NETSCAPE 7.0 DEBUTS

Bill Gates once said of Netscape’s browser dominance that they have 110% of the market. He then proceeded to give Internet Explorer away for free and consistently improved his browser so that in almost no time it came to command more than 80% of all browser usage.

Netscape responded by turning over its destiny to AOL who bought the felled market leader. While that impressed no one, lo and behold: Netscape’s heart has continued to tick. The last time anyone was interested in Netscape was version 4.x. Since then, they’ve brought out 6.0 and just now, 7.0.

Should you care? This is the first of a two-part IMHO that will at least give you reason to ponder.

With 7.0 comes a host of impressive features IE doesn't yet have. My favorite is tabbed browsing. Instead of opening up 17 different browser windows, you can have one with 17 different tabs. I find this wonderfully useful. Pop-up windows remain a problem, but in the preferences menu, there's an option called "Allow unrequested popup windows" that you can turn off to stop them cold. Some other features:

Print Preview has been restored. It was ousted in version 6.0
Smooth integration with AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ (both are AOL owned networks)
Pop-up tray notification of mail (a la Eudora and Outlook)
Radio@Netscape, which hooks into Spinner. Spinner is a free online radio service, not much different than your typical FM radio. They have over 175 stations to chose from, with everything from Classical to Alternative. Because it is free, it is advertiser supported, but again, not much unlike typical broadcast radio. A broadband connection is recommended, but not required for use.
The Integrated Search Function is accessed from the all-in-one sidebar, accessible from the View->Show/Hide menu, or simply by pressing "F9" on the keyboard. The sidebar contains many tabs, one of them a search tab, and Netscape will continue to add to the sidebar feature, making it more and more useful.

In addition to these cool features, Netscape's devotion to speed — meaning how quickly a page loads — has become evident. Our test lab pitted various Netscape versions against each other and Internet Explorer 6.0.

The full results may be viewed separately. Please note that these are timed on a T-1 line, so that differences should be exacerbated at lower bandwidths.

A quick summary of the results show that Netscape 7.0 can be many times faster than IE, depending upon the content of the page. For example, it's 6 times faster for a page with deeply nested tables. It's interesting to note that the older Netscape 4.79 can out-perform all the competitors when it comes to handling large files. Also, it seems to do much better with traditional HTML — that is, forms, tables, and text — the stuff that's been around since HTML 2.0.

In Part II, we will address any additional challenges posed to HTML programmers by the advent of Netscape 7.0. Programmers have to deal with the incompatibilities of different browsers and versions to ensure they deliver a uniformity of layout to the user. For example, Netscape's handling of Cascading Style Sheets, while improved over version 6.0, still isn't up to IE standards.

Stay tuned for more.