A Second Look at Netscape 6

Late last year I reviewed the release of Netscape 6, in which I decided however pretty it was, it wasn't quite ready for prime time. It's been five months since then and I'm regretting ever installing it on my machine.

This may be an well-worn thread, but aren't newer versions supposed to work better than their predecessors? Forgive my ranting, but god help the web designer who has visitors using Netscape 6. I use Netscape 4.7 more often than N6 these days, simply for the fact that often times the Mozilla-using Netscape 6 doesn't display web pages the way the designer intended. This has most recently come to my attention because this is happening on two of the O'Reilly Network sites that I produce. They look great in IE and Netscape 4.7, but the layouts go to hell in a handbasket under N6 and the latest build of Mozilla. Because a large enough percentage of our audience is using a Mozilla based browser, this becomes a potentially major problem that needs fixing, only tracking down the problem isn't as easy as finding a missing closing tag within the HTML. It seems that there isn't a consistent way that the displays get fudged with the Mozilla rendering engine.

But that's not my only complaint. My bookmarks have mysteriously vanished from "My Sidebar" at times. Trying to do production edits through N6 is a frustrating experience. And then of course are the crashes, which happen more often than when I was a 16 year old with a 65 Mustang. That Mustang is now sitting in my uncles yard, long gutted for parts. Just like that Mustang, Netscape 6 will be sitting in my Recycle Bin once I figure out how to fix the bugs of displaying pages with it.