Preview: Netscape 6, Preview Release 2

By: Michael Hall
Thursday, August 10, 2000 11:53:50 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/2176/1/

Strengths and Weaknesses

If there's a recipe for sure disaster for a commentator or reviewer, the first ingredient is having an opinion about Mozilla. For over two years, the Linux community has been engaged in a love/hate relationship with the project, revealing the many fault lines and stress points running throughout the Linux world. In the absence of news about the project, a steady trickle of commentary flows, usually eliciting more energy and passion than the author likely put into the instigating piece. Mozilla has become a lightning rod, and the opinions surrounding it are heated. Even Suck, a passionate exercise in detachment, has worked up enough concern to advocate that the project be disbanded and rendered for whatever good bits have come of it: the virtual glue factory for a horse too late out of the gate and too plagued with ailments to contend.

Fortunately, for those who keep one eye out for Mozilla-related headlines, there's news now: the Mozilla project has made Milestone Release 17, and Netscape (who opened the source for the project and has provided much of the core team) has released its second preview of Netscape 6.

Despite the near-constant background buzz over Mozilla, milestone and preview releases serve as energizers for the Mozilla-observing community (be they admirers or cheerful participants in an alleged deathwatch). The incremental improvements from the last milestone rally the faithful. The ongoing list of bugs large and small fuel the pessimists to greater heights of eloquence regarding the project's impending doom.

We aren't here, however, to dwell overlong on the community's assorted reactions to the project. In fact, we've chosen to concern ourselves with the commercial manifestation of the Mozilla effort: Netscape 6.

The Netscape "product" is the commercial face of the Mozilla project. Where nightly builds of the bulk of the code going into Netscape are available in the form of tarballs at mozilla.org, Netscape has preferred to make only two releases so far, making a small amount of to-do about each.

Reaction to the first Netscape 6 preview release were mixed. Speaking to Microsoft users who downloaded it without any particular interest in the underlying meaning of its open source development reminded me that the average Linux user probably has a lot more patience for code "under development," than those who prefer to use words like "unfinished" or "missing stuff" to describe the same thing.

Reviewers were a little more mixed in their perceptions. Some took the high road, noting that as a preview release, Netscape 6 was something to behold. Others called it too little, too late, and joined the Mozilla obituary-writing community.

Now the second preview is out, more complete, more usable in general, and supposedly (alongside Milestone 17), the last release before the business of optimizing and bugcrushing are undertaken in earnest. In other words: this is what you're going to get, it just doesn't work as well as it will.

Before going any further, we'll issue a few warnings:

Netscape 6 will not present itself as usable to people in need of a stable browser. It has bugs, it misbehaves, and it disappears from the screen over mysterious vexations known only to itself. If casual users can spend an hour of worry- (and crash-) free browsing, we're happy for them.

We also don't believe it's somehow a mark of an imperfect Open Source/Free Software advocate to point out that the product isn't ready for prime time. Netscape 4.73 is more stable on our test machines where Linux is concerned, and when we ran the Windows version on a dual-boot machine, I found much the same thing. The Gecko rendering engine is very good, and it does a nice job. The wrapper around that engine, though, is flawed. It's no poor reflection on Open Source software that this is so, and if you've been around the community for long, you know this makes its own sense. It is, however, a mark of how far a product has to go if Netscape 4.7 is consistently better behaved.

Getting and Installing Netscape 6

Netscape 6 can be downloaded from the Netscape Web site or their ftp site. It weighs in at around 12MB, making it about 5MB heftier than the Mozilla binary release.

It arrives in a standard tarball that unzips into a directory labelled 'netscape-installer'. By running the script within that directory (named, unsurprisingly, 'netscape-installer') the user can launch a graphical installation tool. The tool offers the usual (for the Windows world) "Typical/Custom/Full" options for installation. Users may choose to install the browser on its own, or include support for AOL Instant Messenger, Japanese language support, Full Circle crash reporting software, the mail and news clients, and the spell checker. The installer is, by the way, GTK-based.

Once those options are selected, the program installs the required components in the target directory and quietly, very quietly, exits. Changing to the target directory (/usr/local/netscape, by default) and typing ./netscape, which sets some environmental variables and launches the program.

We installed it on a Duron 650 with 160 MB of RAM running Debian 2.2 (Frozen/Potato) with all updates, and ran it under Helix Code GNOME 1.2 with the Sawfish window manager.

Running Netscape 6

Upon launching Netscape, the first things to present themselves on the screen are a curious splash window, and an offer to sign up for assorted Netscape services to "enhance" the browsing experience. This is referred to as "activating" Netscape. It's primarily a come-on to sign up for a NetCenter account with all the free e-mail, calendars, and other services that entails. We weren't particularly impressed with the euphemism--it seemed to imply that the browser wasn't really working unless personal information was divulged and an account created.

