Has anyone tried it? I’ve been using Netscape 4.7 for what, almost 2 years now? and wonder if there’s any incentive to upgrade. For me the reason would be if 6 supports Unicode characters (Netscape 4.7 doesn’t support half as many characters as IE5).
But I keep hearing that Netscape 6 bites. What do you guys think?
I installed it.
It sucked.
I uninstalled it and put 4.7 back in my box.
It’s huge. It’s slow. It eats memory like a starving Survivor who just got back to Sydney.
The mail and newsreader are Outlook (bleah!) clones.
But then, it’s a beta, so god only knows what the final cut’s going to be like.
For now, though, my recommendation is to stick with 4.7x or upgrade to a higher 4.7x if you’re not already at 4.76.
My husband downloaded it and liked it.
I hated it. Haven’t uninstalled it yet, but its days are numbered. It’s WAAAAAY slow…and its looks remind me of AOL browsers. I used to use the regular Netscape all the time but I was constantly getting illegal error messages, so I swapped over to Explorer. Yeah, a pain, but definitely not as many crashes.
A bud of mine has been raving about Opera…says it’s fast as lightning and takes up very little room. I might try that out.
I don’t loathe it, but it feels weird.
Buttons don’t look like normal buttons, it doesn’t have the look of feel of a stable program.
In fact, it’s more stable than it looks. It’s about as stable as IE 4.
It generally load pages normally, even though on many ocassions, it looks like it’s on the verge of a crash or shut down.
Java support is a separate download.
It has AOL-Time Warner grafted on to it like a third arm.
Email is decent, but it still feels weird.
Newsgroups are less stable.
For peace of mind, stay away from Netscape 6. It works, but goes out of its way to convince you otherwise.
I couldn’t get it to work. I can’t even remember exactly what happened when I tried to use it, but it amounted to nothing. So, I went back to 4.7, which does work.
I’m pretty happy with Netscape 6 right now. I realize it ain’t perfect what browser is? My girlfriend swears by IE 5 ughhhhhhhhh…
I tried it for about an hour and agree completely with jayjay. I’ve gone back to 4.6 at work, but use Opera 5 at home. When my new work machine arrives, I’ll use IE5 just long enough to download Opera then uninstall IE5 (which you can do under NT).
I use Netscape 6 very sparingly at work… mainly in webpage testing. It appears to work ok. I’ve had not problems with it, but I also have a super fast PC (P3-650 w/128 MB ram). I didn’t even try it with my old home PC (P-166 w/32 MB ram).
The thing I didn’t like about it was that the interface was drastically changed. I had to tell it to use the “classic” skin just so I could do my work. The other thing I’ve noticed is that on some web sites that look at the browser type, it came back saying that I had an OLD VERSION of the browser and needed to upgrade.
I did keep v4.7x on my work pc… but in reality, I use Opera 5.0 both at home and at work.
Didn’t they just come out with 6.1? Is it any improvement?
I haven’t used Netscape 6, but I do use Mozilla .6 as my browser at home. I love it. Once you change the interface back to “classic” it doesn’t look stupid anymore.
Mozilla .8 is out now, and I need to get that.
Mozilla is the open-source soul of netscape. Netscape 6 is Mozilla .5 (or something a little less than .6) plus a crapload of stuff you don’t need (AOL stuff)
I used Netscape for years based on the principle that if there is a viable alternative to using a Microsux product, I will use it. Netscape 6 is so slow that I started using IE and Outlook instead.
I don’t know a lot about browsers. Until recently, I thought that IE and Netscape were the only two there were. I use Netscape 6. I like it. I’ve had no problems with it, and if anything, it works faster on my machine than IE5. Mr. Jeannie uses IE5. He likes it, but has no aversion to Netscape. Just MHO.
I tried it and didn’t like the interface and found it to be a huge memory hog.
If you want to try it anyway, I strongly recommend you do what I did: Don’t install 6 over 4.7, install it in a new directory, so you can keep both versions, making it incredibly easy to go back to 4.7 if need be.
Is Netscape 6 still incompatible with Macromedia plug-ins? It was when I downloaded it, which means half the pages I like have big blank patches.
I used it long enough to discover that they’d completely screwed up the bookmarking function*. Once I found that out, I removed it and went back to 4.7.
*You can’t dragondrop bookmarks into specific places in your bookmark list. Netscape 6 dumps it onto the bottom of the list and you have to manually move it to the folder you want it in.
Long time Netscape devotee, but #6 really bites.
Way slow, way cumbersome to use.
I’ve already switched back, after two days.
Thanks for the tip. I tried Mozilla when it was at release .1 or .2, and it blew as much as Netscape 6.01 does now.
I downloaded Mozilla .8 to my Win2000 system last night and I liked what I saw. I’m about to try it on my Win98 laptop, so I can put NS6.01 out of its misery.
I switched to IE exclusively when v5 came out. I like the keyboard shortcuts better then some of the ones used in Netscape. I tried the latest version of Opera, and liked it fairly well, except it had trouble drawing the screen correctly when visiting the SDMB. That might have something to do with the resolution my laptop runs at (1400x1050). My enjoyment of Netscape began to wane when they started adding all the other crap to it in Communicator. I’ve also had less difficulty with Java crashes using IE over Netscape.
Opera adheres so rigidly to HTML standards, it actually mucks up a lot of formatting that some webpages have set up (using proprietary code for Netscape and IE).
I use IE 5.5, and have done for the past three or four years. Netscape has never been my thing. At work, we have to use it for some things, and especially for helping our customers set their Internet up (I work for an ISP). But whenever people need a new version of Netscape, I steer them away from version 6 because it’s just too much hassle. I tell them to stick with 4.7
However, do you think it’s easy to find your way around the Netscape website? Hell no! What a ridiculous mess that place is! Sheeeeeesh!
For something trying to be a better alternative to Microsoft, they have a lot to learn about being user-friendly. They’ve lost the plot at Netscape, I reckon.