It was March 1998. Netscape Communications was still an independent company, Windows 95 was the most recent Microsoft operating system, and no one had ever heard of Britney Spears or Ricky Martin(ahhh, the good old days). And Netscape made the seemingly radical decision to release its Web browser as open source. At the time, no one thought it would be more than two and a half years before the results of this decision would finally be released.

But that time has finally arrived with the release this week of Netscape 6. Was it worth the wait? Well, to give Netscape and the developers at Mozilla.org credit, Netscape 6 is a total rewrite--in fact, its predecessor, Communicator 4.7, has more in common with Microsoft's Internet Explorer than it does with Netscape 6. The new product takes several bold new steps, including excellent cross-platform support, very good standards support, and an open architecture that makes it almost infinitely customisable.

But Netscape 6 also takes several steps backward, especially in the areas of most concern to corporate users, such as messaging and directory support. The most damaging of these is the product's lack of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) support.

Since our first report on the lack of LDAP in Netscape 6, we have received well over 100 messages from businesses that will not deploy Netscape 6 because it lacks LDAP support. Many of these businesses have stuck with Communicator 4.x--despite its inferior browsing capabilities--because of its excellent LDAP and messaging features.

Not only will these companies not be able to deploy Netscape 6, but they also won't be able to realistically evaluate the product because of its lack of key features. Furthermore, many administrators will have to deal with the support headaches caused by users who decide to individually upgrade to Netscape 6.

However, for users who don't need LDAP, Netscape 6 is a very worthwhile upgrade that is much better than Netscape 4.x browsers and also better in most ways than Microsoft's IE 5.5. Nevertheless, although it was very stable in tests, we recommend running it in conjunction with the previous version at least until the first patch or update is released.

Is Netscape 6 good enough to steal IE users? Probably not, although we recommend that they try it. One of the biggest effects of Netscape 6 will be in standards support, where it does better than most browsers. Finally, this is the light at the end of the tunnel for Web developers who have had to write pages to work on the archaic and standards-incompetent Communicator 4.x.

Opera Software's Opera 4.0 browser, which has maintained users based on its small size, broad platform support and very good standards support, will likely be most affected by Netscape 6. Netscape 6 competes with Opera in all these areas, and does better with some standards, such as DOM (Distributed Object Model).

In addition, although Opera has broad platform support, the versions aren't consistent across operating systems. Netscape 6 is essentially identical on Windows, Macs and Linux systems.

Interestingly, the biggest competitor to Netscape 6 might be its open-source kin at mozilla.org. Milestone 18 of the Mozilla browser currently has almost all the best features of Netscape 6 without some of the most annoying, such as the many features that tie Netscape 6 to Netcenter and America Online. The Mozilla browser even provides an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client, something that is very unlikely to appear in Netscape as long as it's part of AOL. Mozilla 1.0 is tentatively expected to ship in the second quarter of next year.

Interface

Netscape 6 includes a skins feature which the company refers to as "themes." By default, the browser ships with two themes, the new modern theme and the classic theme, which give the browser much of the same look and feel as Communicator 4.x. Netscape has started a contest to encourage users to create new themes for others to download. A number of themes are also available at www.mozilla.org.

At first glance, the new My Sidebar feature in Netscape 6 looks very similar to IE's Explorer bars. However, although My Sidebars by default include much of the same functionality, such as bookmarks, searching and related Web sites, they are based completely on standard Web technology, making it very simple for any site or business to create custom Sidebars.

We didn't like the new interface for browsing local directories on a system. In previous versions, this worked in the same way as browsing an FTP site, which made it simple to move up and down in directories. The new interface makes it difficult to move up in directories; we had to actually delete the information from the address bar.

A very strong feature in Netscape 6 is its integrated search capability. Like similar search engines in other browsers, it is simple to choose from a variety of search engines and results can be viewed in a Sidebar. More interesting is the fact that these search features are based on Apple Computers' Sherlock technology. This makes it simple search any site or engine, even internal intranet servers, from within the browser. On our test Mac, Netscape 6 detected Sherlock files and automatically added them to a list of search engines. It was also possible to add Sherlock files on Windows and Linux, although this was a kludgy process involving dropping files in a directory. We would prefer a built-in process for adding Sherlock files.

Netscape 6 did a good job of displaying most popular Web sites, but it had its problems, too. For example, it was unable to search within results on www.google.com. However, many of the problems we ran into came from poor standards support on the Web sites in question.

The standards support in Netscape 6 isn't perfect. It lacks full support of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 2 and DOM 1, as a recent letter from David Flanagan, who has written several books for O'Reilly Inc., pointed out. From tests using pages created based on validation tests from the World Wide Web Consortium, Netscape 6 didn't come out perfectly, though it was still much better than IE, and better than Opera in DOM support.

Netscape 6's performance when rendering pages was much better than Communicator 4.7's, and also beat IE 5.5 in most tests--although both were so fast that the differences were negligible. Netscape 6's performance gain comes from the Gecko layout engine, which is the core of Netscape 6. The small, fast Gecko is a strong candidate for use as an embedded browsing agent.

A huge improvement in Netscape 6 over Communicator 4.7 is the new custom install option: Communicator forced users to take pretty much the entire browser suite. In Netscape 6, it is possible to install only the features that a user wants, for example, we could choose not to install Instant Messenger. Users had to install it in Communicator 4.7.

Also, Netscape 6 now uses a pluggable JVM (Java virtual machine). This means that users can choose to use JVMs already on their system, rather than use the default Sun JVM included with the browser. Netscape 6 also has good multi-language support.

A new menu option called Privacy and Security gives users access to the new cookie, password and form managers, as well as the standard security manager. The cookie manager, much like a similar feature in Opera let us view detailed information on all cookies, choose to remove and reject individual cookies in the future, and define sites from which we'd always accept or reject cookies.

The password and form managers are similar to the Auto-complete feature in IE 5.5, making it possible for the browser to automatically enter user name and passwords for sites and automatically fill in forms on sites. Netscape 6 implements this feature with encryption as an option, making it more secure then IE's Autocomplete. However, we still recommend not using these form or password managers for any core sites until they have withstood some analysis by the Internet security community.

The Mail component in Netscape 6 has seen several changes, including integration with Instant Messenger. If you enter a user's e-mail address in the To: bar, you can also see if that user is logged in to Instant Messenger and can then opt for real-time discussion instead of e-mail. It is also now possible for AOL users to use Netscape 6 as their mail application. The mail client also includes a very nice feature to define and use more then one SMTP server to send mail. Netscape has added a feature that lets users access Netscape Web-Mail accounts from the client.

However, not everything is good in the new mail client. It lacks the ability to handle secure Post Office Protocol connections. Also, a new feature in the browser's Address Book grabs the e-mail address from every message that a user reads. Although this can be very useful for finding a specific address, it can also be a hassle for users who receive hundreds of messages a day. The best option would be a filter to just save addresses from specific domains.

Netscape 6 also includes a feature that lets users sync their Address Book with a Netcenter account--a nice addition for Netcenter users. But users who would like to sync to another server-based address book are out of luck. And Netscape 6 lacks the handheld sync capabilities that were in Communicator, which will be a big disappointment for current users of Netscape browsers.

Composer is still not the first tool you would consider to build Web pages. It's really a bare-bones HTML editor, but its new, pure WYSIWYG capabilities will suffice for quick-and-dirty edits on a Web page.

Netscape 6
Company: Netscape Communications
Price: Free Download
Rating: 4 Star