Once the invitation to register is past, an information screen renders in the main browser window, featuring a floating and bobbing "Netscape". The screen helpfully points out the key elements of the browser, including an invitation to "Learn More" that led to a dead link. In fact, all the informational links pointed to a non-existent domain. When we gave up trying to learn about Netscape 6's "Streamlined Interface," "Small and Speedy" nature, and support of "Dynamic and Robust" sites, we tried to simply commence browsing by clicking the "Start Using Now" button, but that too, led to a dead link. we settled on clicking the "Home" button and visiting the Netscape Netcenter site to get away from the bobbing, multi-colored "Netscapes".

The Browsing Experience
Browsing the web with Netscape 6 is an uneven experience. When things work correctly, the rendering engine is excellent: it's smooth and only occasionally hangs up on elements in a page, making for some awkward pauses now and then. In general, it's very fast.

The browser itself is beginning to handle better than the last release, as well. Those who have been following the nightly builds from the Mozilla project won't notice much, but the difference in speed and general smoothness is fairly dramatic when compared to the last Netscape release.

One feature we found to be a pleasant relief was the ability to increase and decrease font size on the fly. It's something that's been lacking from Netscape for Linux for a long while. Even if you don't use the feature every day, it's wonderful for those sites that insist on using what ends up rendering as six point type.

Some of the preference settings are a little clunky and may bear reconsideration. Most particularly, the font settings are difficult to deal with: they're changed via a dropdown menu. That makes it difficult when juggling the many, many fonts some people accumulate.

Finally, there seem to be some bugs related to the use of a proxy. We surf behind the Junkbuster proxy, which began to return 'broken pipe' errors until we disabled its use in the browser and restarted.

Additional Features

This release of Netscape 6 allows "skins" to customize the appearance of the browser. The one theme included changes the program from its default "Modern" skin to the "Classic," which looks much like the Netscape 4 browser. It's too bad Netscape chose to include such a trivial example if they had to choose just one. The Sullivan/Aphrodite skin is a much nicer example of what can be done with Mozilla's theming abilities. The classic skin also shrank the already small fonts to near-unreadable sizes.

Looking around the main screen, the elements that jump out are the Sidebar (called "My Sidebar") and a collection of labels at the bottom of the screen labelled "Channels" "Tools," "Free Time," and "Shopping." Each opens up a set of links that pull the user directly into a related area of Netcenter.

The sidebar, by default, includes tabs for a "What's Related" function, a Search tool, a Buddy list (a carryover from AOL), CNN Headlines, and a stock quotes lookup tool. The sidebar is customizable and may also include travel-related information and weather forecasts. It's a useful bit of functionality as convenience features go. We were most happy with the "What's Related" and search tools, especially when we realized the search tool allowed a search of local bookmarks. A visit to the preferences tool also allows users to set which search engine returns results.

In addition to the sidebar and Netcenter tie-in links, Netscape 6 also includes the traditional mail and news clients, and HTML composer. It also includes an integrated AOL Instant Messenger client, which is interesting enough if you're a chat fan, providing a buddy list and chat client integrated with the browser in the sidebar. If you don't have a screen name or AIM account, the client launches a web-based registration.

The mail and news clients look fairly good, but with the preference settings for the mail client grayed out and no apparent way to tell it to leave mail on the server, we were loath to allow it near our mailboxes. The news client, while presenting little different in the way of appearance from the client found in Netscape 4.7, didn't allow us to subscribe to any groups.

Last Word

And once again, we're back to the core issue when it comes to writing about things Mozilla: there's no easy way to avoid displeasing everybody. A read through the initial comments of various talkback fora on the 'net the day of the release had avowals of "rocklike stability" vying with assertions that the program couldn't stay running for more than five minutes.

We actually had two separate experiences:

It crashed easily and badly during one session. Over and over again. The next time we sat down to it, things didn't seem so bad. We managed about half an hour of use before problems began to manifest.

If we have an opinion on the meaning of all this, it's pretty straightforward:

A browser as complex as the one the Mozilla project is aiming for isn't something a hobbyist whips up over the weekend. The developers have torn the source they were given down to the ground, rebuilt it, and there is no denying that Gecko is wonderful. The hangups seem to be in the area of the interface that holds it all together. If we had any doubts about this, the Galeon project has shown it's possible to put a simple interface together that allows Gecko to shine. It's just up to Mozilla's developers and the work they have in front of them to make good on an ambitious attempt at a complex product.