Netscape 6.0 Released

Submitted by djc on November 14, 2000 - 10:21.

Just an FYI here, if the Netscape FTP servers are slow for you, we've got both the full install as well as the SmartDownload install for Mac, Windows, and Linux in the browser archive.

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Submitted by bobdavis on November 14, 2000 - 10:24.

I just grabbed the NN6 for Mac.

Pretty nice. Scrolling isn't very smooth, and the pop-ups for "title" are ugly (they look like they do on windows - not the cool "help balloon" that IE5 uses), but it's not bad. It renders HTML 4 transitional correctly (unlike 4.x) and seems to do DHTML ok - though I haven't tried any really fancy stuff with it yet.

Not bad.

Here's one site that doesn't work with Nav6 though:
http://www.falkondesign.com/jykh/major/

It works very well with IE5 Mac, but still doesn't work with Netscape 6. I don't know if it's the scripts or the browser though - I'll have to look.

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Submitted by aardvark on November 14, 2000 - 11:19.

I have N6 for Windows, and I'm running Win2k. So far some rollovers are damn slow, but others aren't. Don't know why. Also, some of my tables are spacing themselves out, despite cellpadding, cellspacing, and border attributes all set to 0. Some others are just fine, but I can't see any immediate differences. Font control looks better. And the User Agent string in the header comes over as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; m18) Gecko/20001108 Netscape6/6.0." Oh, and I can finally copy-n-paste without all those damn hard returns.

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Submitted by djc on November 14, 2000 - 11:41.

Been using it for about an hour now on a pretty vanilla RedHat Linux box.. One crash so far. Linux users will love the new 96dpi fonts, makes it so much easier to read. Nice to see it imported all my email(about 25 folders with 50K+ messages) and newsgroups(25). Had to re-do all my filters though, which kinda sucked, but took about 5 minutes.. The multiple mail accounts is a long awaited feature, and seems to be working well so far. Address book automatically puts emails and names of people that you both send mail to and receive mail from in your address book. You can turn it off, but its kinda cool. I can't seem to figure out how to have the address book hook up to my LDAP server though..(anyone?) Performance wise, its pretty snappy. The 'reload on window resize' bug is gone(has been for a while) and table rendering is very fast. These were my two major performance issues with NS4.x so its nice to see them resolved. Its nice to see that you can edit, add, and remove tabs in the 'My Sidebar' panel. Looks like they pull off a My Netscape RDF file, I'll have to resubmit evolt's :) All in all, pretty smooth sailing with it so far. Sure there are a couple bugs, but hopefully Netscape can address them fairly quickly..

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Submitted by marlene on November 14, 2000 - 11:47.

It's definitely breaking tables in odd ways (I'm a Mac user). And text input fields are huge.

My main beef, though, is that you can't change font sizes on the fly, you have to go into preferences to do so.

I do like its simplified toolbar, and the fact that it automatically imported my IE5 bookmarks.

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Submitted by olineham on November 14, 2000 - 17:09.

It's rather annoying that Netscape have only released the full install ("Netscape 6"), some 25MB. Following the links on netscape.com to stand-alone Navigator shows 4.08 as the latest version (I also can't find it on the FTP - Netscape has been known to forget to update links on the website)

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Submitted by jaylard on November 15, 2000 - 11:24.

It looks as though the problems with table spacing are universal -- I've seen them, too. This appears to have been introduced after M18. As well, Netscape 6 maintains a huge problem rendering CSS background images in tables: it renders a background applied to individual <td>s as though it were applied to the entire <table>, and renders a background applied to the <table> as though it were applied to each individual <td>. This is a biggie.

Marlene: If you're referring to the ability to size-up or size-down fonts on a page, go to the View menu and select Text Size -- a flyout menu gives you quite a bit of control over text size.

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Submitted by Anonymous on November 20, 2000 - 10:27.

I am using NN6 on Win 95. The way it has installed by default means that I no longer see alt-text, just as if I am using a Mac. Have others experienced this? Seems to me that this could have major implications for users - all that added navigation info we lazily/discreetly hide away in alt-tags will no longer be seen. Is "title" about to become the web's fastest growing attribute...?

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Submitted by aardvark on November 26, 2000 - 18:40.

I am not surprised by the lack of "tool-tips" for 'alt' attributes. Technically, it's up to the browser to decide whether or not to display the alt, and with the advent of the 'title' attribute, which is designed to be displayed to the user the way we expect alt attributes to be displayed, there really is no reason to render alts. I, for one, prefer this, since it means (although not in the short term) that I can use alt attributes for their real intent (guidance for users who cannot see or display images) instead of having to worry how they will appear in tool-tips (or balloon help, etc.). I can now have two different attributes on one element, targetted at two different types of users.

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Submitted by cozmotrouble on November 26, 2000 - 19:15.

I went to check out Netscape 6.0 in order to see how it rendered CSS and HTML. I heard promises that it would adhere to CSS standards. Which in effect created yet another “standard”. Read: Another set of rules that you have to take into consideration while developing cross browser sites. Ergo, another pain in the ass. I gave up on Netscape, except for debugging JavaScript, years ago. And I have yet to work with a developer who hasn’t muttered “F*#&ing Netscape". My main beef at the moment is the HTTP_USER_AGENT attribute, as it is formatted by the browser sniffer that I use (CF_AEBrowser), renders the browser version as “netscape 6” instead of a numeric value. This in turn caused an error with my code. Ergo: another pain in the ass to deal with.

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Submitted by drinky on December 5, 2000 - 22:07.

Still can't add a style to the file input box, and the size of those input fields!!!!! Arrgh

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Submitted by wolf on December 7, 2000 - 01:39.

Well, btw, Netscape 6: There is a screenshot (done by myself, no manipulation) that I would like to share with the brave evolt readers: btw, why does it think it has to act as a server before it even starts to imitate a browser? I think the long time waiting for it was not really worth it. But maybe that is just me, I do not want to step on someones toes, if someone feels hurt by my opinion.

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Netscape 6 - why should I

Submitted by secarica on January 20, 2001 - 09:11.

I installed then uninstalled Netscap 6 after about 30 minutes (under WinME). Why: - I was't able to switch off the text from the toolbar buttons - I found the address bar too short for my taste - it has no more the "Display images on this page" toolbar button/function - had some window drawing bugs, I had to restart the program for this to correct (may be in conjunction with my Matrox display driver, but why is Netscape 6 the *only* program that does this ?) - the wheel mouse scrolling is the same as on old versions (i.e. not "smooth", ike in IE) All this with the "standard" appearance (I hate those great skins) and all the "my sidebar", "my etc." closed. Yes, I noticed the excellent rendering speed and the "'reload on window resize" bug solved. But overall ... I find IE 5.5 SP1-ed better. I am (still) using Netscape Navigator 4.08 in *some* cases, for only two reasons: - it has the "Display images on this page" toolbar button (I keep pictures normally off, for speed reasons and also for web development testing (e.g. how does look this page without pictures/icons ? is it still usable ?)) - by cause of this scenario: loading some HTML text from CD, eject CD, put a music CD for listening, then start reading from the screen (example - some cable or connector layout during cable building operation); with IE 5.x I am unable to do that: when ejecting the CD, the IE window closes.

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