Product Reviews

Once upon a time, Netscape Navigator ruled the web: before 1997, it was virtually synonymous with browsers. But then Microsoft lured people away with Internet Explorer, eventually nailing the Netscape coffin lid down tight. Or so we thought.

Firefox users will feel at home, as Netscape has turned to the Gecko page-rendering engine that drives Firefox. This means you get the same across-the-board standards compliance, the same compatibility with most modern web pages, and the same support for Firefox 2 extensions.

What it didn't do was pick up an existing Firefox bookmarks file on our test system, offering only to import the IE and Opera ones it found. But the

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Gecko support does at least mean you get similar performance to Firefox: our page-rendering test took 5.26 seconds (compared to 7.09 seconds for IE7), and memory usage was just 25,268KB.

In an attempt to distance itself from the inevitable Firefox-by-another-name accusations, Netscape has tuned into the social aspect of web browsing and added a slew of related features. One is an integrated tool that enables you to vote for news stories and blog postings, and the ability to post stories directly to netscape.com - but, of course, this is only really of any value to users of that particular social-bookmarking service.

Other features also require this Netscape tie-in, such as the Friends' Activity Sidebar; this shows when your contacts post a new story. Even the news subscriptions delivery is tied to Netscape news only. Thankfully, there's some innovation without the incestuous intent. The Link Pad lets you quickly drop links into the sidebar for later viewing, while the automatic URL correction for dealing with common misspellings and mistakes is very neat.

But that, it has to be said, is it. Why anyone other than already committed users of Netscape.com services would be tempted to use Navigator 9 instead of Firefox is, frankly, beyond us.