With the core technology for Netscape 4.x being more than three years old, it should come as no surprise that both Netscape 6.x and Internet Explorer 5.x are far more advanced when it comes to support for the latest Internet standards and Web technologies.
Thanks to the Netscape Gecko engine, Netscape 6 adds full support for XML, XUL, Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (CSS1), W3C DOM Level 1, and JavaScript 1.5 standards. Internet Explorer lacks JavaScript 1.5 and XUL support, but it does offer full support for XML, CSS1, and WSC DOM Level 1. (Then again, does it completely support these standards? According to the Web Standards Project, IE 5.x doesn't.) In terms of strict standards compliance, Netscape 6.0 has to date adhered to the accepted third-party standards much more closely than IE5.
Netscape 6.0 has, for the most part, finally caught up to Internet Explorer 5.5 in terms of support for the latest Web technologies, but it certainly hasn't surpassed IE 5.5 like one might expect from a browser carrying a 6.0 label. There are still a very large number of Web features and technologies supported in Internet Explorer 5.5 that aren't shared by Netscape 6.0. These include filters and transitions, windowless and transparent frames, borderless tables, popup technology that allows HTML content to be displayed outside the boundaries of the browser window, colored scroll bars, page zooming, and HTML+TIME.
One advantage Netscape 6.0 does enjoy over Internet Explorer is its cross-platform compatibility, with versions already available for all 32-bit Windows platforms, the Macintosh, and Linux. The Netscape Gecko engine has also been designed with the ability to be easily integrated into new computing devices as they become available. Gecko is embeddable, free, and open source, and has a cross-platform architecture that makes it easily portable across platforms and devices.
