Product Reviews

When we initially looked at the preview release of Netscape 7.0, we were impressed with many of the features.

The speed of rendering was incomparable, making Internet Explorer look slow and dated. Tabbed browsing, which allows you to have more than one page open without multiple windows cluttering up your screen, was an effective feature that genuinely made the whole Internet using experience better. And the integration of an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client worked surprisingly well, and was coupled with a decent email client.

The final released version lives up to the promise that the preview showed, and, as might be expected, improves on the overall speed of the product. Where opening new windows under Mac OS X could be sluggish, Netscape 7.0 is now much snappier.

Bare essentials

All of the features are well made, although the email client and instant messaging client are very much of the no-frills variety. Usefully the mail client includes direct support for AOL email. The instant messaging client can handle either AIM or ICQ, but not both at the same time, which is a missed opportunity.

As with previous versions of Netscape Communicator, there's also an address book and a small, but perfectly usable, simple Web page creator. It's not the kind of product that can create sites, but for knocking out a simple single page it works well enough.

The browser is fast at loading and rendering pages, and the added extras are nice interface touches, especially the tabbed browsing and the sidebar. The sidebar can be customised to show various kinds of commonly accessed information,

ADVERTISEMENT

such as stock prices or browsing history, and tabbed browsing is a real space-saver on smaller screens.

There are a couple of small niggles, though. First of all, despite being extremely standards-compliant, there are Web sites that don't display properly. This is really the fault of the site designers, rather than Netscape, but it's worth bearing in mind when choosing Netscape over Internet Explorer. Also, Netscape uses its own proxy settings rather than Mac OS 9 or OS X system preferences, which means that you have to set them manually if you move locations.

All in all, Netscape is a decent package. However, since we looked at the preview release, the landscape for browsers has changed. With the latest version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has managed to make the rendering speed somewhat faster, to the extent that it is far more usable on slower machines than before. For casual users, this will be enough to persuade them not to download another Web browser.

For more experienced users, the credible alternatives to Netscape or Internet Explorer are improving. One such example is Chimera, the Cocoa-based browser that uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Netscape 7.0, and has gained many of Netscape's more attractive features. In particular, it has added tabbed browsing, which is the key feature for power users, and this means it will be a better offering for anyone who doesn't want the mail and instant messaging features of Netscape 7.0.

Take aim

What's more, with the integration of an AIM-compatible client in OS X 10.2, some users will find the AIM client in Netscape surplus to requirements. Given that Apple also bundles an email client with its operating systems (Outlook Express for OS 9, Mail for OS X) it's difficult to see how many people will actually want the mail client in Netscape 7.0.

Despite its positive features, it's difficult to recommend Netscape 7.0 as there are better browsers, better email clients, better instant messaging software and all of them are free, so there's no compelling reason to go for Netscape on cost grounds. Perhaps on other platforms, Netscape is a more realistic option, but on the Mac it's simply outclassed.