| Product: |
Netscape Navigator 6.0 |
| Date: |
04.03.01 (13 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: looks nice, nice email features, renders pages better
Disadvantages: slow, big, BUGGY!!!
My first browser was Netscape. IE was not bundled with Win95 I was using. I liked it a lot and I became a fan of Netscape. I don't have the best of the feelings for Microsoft so IE was not even a thought even my uni was using Netscape. I left the uni for summer Netscape was at 4.6. After a 9 month period without internet and after I got a new computer with IE preinstalled last summer I was patiently waiting for Netscape 6.
It was supposed to be small, fast, and stable.
I started installing it to my system from beta version even. At last the full version arrived and I rushed to download it.
Small. Well it isn't really. It is a download of around 25MB if you want all it comes with - AOLIM, Communicator and some other stuff. You can decrese the size by a little but don't expect to go below 18MB of compressed data. That is comparable to IE5.
Fast. Netscape was never fast in loading it self but seemed faster in downloading and showing pages. Now it takes even more time to load and the pages to me at least seem to load just as fast or slow as IE5.5.
Stable. Netscape used to be more stable than IE. The 4.x versions I used were rarely if at all crashing although my friends were complaining all the time about IE. That I hoped would be the case with the 6th version but I was dissappointed. The bugs are aparent everywhere and it crashes more often than IE. And don't hope for bug fixes. The 6.01 version came about two months after the first and in my machine is only slightly better if at all. Example of the bad behaviour is the fact that after you load it once and then close it you will have trouble opening it again if you get to open it.
So all gloomy and black? Not really. I accept that it fails in three basic tests compared to it's immediate rival but it has some nice features.
Email is easily categorised by your email account. If you have more than one email accounts each one of them have a different f
older and when they come they get into that folder.
It can change completely with skins that change the whole appearence of it and personalise it. Some of them are impressive and makes it nicer to work with.
It follows W3C rules closer than IE5 which means that displays pages better than IE5 and earlier netscape, but not as close as it should after so much time of being developed. It will be surpassed by IE easily soon enough.
The Sidebar and the bottom menus are cool and interesting to have but they are too slow to be of any use even in a decent machine - P3 600 with 12GB and 128MB.
It also remembers passwords and usernames as IE does but it does it better and you can even secure the file that these are saved at.
But other than that there is not much good stuff to mention about it. If you do want to try it though either wait for a version with magor improvements to this one or try Mozilla. It has the nice features of Netscape, it is less buggy and it is improved much more rapidly than Netscape.
But for the moment you better stay away of it.
Summary:
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