Netscape 8.0 has been released. BFD, right? It's based on the Firefox framework, so if I want that I should just use Firefox, right? After all, it's slower than Firefox and who wants a browser to be slower? It has that abomination that allows it to use the IE rendering engine for specific pages (or even by default) if you want. Ewww...why would you mess up that clean Firefox browser by polluting it with IE?
All of those are valid criticisms, as is my basic one that I haven't seen a version of Netscape that I've liked since 2.03. They've all suffered from stability, bloat, and/or performance issues. That's quite a long track record of misses. In that time I've used various versions of IE, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, and IE with extensions such as Maxthon.
But, this morning I made it my default browser. I need that IE rendering engine at times. Windows Update requires it. The Admin for this blog works much better in IE. My time entry website requires IE because it has some VBScript on it. I have used the ieview extension in Firefox for these things, but it's not quite the same.
I don't like the fact that it's slower than Firefox, and that may end up driving me back to Firefox. It seems to be bad about blocking pop-ups, which bizarrely enough, seem to show up in IE windows. There seem to be some keyboard focus issues related to this as well. I haven't quite figured out what's up with that. Also, I don't have an extension (yet) that enables me to right-click and subscribe to an RSS feed in NewsGator.
All of these are reasons to stick with Firefox, and I may do that. But, I'm willing to give Netscape 8.0 a try. It's lasted on my machine for 24 hours now, and that beats almost every previous version since 2.03. And I believe that the only real way to try a browser out is to make it your default. I want it to be the browser that's used when I click on a link in e-mail. I want it to be the browser that's in my face all day. Otherwise I can't give it a fair test.
Will it pass? Probably not. But, I'm willing to give it a try.