Netscape 6 Laden With Design Flaws
There’s a new Web browser on the block. Netscape 6, released last month, is the first major new browser released by Netscape Communications since it was bought by America Online last year. Netscape 6 is available as a free download from Netscape’s Web site at https://www.netscape.com as well as on CD-ROM for $5.95.
Don’t bother with it.
Netscape 6 has some improvements, but they’re overshadowed by several design flaws. And its browsing enhancements lack the usefulness of their counterparts in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5, whose praises I sang in this space several weeks ago.
Netscape 6’s problems begin with its size: This Web bruiser is a 28-megabyte download, compared with 7 MB for Internet Explorer 5. Once installed, Netscape 6 requires about 30 MB of hard drive space; IE 5 uses about 17 MB. And Netscape 6 requires about twice as much memory to run as IE 5.
What do you get for all this girth? For starters, there’s a new look: Netscape 6’s windows and toolbars have a 3-D appearance.
Netscape also has borrowed from Microsoft by adding a sidebar, an optional, split-screen area along the browser window’s left edge. Microsoft uses this space to provide useful enhancements, such as the Scrapbook, which lets you save Web pages on your hard drive. Netscape, on the other hand, uses it primarily to present news feeds and other Web content, much of it from Netscape business partners.
The sidebar is just one area where Netscape chose funds over function. Another is the new Print Plus menu, whose three commands link to Hewlett-Packard sites that sell printers and supplies. Netscape 6 has no equivalent to Internet Explorer’s Print Preview command, which helps you save paper and ink, not buy them.
Given that Netscape is part of America Online, it isn’t surprising that Netscape 6 incorporates AOL’s Instant Messenger, which lets you swap messages in real time with AOL subscribers and with users of the standalone AOL Instant Messenger utility. Instant messaging is also nicely integrated into Netscape 6’s e-mail window. An icon shows whether an e-mail correspondent is accessible via instant messaging.
New privacy-oriented features make it easier to manage and refuse browser cookies--tidbits of information planted on your hard drive by sites you visit. You can have Netscape 6 query you when a site attempts to plant a cookie on your hard drive, and if you refuse the cookie, Netscape 6 rejects all subsequent cookies from that site.
The most eagerly awaited feature of Netscape 6 is its new page-rendering engine, named Gecko. This is the brains of the browser, responsible for interpreting and displaying Web pages. The rendering engines in Netscape’s earlier browsers were buggy and slow and didn’t adhere to international standards for Web-markup languages. Rewritten from the ground up, Gecko promised better standards support and faster performance.
Gecko does indeed provide better standards support, but the engine’s performance is hamstrung by the creaky body that surrounds it. Everything about Netscape 6 is slow. It takes 13 seconds to start up on my 400-megahertz Power Mac. Internet Explorer 5 takes less than 4 seconds. Netscape 6 often takes longer to display complex Web pages, and even scrolling is sluggish. And that’s when things work. Netscape 6 is prone to occasional crashes.
It gets worse. You can’t save an image by dragging it over to the Mac’s desktop--a convenience that Netscape’s Mac browsers have provided for years. And Netscape 6 flouts several standard Mac interface conventions. Its scroll bars, for example, don’t operate the way Mac scroll bars should.
Netscape 6’s good intentions--the Gecko rendering engine and the new cookie-management features--are overwhelmed by its slowness, its Mac interface inconsistencies and its marketing-driven new features. I wouldn’t have said this a year ago, but times change: When it comes to building a fast, functional Mac browser, Netscape could learn a lot from Microsoft.
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Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine.
