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.
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