[thelist] Netscape 6 (was interesting site...)

Aylard JA (James) jaylard at equilon.com
Tue Nov 14 11:24:20 CST 2000


Fred et al,

> Is it just me or is this release REALLY bad.  CSS is a little better but,
> tables look horrible (i was completely surprised when i saw this, it's
horrifying).  

	I've just installed and begun testing the Netscape 6 "RTM". Initial
impressions are not very positive, unfortunately. First, though, some good
points:

* Some of the UI rough edges (e.g., improperly size dialog boxes, tabbing
behavior) seem to have been mostly polished away.
* The :hover pseudo-class has been fixed.

The bad points:

* Table layouts that have worked consistently in IE and all recent versions
of Mozilla do not align properly, throwing off pixel-precise layouts.
* Rollovers are slow. Worse, sometimes during a rollover Netscape "loses" an
image altogether and replaces it with (unusually large) alt text. You can't
get the image back without a refresh.
* Seems to be a resource hog -- currently consuming almost 30MB of memory on
a WinNT PC.

	My conclusion: Netscape 6 has some very nice features, and still has
a lot of promise; but this release is still beta-quality software with some
serious flaws. The average end-user who happens to install it will probably
like it (assuming that its memory demands allow it to run well enough); the
average developer will probably call down curses on the AOL/Netscape suits
who released it prematurely.
	This is just a quick, initial sweep, and I'm sure I'll form
more-informed opinions in the coming days and weeks.

James Aylard




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