People who remember the tremendous stability and usability exhibited by pre-release versions of Netscape Navigator 1 are bound to be disappointed. Netscape .92b was more stable than the released version of Mosaic 1.0.3. Netscape 2.0b1 is inconsistent and incomplete. It's buggy and it crashes, but in this behavior it is no different than the vast majority of betas in the world. If you want to use beta software, you need to accept the risks. Unfortunately, we were spoiled the first time around, which led to artificially high expectations for 2.0b1.
The disappointment for me is not in the quality of the beta, however, but in the lack of quantitative changes in the browser's design. (And by the way, Netscape officials no longer refer to the Navigator as a "browser," but as an "application development platform." Try putting that in an "About Box.") Yes, it's slightly faster, but if you are employing the caching server, you won't notice the change. 2 Yes, it acts as an integrated newsreader and e-mail program, but it lacks critical features that standalone packages employ. 3 Yes, it has support for "frames" and other new "cool" Netscape extensions, but until these and other extensions are absorbed and made part of the actual HTML "spec," they may or may not be supported by other browsers. 4 With AOL, Prodigy, and soon the Microsoft Network coming online, 80% market share for Netscape is simply a convenient fiction to palliate guilt. If you are using these extensions, many people are not seeing your pages as you intended, or worse, are seeing plain gibberish.
Where does Netscape 2.0 beta break new ground? Eventually, though not in this release, it will support plugins for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files, Macromedia Director and Progressive Networks Real Audio. 5 It will also support Sun's Java programming language, which has the potential to obviate those "helper applications" that are the bane of one's WWW existence. None of this is there today (Java support is in beta for the Windows and UNIX client, but not yet for the Mac).
What is there today, finally, is the ability to edit one's bookmark files without risking a stress-induced cerebral hemorrhage. This version of the Navigator actually allows you to drag a bookmark to a new location. Imagine that? Gone are those little up and down arrows, which forced you to scroll through a list of 100 or so URLs to move something to the top. To be perfectly frank, at present this is the best reason to download a copy of the beta.
Of course, we all have Netscape Navigator 2.0b2 to look forward to...
Postscript:
Any of you familiar with the publishing scene will know that the time between the writing of an article and its publication can sometimes be quite long. When this review is finally rendered on newsprint, Netscape 2.0b2 will have been out for a few weeks. While beta 2 is somewhat more stable and mature than beta 1, the bulk of my review remains accurate. At least we have beta 3 to look forward to...
1 From the 1960s through to the mid 1980s, Sovietologists would attempt to garner information on the Politburo in a number of rather non normative ways. Every May, on May Day, the ruling elite would gather on top of Lenin's Tomb, to watch the annual military parade. By closely studying the number and the order of the leaders, Western intelligence would create a picture of whose power was on the rise and wane in the Politburo. This method of "counting heads" was surprisingly effective.
2 The caching server is a technology being employed at Yale to drastically improve WWW performance. The caching server keeps often used WWW pages saved locally, rather than forcing the server to go to the home site. The server uses a complex algorithm to decide when to serve the local page, and when to go to the host site for a fresh copy. Make sure that the following information is in your "proxy" preferences to use the caching server:
WWW: http-proxy.cis.yale.edu port 8080
FTP: ftp-proxy.cis.yale.edu port 8080
Gopher: gopher-proxy.cis.yale.edu port 8080
WAIS: wais-proxy.cis.yale.edu port 8080
If you are ever worried that your client is not giving you the most up-to date page, choosing "reload" will always force the client to return to the host site.
3 Reading news is not nearly as nice an experience in Netscape as it is in a standalone program such as NewsWatcher. The subscribe, unsubscribe and related commands are all laid out better in NewsWatcher, and the entire program displays a more mature feel. The Netscape e-mail program lacks a "filter," or a way to separate incoming and outgoing mail via a predetermined heuristic. The lack of this essential power-user feature will make Netscape unacceptable to many. While Internet neophytes may welcome the "all-in-one" design, experienced users will still want the ease of use and better handling of the dedicated programs.
4 "Legal" HTML is based on a "specification" that is agreed upon by the HTML Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The current "spec," which does not support tables, is 2.0. The newest "spec," 3.0, will be solidified in the near future. This "spec" will include support for tables and certain other "enhancements," but much of what you can do in Netscape is not legal HTML and may not be rendered accurately by other browsers. I urge anyone out there who is writing HTML to read the 2.0 "spec" and to adhere as closely as possible to it.
5 The PDF and Director plug-ins will allow you to view these respective documents within Netscape, without launching a separate helper application. Real Audio support, which allows you to play audio on the Internet in near to real time, will also be built in. Java may obviate the need for helpers all together, by allowing programmers to construct "applets." These applets can be downloaded with specific resources and tailored to execute as necessary on the user's own computer.