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created 19 Nov. 2000

Netscape 6, Is It Really Worth The Effort?

Okay, so here it is, after a few years of waiting, the successor to Netscape 4. Finally out of beta, I've been able to work with it for a while now, and the impressions, unfortunately, are consistent with my earlier impressions of the various PR, (Public Release) versions.

The installation went smoothly enough, although it did take four or five attempts for the initial download. I'm not going to get upset about this, I'm willing to bet that every router that's ever heard of netscape.com is being hammered pretty heavily right now. The install creates about 480 items in the Netscape Folder, and it takes up about 29 MB of drive space. This is less space than Communicator 4.7.X, although about twice as many items, and more space and files than for Outlook Express 5 and Internet Explorer 5. One instantly annoying part of Netscape 6 is that thanks to a new plugin architecture, which is evidently incompatible with 4.7.X's plugins, Netscape ships with only Java and Shockwave plugins, no Quicktime, or any other plugins are evidently available.

Initial impressions are the same as the PR versions. The HTML rendering is faster than 4.7.X, but not noticeably faster than IE5, with the exception of long text pages, which has always been a sore spot with IE. The appearance of Netscape 6 can be changed via Netscape's themes mechanism, and the final release ships with 2 themes, the new theme associated with Netscape 6, and the older, 4.7.X-ish theme. I personally don't have a problem with the new appearance, and find it cleaner in some ways than the 4.7.X appearance.

One problem I do have is with the fact that the interface itself is slow and buggy. Popup text hints for button usage take longer than for IE, and the amount of artifacts that get left behind by either the popup text, the dropdown lists, etc. are much higher than is acceptable for a non-beta product. Netscape's insistence on using a common interface is part of the problem here, but a bigger problem is that it appears that in its quest to be platform neutral, Netscape decided that it would be better to completely duplicate all window, and scrolling routines that already exist in any OS. The MacOS Appearance Manager settings are ignored, and a severe speed penalty in scrolling long pages seems to be one of the results of this. Other interface bugs include the inability, at least on my PowerBook's external monitor, to widen web and email windows past the width of the PowerBook's LCD screen. When switching between windows within Netscape, the refresh of the windows can take up to 3 seconds, which is annoyingly slow. Scrolling is jumpy, much more so than in IE or 4.7.X. Another entry in the interface/OS incompatibility problem list is the utter ignoring of the Internet Control panel/Internet Config that Netscape does. Considering that 4.7.5 finally started to use the MacOS internet preferences settings, and that Netscape 6 ships with out any pre-defined helper applications, this distancing of the product from the interface is all the more annoying.

But the worst offenses are in the area of keyboard equivalents. Now, to mark a message as read, instead of the 4.7.X keyboard command of CMD-/, the command is the letter 'M'. Not CMD-M, (which is still 'New Message'), or CTRL-M, or even OPT-M. Just 'M'. To mark all messages in a folder as read, you use the letter 'A'. I'm amazed at this, as it is not too hard to see where you could accidently hit the letter 'A' in a window, and mark all messages as read without wanting to. Considering that other email clients allow you to use letters to quickly jump to other folders, the use of unmodified alphabet characters for program functions is mindboggling in the potential for causing all sorts of problems. This insistence on 'doing it all ourselves', on platform neutrality at all costs has caused far more problems than it will ever fix. It seems to have made the product much more complicated than it should be for any reason, and caused an even more serious issue in the area of RAM usage.

Netscape 6 doesn't just use RAM, it inhales it. I normally double the manufacturer's recommended RAM allocation for any application. So for Netscape 6, I set the minimum RAM to 20MB, and the preferred size to 40MB. Just sitting there, with only my home page open, Netscape was using 29.5MB of RAM, which tells me that the default preferred RAM settings are too low to be functional. By the end of 3 hours of use, including IMAP email, and my standard web browsing, Netscape 6 was using 47.3MB of a new allocated amount 60.7MB of RAM. So at this point, even my doubled RAM allocation was too low, and Netscape had vampired an additional 20MB of RAM from the system. Even with only one browser window, simply changing web sites, scrolling, and refreshing pages drove the RAM usage up an additional 1.7MB, and stayed there, even with the program doing nothing, for over an hour, no surfing, no emailing, nothing. This seems to indicate a pretty radical memory leak, as with nothing going on, Netscape should have returned RAM back to the system. As a comparison, for my normal usage, I have both Internet Explorer 5 and Microsoft Entourage set to use 16MB of RAM each, and that's the limits they stay within. Netscape starts out with 8MB more than both of those applications, and needs another 20+MB of RAM in addition to do the same amount of work. This is simply not acceptable behavior for an application that is in its fifth or sixth iteration, and especially not for an iteration that has been in development for over a year now.

When it comes to email, Netscape 6 isn't even able to keep up with its predecessors, much less its competitors. Netscape 4.7.X allowed me to download over 3000 IMAP email headers in under 5 minutes over a 33.6Kbps modem. Netscape 6, on a cable modem that was giving me T-1 level throughput took 50 minutes to download 1500 IMAP email headers. In both cases, the email server was the same Netscape/iPlanet IMAP server running on Solaris on a dual UltraSparc server. Netscape 6's email filtering capabilities are essentially unchanged over 4.7.X's, and when compared to the filtering capabilities of products such as Outlook Express, Eudora, Entourage, or even Emailer, quite pitiful. The lack of LDAP address book capability limits Netscape even further, by removing a valuable and useful way of condensing company and university - wide address books into one, easily administered and maintained listing. To be blunt, the lack of LDAP is forcing not only my company, but the company of almost every administrator I've talked to into starting the process of either removing Netscape from the list of supported software, or freezing Netscape at the 4.X.X level.

This is the first version of Netscape I find myself unable to recommend in any capacity, unless you are a web designer, and need to preview pages with Netscape's Gecko HTML engine. However, judging by the opinions of most web designers that I know, they are probably just going to redirect Netscape 6 users to pages that are compatible with Netscape 3. This is due to Netscape's overly rigid requirements that HTML conform to current W3C standards. Don't misunderstand me here, compliance with those standards should be the goal of every web designer. But there is a lot of old code out there that will never be revamped, for various fiscal and time reasons. Unfortunately, if your code used Netscape 4.X specific tags such as the layer tag, Netscape 6 won't work with those pages. Being compliant with the current CSS, DOM, XML and other standards is good, but to be incompatible with older versions borders on ridiculous. Considering the public lambasting that IE5 took over not being too accepting of older HTML, for Netscape to be even more restrictive with it's HTML engine is incomprehensible, especially considering their current market share.

I'm disappointed that AOL chose to release as final a product that is so obviously not a final release. It may have been a large helping of crow to release a PR4 version of Netscape 6, but it would have surely been less than the crow AOL is going to eat with the first service pack fix for Netscape 6. I'm also saddened at the way that AOL is ignoring, and even thumbing their nose at any of the non-home user market with this release. While the business and Higher Education markets may not have been AOL's traditional markets, they were Netscape's, especially higher education. But it looks like AOL has ceded these to Microsoft, Opera, and iCab. I don't see how they can afford to do this, unless they really mean for this to be the last commercial browser released under the Netscape name, and for Mozilla to take all of this function as their own. If so, I will mourn the passing of one of the companies that helped make the internet a tool for all of us.

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