Thanks to Hanni, I found out that the Netscape Browser 8.0 beta has moved along since last summer when it was, by all accounts, an ugly piece of crap…
So, being the curious person I am, I’ve downloaded it and installed it over the old Netscape 7.2, I’ll wait for the Firefox evangelists to burn me at the stake for going near that, and here are my initial thoughts…
It’s still a bit cluttered, but a lot tidier than before… There are a few features I like, like the silly little weather pop-out in the personal toolbar bit, plus having multiple toolbars could come in handy on occasions. The one prolblem I have with it is the Print button located on the far right, you can’t get rid of it… Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like having a big ol’ “PRINT” button on my broswer toolbar, though I do have it on IE, so go figure… The option not to have it would be nice, plus the whole customization option is lacking in places and not very clear at all.
I do, on the other hand, like how the live RSS bookmarking appears in the address bar if a page has RSS feeds, it makes it a bit more noticable than the little icon in the bottom right of Firefox.
The sidebar is also very cluttered as it has everything in one as opposed to individual sidebars for bookmarks, history and what not, it also has AOL IM integration, but not as forced as it was in Netscape 7.2 in which you HAD to sign in to open up the browser. The import of bookmarks from Firefox went pretty easy, though Erika was having problems with it, it also imported the history, just incase you thought I’ve been using this for a while.
The position of the File, Edit, View menu’s is just WRONG! It goes against everything I know to be dear by being right aligned, infact it took me a few minutes to even notice they were there in the first place.
Overall, it’s based on Firefox 1.0 so it’s not as bad as Netscape 7.2 was… Essentially I see it as Firefox with a new theme and a few extra features, one I really like is when a pop-up does open, it open it in a new tab as opposed to a new window, that’s kinda cool, but I won’t be using it as my browser of choice though, there are to many unnesessary bits and bobs… But it’s a huge step forward for Netscape… I’d almost forgotten about them.