Netscape

Netscape's latest version, 6.2 (at the time of this writing) is essentially Mozilla with some proprietary stuff thrown in - plug-ins for Flash and other bandwidth hoarding stuff. The good thing is that it all comes along with the installation, so you don't have to mess around much with setting it up. So if it's not terribly thrilling for you to read instructions like 'copy what_the_heck_is_this_lib.so.0 to /usr/lib/i_wanna_watch_video/', then go over to netscape.com and download their installer and this will all be taken care of for you. You can also sign up for their services- like the calendar, which I signed up for out of curiosity. I use WebCalendar by Greg Knudson (just wanted to get in a pitch for Greg's great app), so I didn't need it - but it was nice knowing it was there and that the people at Netscape had offered it.

You can notice the difference in Netscape compared with past versions. Instead of being somewhat unstable as was the 4.X series, it's only occasionally unstable. I believe it has something to do with websites that have their ads served by third parties, or so I have observed. Netscape will freeze if one of these ad servers is slow or does not respond. It's kind of annoying because you have to manually kill Netscape by doing a 'ps' and looking for its PID. Also, because Flash is enabled by default, you can't be running another sound application when you visit a Flash enabled website. That's easy to do if your expecting Flash, but if you aren't, you'll get the unpleasant surprise of Netscape crashing on you. If you can put up with these minor inconveniences, Netscape is a good browser. Version 6.2 is much better than previous incarnations, thanks to Gecko, of course.

Strengths:

• Easy plug ins
  The ability to use Flash, RealAudio/Video and other plug-ins out of the box is a plus to new users of Linux.
• Lots of extras
  As with Mozilla, there is an email client, HTML editor for making pages about your Bonzai growing hobby - plus something that Mozilla doesn't have - Instant Messenger. For those of you in need of a cyber umbilical cord to your friends, you'll like this.

Weaknesses

• Slow and quirky
  Netscape is still slow. I have never been naive enough to think that browsers were going to keep cramming features into them an get faster to boot.
• No tabbed pages
  Until Netscape 7 is release, there is no way to open webpages in tabs instead of in new windows. For now, there's no remedy for cluttering up your desktop. Hopefully the wait for Netscape 7 will be brief.

Next --> Opera