Myself, I would probably have included a “home” button, if necessary at the expense of “forward”, which is pretty limited in its usefulness. Better still, why not follow IE 5 for the Mac and let the user decide which buttons should be up there?
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 (or “explorer bar”) , putting useful things there like bookmarks, search results, history, and the scrapbook, the Netscape 6 sidebar looks more than a bit stale.
Overall, I quite liked Netscape 6. I could possibly use it for everyday browsing, except that I would miss IE 5’s scrapbook feature; but I could use it without the frequent fury Netscape 4 can provoke. Its compliance with standards is praiseworthy.
On the other hand, some aspects of the program suggest a degree of sloppiness — the ghosted Page Setup, the e-mail menu items when the e-mail software has not been installed, the failure to recognise the holding down of the mouse button, the Preferences options which don’t work, the Apple menu item “About Netscape” which doesn’t work — given the gestation time for this program, that is not really excusable. However, it does load Web pages reasonably quickly and display them much better than Netscape 4.7 did.
The question is, will people go for it?
What are its chances?
There are two groups of people to consider: those who already use Netscape and those who don’t.
Surfing with Netscape 6 was pleasant, as I have already said — but there is nothing which really grabs you and says, “I must have this program!”. OK, well-written pages which look good in IE should now look just about as good in Netscape; it does seem to me that merely being as good as the market leader isn’t the best selling point ever conceived.
Netscape 6 is standards compliant, more so than IE5.5/Win, but does that matter to the average user? Web designers want standards compliant browsers because it makes the job easy, but users simply want a browser which shows the pages they want. Internet Explorer is not, perhaps, the finest piece of software on the planet, but it works, and I can’t see anything in Netscape 6 which would entice users away from it.
The features which Netscape boast about on their Web site may be worthy or appeal to certain groups of users, but just how many users will pick a browser on the grounds, for example, that it incorporates AOL Instant Messenger? Some of its “new” features, such as the address bar which doubles as a search facility, are old news to to anyone who has seen recent versions of Internet Explorer.
On the Macintosh, even the standards compliance argument is not very effective, since IE 5 for the Mac is pretty standards compliant. IE5/Mac also has a couple of very nice touches which give it an edge Netscape 6 doesn’t come close to beating. On the other hand, there are also plenty of Mac users who would not look at Internet Explorer — although fewer than there might have been, perhaps, since it has taken Netscape so long to get a new version out. The question is, will diehard Netscape users switch?
Some won’t, of course, and for good reason: particularly on Windows systems, installing any new piece of software can really screw things up. Previous experience, though, suggests that over the next 18 months or so we might expect to see most Netscape 4 users (who, by the way, make up more than 90% of Netscape users) migrate to Netscape 6. Perhaps slightly faster — it is a nicer browser.
One thing which might come into play is the effect on Web design. If a large number of Netscape users switch to Netscape 6, producing a set of pages which look good in Netscape 4 will become less and less cost effective. Ultimately, Netscape 4 users may find, as Netscape 3 users already do, that many sites are closed to them because of the browser they use. That could be quite an incentive to push more Netscape users to upgrade.
Some good points, more bad points
To summarise the good points in Netscape 6: it is standards compliant, and that is a good thing, from the point of view of Web designers and, ultimately, users, who should get better constructed Web pages appearing on their screens; it devotes a lot of screen space to the Web page — about time, too; it seems, so far, to load pages faster than its predecessor; the browser can be installed without the extras which many people don’t want.
The bad points, on the other hand, are: OK, it’s a version ending in zero, but even so I have never seen a product which looked so unfinished — Preferences options which don’t work, Page Setup ghosted, menu items for components that aren’t installed, the “About Netscape” menu option which doesn’t work; and, worst of all, could it possibly gobble up more memory?
I suspect that most Netscape users will drift towards Netscape 6, but possibly not until they can feel secure that Web pages will be written to handle its relative stringency; they may also want to wait for the first couple of maintenance releases to fix some of its little “features”.
Internet Explorer users will, of course, migrate en masse to Netscape 6 — the day that George W. Bush can speak a coherent, grammatically correct sentence and when scientists using the most powerful scanning electron microscope finally detect Anthea Turner’s talent.
It is difficult to believe, seeing this, that Netscape was the market leader only four or so years ago, with about 70% of the market. Microsoft grabbed the leading position by simply bundling IE with Windows — free software is always appealing. On the other hand, Netscape has also been free for a while, but has nonetheless sunk to at most 33% of the market (recent figures suggest it is more like 20%).
During the past couple of years, each new version of Internet Explorer has shown some evidence that Microsoft was listening to its users; in particular, after all the criticisms of IE 4.5 for the Mac, IE 5 was a superb browser — better in many respects than IE 5.5 for the PC.
By contrast, Netscape 4 has looked increasingly tired and dated. None of the minor upgrades have made much difference to that. Netscape 6 is a browser which, when its little “features” are ironed out, would be able to hold its own against Internet Explorer — if the playing field were level. Unfortunately for Netscape, the playing field isn’t level.
While Netscape has been developing version 6, Microsoft has grabbed a comfortable 75% of the market. To dislodge any significant chunk of that user share, Netscape 6 would need to be a killer browser that everyone would be gagging for — and it isn’t. Being just about as good as Internet Explorer simply is not enough. It has crossed my mind to wonder if there will ever be a Netscape 7. Bets, anyone?
© DC 2000. All rights reserved.
