Netscape has released version 8.0 of their Firefox based browser. The UI looks slick and it has nice features like warning while visiting spyware sites and passcard to manage all your passwords. Since it is based on Firefox 1.0.3, you get tabbed browsing and fast rendering with the Gecko engine.
But while taking it on a spin today, there were two things that put me off
- When I click on the feeds in bloglines, it does not open anything in the tab
- When I open many tabs, the tab which is in focus expands, this reducing the space for other tabs and thus reducing the space for their titles. Now to see the names of the other tabs, you have to click on an icon on the right, which is one additional click.
So I am sticking to Firefox, which does not have these two issues
Since you tried it, I have a couple of questions.
1) How does it fare with unicode fonts? On Win2K, unless it is internationalised, Ff display unicode mal chars distorted, thanks to M$’s scriber dll issue. How did NS do?
2) Does adblock extension run on it?
3) Based on 1.0.3, huh? Not sure whether they have the vulnerability which prompted Ff 1.0.4
4) Speed?
5) Does it have an about:config thingy as Ff do?
–Evuraan.
Evuraan, I am sorry, I uninstalled it already.
I would have to say that Netscape 8.0 is the best browser I have come across. I was a loyal FireFox user following the wave and testing other third-party browsers, and I had read an article about Netscape 8.0. Maybe you should too. It has an about:config page… If it didn’t, I wouldn’t still have it, and I wouldn’t be using it now. There is a major pro to using Netscape 8.0, the fact that it has the Internet Explorer rendering engine built in. Now when I visit a site that uses ActiveX or anything unsupported by FireFox, I can just switch rendering engine, and the page will appear as it was intended to… The speed at which pages load is excellent and the rendering is quick as it was in FireFox. Overall, I would recommend this browser to anyone, as for almost any problem you can find a workaround.