I don’t know exactly when, but Netscape has recently released the much anticipated Netscape 6.0. I went to Netscape Dowload, and it said I was using IE 5.0 and that I could “Upgrade to Netscape 6” (or Netscape 4.whatever). IMHO, releasing it was a big mistake because there are a ton of bugs and usability issues. I downloaded it this morning, played with it for 10 minutes and found the following problems:
- The complete download was approx. 24.9 MB. That is huge!
- Right clicking in many important places does not do anything.
- I had a ton of trouble trying to set up a proxy server (in all fairness, it was a microsoft server and I can’t get it to work on older versions of Netscape either.)
- In fiddling with the Proxy settings, I was manually entering sites to bypass the proxy server and everytime I pressed the right arrow key to move the curser, the radio buttons also switched around. That was very disconcerting, but you’d probably have to see it in action to see what I’m talking about…
- I didn’t seem to get any errors if I typed in an incorrect URL. It simply stayed on the same screen. That’s even more annoying than the generic “404 File not found” message..
Since I couldn’t get the proxy working, I couldn’t really test all the new features, many of which seem really cool. I’m particularly interested in seeing how well Netscape’s mail client handles AOL email addresses and IMs, but then, my 10 minute trial on the browser doesn’t give me much hope. Now don’t get me wrong, I was looking forward to this release, but I think they rushed to put out an incomplete product, and it is a little frustrating. There are a lot of things that are really great about Netscape 6, but I think I’m gonna wait until they stabilize it a little more and work out the bugs before I really start using it…