[CLUE-Talk] Review of Netcape 6 for Linux

[John Kottal]

Jim Intriglia wrote:

> I am putting the finishing touches on the first of a series of articles I'm writing on
> the new and recently released of Netscape 6 Communicator/Navigator product for Linux.

The experiences related in your article paralleled mine.

It took about six tries to download the entire program, even with a DSL connection. The
download process kept stalling in the middle of the spelling module, and each time I
tried again, it restarted from scratch. I finally tried about 6:00 AM and was able to
complete the process. The entire download and installation took about 30 - 45 minutes,
most of which was spent downloading the Java 2 files.

I did not like the installer program: not only must it be run from XWindows (so much for
security), it installs to /usr/local, and this creates unnecessary problems with file
permissions: either one does the download as root (so much for the Principle of Least
Privilege) or one does it as a user, and then has to fiddle with file permissions. I
would much rather download the entire thing and then install it later.

My system is a Pentium 233 MMX with 128 MB RAM. Netscape 6 will run on it, but it is
about 3 times slower than 4.75 to get up and running. Additionally, it is noticably
slower while running, but not to the point of annoyment.

Netscape 6 seems to be designed to run only under GNOME and possibly under RedHat: it did
not want to install under Slackware and KDE, giving error messages that there were
libraries that (I think) were installed as part of GNOME missing (sorry, I can't remember
the names, something like GTK), and even after going back and installing GNOME, I was
unable to get it working.

The modern GUI is somewhat washed out on my screen compared to 4.75, but there is an
option to revert to the older interface if so desired.

I am not sure that I like this new version. I've used Netscape now since version 2.0
under Windows, and much, much prefer it over any other browser, including Opera and
Internet Explorer. I've tried Opera and Conquerer under Linux, and always gone back to
Netscape. But given my druthers, I may just go to KDE's Conquerer and stay with that, as
I much prefer KDE over GNOME.

John Kottal