By Eddy R
4-10-00

The long awaited preview release of Netscape 6 is finally here! We downloaded, installed and tested this brand new browser in our systems and here is what we found!

Small download size

Smart move Netscape! Users only need to download a 300k size applet that lets them select and download the components they only need. According to Netscape, the Browser download is about 30% percent smaller than IE 5.0 - a typical download will be about 25% smaller. With this decrease in file size, users (those with modem connection come to mind) shouldn't spend more than an hour or so downloading the product.

Web Page Rendering

Although web page rendering was faster than in previous versions, it wasn't as fast as we hoped it would be. Web page rendering was faster in our Pentium machine than in our good old 486. Since this is just a preview version, we still have to wait for the finished product to see just how fast Netscape 6 can really render web pages.

Compliance with standards

Netscape uses a new "browser engine" called Gecko. Gecko is an open-source, cross-platform engine that makes a lot of things possible, like the support for W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets, XML 1.0, ECMA-262, and Level 1 DOM.

With support for these standards, Web Builders will finally be able to design sites that deliver richer and more interactive content. Kudos to Netscape!