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Whenever a browser comes out with a new version, it's like an automobile manufacturer coming out with a sleek-bodied car. The lines and curves may look real nice, but you have to look under the hood and take a test drive before you can form an honest opinion for yourself. In order to beat their competitors, automakers may rush into production, which can lead to recalls because of parts failure.

Netscape 6 shares this same fate. Internet Explorer has taken away most of Netscape's market share, and this new version of Netscape has been rushed to the public with bugs and standards-compliance problems. O'Reilly author David Flanagan has started a manifesto addressing the problems with Netscape 6, and urges the developer community to protest the new version. After hearing all of the haranguing around N6 since its release, I decided to take a test drive myself from a non-developer point of view, where I found more problems than just standards compliance.

Non-developer viewpoint

Upon firing up N6 for Windows, I was impressed with the fancy new splash screen and the sleek new look of the browser once it finally appears on your screen. The buttons have an updated look and yet still look very Netscape-esque. Borrowing from IE 5.5, N6 has added a "My Sidebar" section, with its tabbed choices of bookmarks, What's Related, and search engine. You can still access your bookmarks from the taskbar, and searching can also be done by entering keywords into the location bar, but it is nice to have them all together in one space.

One thing that looked interesting to me about the "My Sidebar" feature was the ability to add other tabs, such as news, stocks, horoscopes, or the other features that are available if you're familiar with the "My Netscape" type of accounts. After selecting the stocks tab, I tried to customize it so it would cater to my portfolio. Seeing that I didn't have an account set up with Netscape, a pop-up window appeared that asked for my pertinent information. The problem with this pop-up window is that there is no scroll bar, so I couldn't submit the information even if I wanted to; the window was larger than my monitor could accommodate.

Being slightly perturbed, I decided to try and voice my frustrations with one of my colleagues over AIM. On the bottom of the browser window is a series of icons, including one to launch AIM. After selecting this button, a window pops up with "Register" in the title bar. Then, upon looking under the File menu, I found the Import Buddy List and Sign On options were grayed out. After looking at the help file and trying to figure it out on my own, I was ready to give up trying to access AIM through N6. Somehow, I found that to access the IM application, you have to select Tabs from the My Sidebar pop-up window, then Customize Sidebar, then Buddy List. From there you can sign up for a new account or import an account you are already using. Talk about non-intuitive.

Browsing

The reason I downloaded N6 in the first place was to see if it would alleviate some of the problems I was having between my network and both IE5 and Netscape 4.7. Netscape 6 has cleared up any network problems I encountered with other browsers, and a test drive around the Internet showed me that N6 is very quick in loading web sites. I've also found Netscape 6 to be great for working within the browser window, which is integral for web production.

The problem I have with using the browser is when a page uses <a> tags as reference points. When this happens, the browser thinks that you are loading that particular page the same number of times as the amount of <a> points, thereby recording that in your browser history. So when you select the Back button, you have to cycle through any number of identical pages to get back to where you started.

One discussion around the office was that browsers have catered to bad web designers for much too long; the browser will often render a document even if it was written with sloppy code. Netscape 6 has taken the first step towards making Joe Public learn to write correct code, meaning that you should start writing in XHTML if you haven't already started. If you start using N6 for browsing, you may find some interesting formatting of some web pages that were authored using bad coding practices. N6 is also the first browser to fully support XML, CSS1, and RDF, which may have lured some of the developer audience back over to Netscape had they released a standards-compliant browser in the first place.

Non-Windows users beware

When I downloaded N6 to my Windows box, I encountered no problems. As a matter of fact, I was happy to find that it didn't even write over version 4.7. When I went to check in with a few Mac using friends to see how they liked the new version, the reviews were mixed. Browsing was a breeze and no problems occured upon download to a blue and white G3, but major problems were reported upon download to a Powerbook 2000. After three attempts to download and install the program and multiple computer crashes, our Powerbook user has given up until the problem is resolved in an updated version.

Moments later I heard an agonized moan from my Linux-using sysadmin, who downloaded and installed the new version (after having to go to the FTP site himself), only to find that the N6 install had completely obliterated any trace of previous versions of Netscape and erased all of his bookmarks without warning. Netscape prides itself on using a non-platform-dependent codebase in this new version, but I now must wonder if this claim of a platform-independent application works in theory but not in public practice.

There is a lot to like with Netscape 6, including their incorporation of password recall and the ability to change the look of the browser through different skins. This is a product that needs to be recalled and revamped, though; there are too many problems with usability and their omission of full standards compliance. During the two years that we've been waiting for Netscape 6, we had visions of this being the next generation of web browsers, and we are willing to wait a little bit longer as long as the release is done correctly. I find it odd that Netscape would rush to beat the competition in an attempt to win back fanfare within the developer community by releasing an incomplete and (easily fixed) bug-ridden product.

Steve McCannell is a writer/producer for the O'Reilly Network and the founder of Lost Dog Found Music.

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