InformationWeek

The beta developer release, called Netscape 6 Preview Release 1, shows that Netscape is on track to offer a quality commercial Web browser. Initially available for the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS platforms, Preview Release 1 delivers a foundation for the Web developer's Holy Grail: feature parity and consistent rendering of Web pages across different platforms. While Netscape has always achieved close functional parity among its versions of Communicator for various platforms, it has never been able to get Web pages to display quite the same in its various Communicator 4.x Web browsers, creating a difficult situation for Web developers.

Netscape 6's Gecko rendering engine, however, does a fine job of displaying Web pages identically across Linux, Windows, and Macintosh. In contrast, Microsoft hasn't synchronized its browser development across platforms; the result is that Web developers haven't been able to depend on the same rendering features on each platform.

The recently released Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh, which uses Microsoft's Tasman rendering engine, leads Internet Explorer 5.01 for Windows in its ability to render certain Web coding standards (Internet Explorer for Windows uses the Trident rendering engine), but still doesn't achieve parity with Internet for Windows in other categories. Microsoft gives Web developers neither consistent rendering of Web pages nor a consistent feature set across platforms. This disparity becomes more of an issue as more Internet appliances are added. Gecko can be easily ported to many of these devices and provide rendering consistency.

Still, Netscape 6 isn't shipping and probably won't be ready until fall. Preview Release 1 is easy to crash and is missing important features that won't show up until Preview Release 2, expected in June. Notably missing is a tool for manipulating "skins" (Netscape calls them "themes"), which are configuration files that describe the look and feel of the browser's graphical user interface.

Skins can be added to Netscape 6, but they must be manually installed. Skins are made possible because Netscape 6's GUI is dynamically generated using a Netscape-invented Extensible Markup Language called XUL (XML-based user-interface language). The look and feel-the "skin" of the browser GUI-can be dramatically altered using XUL. Combine XUL with World Wide Web Consortium standards, such as DOM (Document Object Model) Core and DOM HTML, and some impressive client-side functionality can be produced. An interesting example is Alphanumerica Inc.'s scripting editor that takes advantage of those standards, JavaScript scripting, and XUL to craft a scripting editor with a text editor look and feel added to the browser GUI.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the script editor to function properly under Netscape 6 because of security features added to Mozilla by Netscape. (The script editor works fine on the M14 build of the Mozilla open source, however.) Other skins can be found at MozillaZine's Chromezone (www.mozillazine.org/chromezone). Also missing from this release is a complete interface for Netscape 6's Personal Security Manager, which eventually will include some digital certificate configuration features.

Though Netscape 6 will be attractive to Web developers and IT departments because of its speed, size, and consistent cross-platform rendering, it's by far Netscape's most-attractive consumer offering ever. It has built-in America Online Instant Messenger Service and the ability to access AOL E-mail accounts over the Internet using the IMAP capability of Netscape 6's mail program.

The mail program also accesses POP3 E-mail accounts and has a Net news reader. Java Virtual Machine support is delivered as a plug-in-Sun's Java 2. This is a smart move because plug-ins, previously somewhat unstable and difficult to use, are now well-understood and supported. It will be easy to update the Java Virtual Machine by swapping out the plug-in. Rounding out the add-on software is version 10.2 of Net2Phone Inc.'s Internet phone client that lets you use your PC and a Net connection to fax and make phone calls.

Another software application that should be available (but isn't yet) is a customization kit for Internet service providers and business deployment called the Client Customization Kit. Similar to Communicator 4.x's Mission Control Desktop, the kit lets you build custom installers for Netscape 6.

Netscape Composer is still part of Netscape 6, letting users author basic Web pages. It's handy, but useful only for minor HTML editing. An updated Netscape Calendar client will be shipped with the final version of Netscape 6. The Communicator 4.x Calendar client should work with the preview releases until then, Netscape says.

The name Communicator, by the way, is gone. When released as a shipping product, Netscape's new browser will be called simply Netscape 6. Communicator 5.0, the name given to a pre-Gecko version of the open source, was never released as a product. Clearly, Netscape is on track to deliver what it has promised: an open-source browser that offers feature parity and consistent rendering across multiple platforms. The challenge to Microsoft is to prove that it can do same.