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Plenty of Customization with Netscape 6

When the World Wide Web first took off, a little company called Netscape was founded to commercialize a version of the Mosaic browser developed for Carnegie Mellon University. The company named its browser Netscape Navigator, released it to an increasingly Web-hungry public, and watched its user base grow. Over the years it has survived hackers, detractors, and more important, the ever-growing dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Netscape's user base has eroded during the last few years, but the company, now owned by America Online, still counts millions of loyal users--enough that many Web sites still carry a small tag line saying "Best if viewed with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator."

Version 6--the newest version of Netscape--builds on the software that earned a loyal user base, offering new features and an easier way to configure custom versions of the browser.

Netscape 6 is built on Netscape Gecko, a new code engine that differs from the Netscape 4.x code. Versions of Netscape 6 will be available for the Windows 95, 98, 2000, Me, and NT platforms, Mac OS, and Linux. We tested the software on PCs running Windows 98 SE and Windows Me.

While the Netscape Navigator browser is at the core of the product, the complete Navigator 6 includes a mail/newsgroup program (Netscape Mail), an e-mail writer (Netscape Composer), RealPlayer 8, Net2Phone, and an integrated version of AOL Instant Messenger called Netscape IM. The Search button in the browser connects to the Google metasearch engine.

The package is a 24MB download, or it can be requested on CD-ROM from Netscape for $5.95. You can also download just the browser, at 7.5MB. If you are installing the software on a PC with a previous version of Netscape, you can migrate the user profiles and bookmarks to Netscape 6.

Despite the new engine, Netscape Navigator is much the same as the prior version. The biggest cosmetic change is the inclusion of two themes that alter the way the browser appears: the Classic, which looks very much like the older Navigator 4.x, and the Modern, which looks somewhat like the new MSN Explorer interface. Netscape anticipates that many new themes will be available for downloading from its Web site.

New to Version 6 is the Netscape Client Customization Kit, or CCK. This is available as a download from the Netscape Web site and is useful for offering your own custom version of the Netscape Navigator to friends or customers. The utility takes you through a series of screens that lets you customize your version of Netscape.

Netscape Composer is an HTML editor that lets you create your own Web documents. It's a great way to also send HTML-encoded e-mail. You can also use Composer as a standard word processor, which is great when you need to create a more complex e-mail.

Also new is My Sidebar, a window on the left-hand side of the browser screen that has tabs containing bookmarked URLs filed under the appropriate headings. Netscape has arranged for content providers, such as CNN, the Weather Channel, and others, to provide tabs already organized to content. You can also keep your Buddy List in the My Sidebar portion of the screen and simply click on a name in the Buddy List to send that person an Instant Message.

There has been some heated discussion online about bugs found during Netscape 6 beta testing. Some are concerned that Netscape 6 is not quite 100 percent compliant with several industry standards, including HTML, DOM (Document Object Model), ECMAScript standards, and a few others. We did not do extensive testing in these areas, preferring to use the browser extensively in the area it is intended for--the Internet. Netscape answers many of these issues in "W3C Standards Support in IE and the Netscape Gecko Browser Engine" posted on its Web site. If the Netscape 6 browser is not compliant in some areas, workarounds will be developed rapidly. We didn't see any immediate impact upon standard Web surfing.

Netscape 6 is a better and more complete Web utility than Netscape 4.x. The upgrade is small enough to be easily downloaded, even on a dial-up connection. Current Netscape users will definitely want to give the new browser a close look, as may those who have run into one of IE 5.x's many roadblocks.