Security Gets an Extreme Makeover in Netscape 8.0 Advanced Features Now Easier to Access Jim Wagner
Advanced Features Now Easier to Access
In this version AOL has gone out of its way to make the browser's advanced features easier. An eraser icon at the top left of the browser allows users to clean out their cache, cookies, and search and download history, right next to the form auto-fill icon. A multi-bar feature allows users to group and create customized toolbars.
Integrated into the browser is an integrated search function, which includes Google, Ask, and Netscape. AIM, AOL's instant messaging platform, has been integrated into the Netscape 8.0 suite as well, though the company has no plans to incorporate other IM platforms at this time, according to Liew.
He also said the company's research found that many people would rather type in the name of a company through a search engine and click through the results, rather than type in the URL. As such, he said, the search engine box was given more emphasis and the URL windows shoved off to the right side.
This increased functionality comes at a price, though. Web sites take longer to come up than with either IE or Firefox, based on visits to several image-laden sites. Liew said the added security features — verifying good/bad Web sites — will always make surfing a trifle slower than with other browsers. He said slowdownn doesn't mean as much to users as a browser that keeps them safe.
"As the world moves to broadband that extra half-second doesn't matter as much," he said. "What matters more is the longer-term affects of spyware, which slows your entire computer down all the time."
Liew said AOL and the Netscape team are committed to constant updates to the Netscape platform in the coming years. Incremental feature updates are expected throughout the year and the team is thinking about what features they want to include in Netscape 9.0, due out sometime next year.
He said any Firefox updates will be added to the browser soon after they are published on the Mozilla site. Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox 1.0.3; Liew said they didn't include the latest Firefox release, version 1.0.4, because the security vulnerability patch only affected Firefox users.
"The beauty of being built on the same code base is that we get the benefit off of a lot of what they do," he said, "so I think you'll see us moving as quickly as Firefox."
The latest version comes nearly three years after AOL released a major update to to the Netscape browser, with version 7.0 in August 2002.
A lot has changed since then. The Netscape 7.x series of browsers were based on the Mozilla Foundation's Mozilla Suite.
Netscape 8.0 and future versions will be based on Firefox, the open source browser that split off from the Mozilla Suite as a standalone application. The Mozilla Foundation recently scuttled future development of its Mozilla suite.
Netscape is no longer the browser darling it was in past years, either. The once-dominant browser competed head-to-head with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) for popularity. IE ended up on more than 95 percent of the world's PCs, thanks in part to the browser's bundling into the Windows operating system platform.
Now it's not just IE on the PC, although a rash of security vulnerabilities has a growing number of users moving to alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera. According to recent numbers by Web analytics company WebSideStory, IE use in the U.S. has dropped to 89 percent with Firefox gaining to nearly 7 percent. Netscape and Mozilla broswers make up a little more than 2 percent of Web surfers, according to the report.
Pros: Dual-rendering engines, tabbed browsing, FormFill, and MultiBar features are great additions for Netscape
Cons: Only available for Windows at this time; impressive feature additions, but Netscape Browser still faces an uphill battle against IE and now Mozilla Firefox in the war for market share
