Netscape Soldiers On With Free Preview Release

According to the Web developer site W3schools.com, Netscape browsers had just a 4 percent market share as of this April. Internet Explorer versions had a 90 percent share.

Preview Release 1's purpose is to elicit feedback, and, except for a couple of annoyances, it's pretty slick. There's a quick-launch feature that keeps the browser in memory, so it's quicker to launch a second time. If you're into instant messaging, that feature is highlighted and the default is to ask you for your user ID. That was one annoyance, easy to undo in preferences.

And you can search from a Web document without leaving that document, simply by highlighting words and right-clicking, which cause the search to open in another window.

After being less than completely in love with Netscape 6.0 and better pleased by the 6.2 version released last November, it's easy for me to see the ongoing improvement. But the feature I most appreciated is the one that lets you make the interface look like the 'classic' 4.x versions so many use, are used to and continue to use. (Even with access to all this new wizardry, Netscape 4.7 is what's running both in the office and at home; it does all I want done, which isn't much.)

As for instant messaging, that, for some of us, grew old in the early '80s chat rooms and is now just an invitation to aggravate the arthritis. And instead of listening to the radio over the Internet, we probably listen to the radio over the radio.

Nonetheless, those who want to take a look, should surf over to netscape.com.

First, the system requirements. For Windows 98, 98SE, ME, XP, NT 4.0 or 2000; at least a 233-megahertz processor and 64 megabytes of RAM, plus 26 megabytes of hard drive space.

For the Mac among us, Mac OS 8.6 or later, Power PC 604e 266 megahertz or faster, 64 megabytes of RAM and 36 megabytes of disk space.

For Unix, the same hardware requirements as for Windows and Linux kernel 2.2.14 or greater with these libraries or package minimums:

_glibc - 2.1.0

_gtk++- 1.2.0 with 1.2.5 or greater preferred.

_XFree86-3.3.6.

At least with the PC Windows version reviewed here, the install time took a bit longer than the download time, but it was smart enough to pick up all existing bookmarks.

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