At least it looks good. (Netscape Navigator 6.0)

Name: thanatoszane

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Netscape Navigator 6.0
Date:	20/02/01 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The skins look good

Disadvantages: Slow, buggy, leaks memory.

Firstly, I'll confess that I'm a bit of a Microsofty. Perhaps that means I shouldn't be writing an opinion on Netscape, as I'd obviously hate it anyway, but my feelings on this one are so strong that I have to write about it.

Netscape 6 is a big departure from Netscape 4.whatever. Instead of boring grey buttons, they have skins (although you can still have boring grey buttons if you want.)

Some of the skins are pretty cool to look at, and I can see potential in the side bar, and the thing at the bottom with 'Business', 'Tech, 'Fun', and other menus. The intention of these is probably to let you get access to the information you want, whenever you want.

BUT IT'S SO SLOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!

It takes ages, and ages, and ages to load even simple pages, and if you click on a checkbox in something like hotmail to select a message to delete, then go away and have a bath, have a coffee, do our shopping, then it MIGHT have realised you've clicked on it.

Want to scroll down a page? Get your pet snail to do the London Marathon while you wait, it's that slow.

Seriously - the sidebars would be nice - there's stuff like CNet.com downloads, Search, What's related, even Pocketpig - some nutter who uses their PDA to draw pictures of what they've eaten, then uploads them each day. It would be nice to have these things handy, but when you click on them to make them visible, a green 'loading'icon comes up to taunt you while it takes it's time to load. Even clicking a link to go to another page takes ages to register.

I don't have a slow PC, and I have plenty of memory, or so I thought, but 128Mb Ram starts looking like 16Mb when you stick Netscape 6 on.

It displays websites a little better than the older versions of Netscape did - presumably it's getting relaxed about coding now, just like Internet Explorer is, but is that R
EALLY a good thing?

I suspect I''m going to move over to a combination of Internet Explorer to read my Hotmails and view some sites that simply won't work in anything else, and Opera to use for the rest of the time.

The new version of Opera is Adware, so really it's free if you don't mind an advert banner at the top of the screen, and it's got a similar layout to Netscape with a sidebar for bookmarks. It's also a lot faster than Netscape, and less of a memory drain,also it's stable, although being so small what would you expect? Heck, I may even try Mozilla, which Netscape 6 is apparently based on. Anything is better than this.

I don't know what real Netscape fans think about NS6, although I have heard one or two say they feel it was released too soon, but I suspect that they will be alienated by this version - it's slow, buggy, and a huge memory leak. Sounds a bit like the stereotype of a Microsoft product, except this time in comparison Netscape IE 5.5 is positively sleek.

Doo Yoo get the idea, I don't like it - wait until 6.1 - see if it gets any faster / better, but I doubt it.

Summary: