The Explorer: Torture Testing Netscape 6.0

There were other moments of weirdness, too. The personal firewall ZoneAlarm, for example, reports that N6 keeps trying to act as a server. What's a browser doing acting as a server? My guess is that it's the AOL instant-messaging components of N6 that want to announce my presence online to AOL's IM servers.

But I never requested that function, and without ZoneAlarm, I'd never have known that N6 was transmitting. That's a very unfriendly thing for N6 to do.

And call me crabby, but I rapidly tired of the bland N6 color scheme, which to my eyes looks like a UI from the days of 16-color displays. N6 supports "skins" where you can change the look -- but the UI is so flat and boring that you'll almost have to change it to get something decent.

If this had been "alpha 1" and six months into the project, I'd say N6 showed promise. But this far along and more than two years late, I must report I'm distinctly underwhelmed by both the overall design and the implementation of N6.

Maybe future betas will improve things. They better, and a lot, because as-is, N6 seems a weak contender in the Web browser wars.

What's your opinion? Join in the discussion!

To discuss this column with other readers, please visit Fred Langa's forum on the Listening Post.

To find out more about Fred Langa, please visit his page on the Listening Post.