Back In The Browser Business

Look who's back in the browser game!

It's the new Netscape 8.0 browser. It's based on Firefox and functions pretty similarly. This post is being composed with Netscape.

It hasn't supplanted Firefox as my primary browser. Here are some good and bad features of the new browser.

Good:
The multibar. Shown here, it contains weather updates, rss headline feeds, and is essentially 5 toolbars in one space. There actually may not be enough useful features to fill in five different toolbars.

It uses Firefox to render, but can also show pages in IE. Just right click and say, "view as if IE."

Sidebar is back with a little more force. The Firefox sidebar is much more vanilla.

Automatically includes "Tab preferences" which is an extension in Firefox.

"Clear My Tracks" button, allows you to clear any of the various privacy-type sections (cookies, history, location bar, cache, all of them) from the main window, and also allows clearing of these folders upon browser exit.

Neutral:
The new look. It looks sleek but it's actually sort of hard to use because I'm so used to finding things in different places. After a little while I can get used to it, but still disorienting right now.

Bad:
Still a little buggy. For example, I tried to set up the RSS feed for the KFB and it does not work.

It does not accept a number of Firefox extensions, including one of my personal favorites, Adblock.

It is based on Firefox 1.0 which recently was revealed to have a security flaw!

Windows PC Only.

Summary:
This is not a bad browser, and certainly better than the original "Mozilla" browser, the basis of Netscape 7. Minimalists will still prefer Firefox, but Netscape has a few bells and whistles and a little bling Firefox does not. Security freaks ought to stick with Firefox, since the updates are a bit more regular. I wonder if Netscape has the sort of brand recognition anymore that could make this product a true competitor again.