Cookie manager hard at work

Coming to a Theater Near You

What's radical about this hybrid approach is that, by basing the core browser engine upon open-source code, Netscape was able to simultaneously unleash Netscape 6 across three different platforms with nearly identical user interfaces and feature sets. This cross-platform success is due to a Mozilla.org language specification called XUL (XML-based User Interface Language). Pronounced "Zuul," XUL utilizes standards, including XML and JavaScript, to represent browser elements for multiple platforms in a nearly code-free environment.

Normally, when developers produce a cross-platform codebase, they must include a seemingly never-ending string of #ifdefs in their C++ code. The result is not only software bloat but development time devoured by the need to implement duplicate user interface code for each platform. With just a bit of JavaScript code and some HTML, however, Mozilla and Netscape developers can quickly and easily cobble together widgets for use on multiple platforms. Here's all the code you'd need to create a cross-platform toolbar:

 <toolbox>
   <toolbar class="main-bar" chromeclass="toolbar" style="height: 27px;">
   <titledbutton value="Click here" onclick="click(1);"/>
   <titledbutton value="Or click here" onclick="click(2);"/>
   <html:input type="text" id="location"/>
   <titledbutton value="But don't click here" onclick="click(3);"/>
   </toolbar>
</toolbox>

XUL code to create a pull-down menu

There are a number of other features I really liked about Netscape 6. Topping the list is My Sidebar. Using the metaphor of a sliding drawer, My Sidebar draws out from the left side of the browser as a sort of bookmark page on steroids. Instead of merely asking your readers to bookmark your site, you can create a mini-site for them within the My Sidebar space. You can insert news feeds, feedback forms, stock tickers--virtually anything you can create in HTML. What's more, with a bit of XUL, you can create user interface elements just like the toolbar example above and launch them within My Sidebar. In fact, that's exactly what Netscape did in adding AOL Instant Messenger to Netscape 6. AIM no longer launches as a separate application, though you can run it in its own window. Now, it runs completely within My Sidebar. We liked this feature so much, we decided to build our own Sidebar for Network Computing. Click here to give it a try (assuming you're running version 6).

There is one phenomenally stupid feature in My Sidebar: Whenever you enter a search string within your regular browser pane, say at a site such as Google, My Sidebar pops open automagically with a summary of the search results plus an interface (again via XUL) that lets you search other directories--good idea, dumb implementation. The only thing more obnoxious would be for your car to pop open the glove box each time you hit the seek button on your stereo.

Entering sidebar search hell

Be Careful What You Wish For

Before you run out and build a Netscape 6-compliant site or push all your users to this new browser, there are some drawbacks you should be aware of. First, the bad rap Netscape 6 has received for being a resource hog is, sadly, well-deserved. This application devours more RAM in a day than Godzilla can eat unlucky fishing vessels. Certainly, the app downloads quickly, with a binary footprint well under 30 MB (take that Microsoft!). But it's indefensible that a piece of software with such simple tasks to perform gobbles up more than 13 MB of RAM on Red Hat Linux and nearly 40 MB on Mac OS--Mac OS 9 requires only 30 MB. Windows is even worse, requiring 6 4MB total to run Netscape 6.

Moreover, while the power of the atom unleashed Godzilla, the power of XUL has unleashed a new kind of monster, what I'll call "UI blandization." If you manage multiple platforms, you'll need to spend some reassurance time with your users as they struggle with a more limited set of UI capabilities. On the Macintosh platform, for example, you won't be able to use OS 9's Appearance manager to create Smart Scrolling widgets. You won't be able to simply drag an image from your browser to your desktop. And you won't be able to hold down the mouse button to activate Netscape's pop-up menu. You'll need to hold down the CTRL key while clicking.

But these are merely training and resource issues--which, in their own right, are not trivial. There are some compatibility problems still pending with Netscape 6. On the plug-in front, I was able to download and install the Adobe Acrobat and Macromedia Flash plug-ins with no troubles on the Mac OS platform, but I found that not all current plug-ins are Netscape 6 ready. Macromedia, for one, claims that a change in the Netscape 6 plug-in API has broken its Shockwave plug-in, so don't even bother deploying Netscape 6 in support of Shockwave-based applications until the two companies come to terms.

I was also disappointed in Netscape's lack of support for the latest standards. Although the product adheres to W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets version 1), DOM (Document Object Model) Level 0, XML 1.0 and JavaScript 1.5, it doesn't do much for the most recent suite of standards, such as CSS2, DOM level 2 and XHTML 1.0, though it will let you parse malformed XHTML documents accidentally--something no Web developer wants. Still, failure to hit such moving targets is certainly forgivable, especially when the available support bests that in Internet Explorer (except where the DOM is concerned).

What isn't forgivable is Netscape 6's lack of perfect backward compatibility with older standards. For instance, Netscape 6 no longer supports dynamic fonts or the much used BASEFONT attribute. The same holds true for old elements like the <layer>, <blink>, <marquee> and <bgsound> tags. According to rumblings within the Mozilla developer community, these omissions are merely due to a lack of developer interest and should be corrected shortly. So goes the world of open-source development.

What most users are upset about is the apparent "bugginess" of Netscape 6. One bug that proved itself most troublesome in my testing concerns frame-based sites. On my Red Hat machine, Netscape 6 could not track my movements through www.pricewatch.com. Normally, you can just hit the back button (even on frame-based sites) to return to the previous page. But Netscape 6 appears willing only to take you back to the very first page, before you encountered frames.

You can work around this problem, however, by using the Go pull-down menu, not a very predictable or elegant solution. On the same platform, Netscape also has neglected to enable keyboard shortcuts. Thankfully, the same problems don't extend to the Mac OS platform.

Netscape 6 bugs are not always so clearly defined, however. You may, for instance, run into some flaky behavior with image rollovers. Sometimes the browser won't display the second (rollover) image. Other times, it won't redisplay the original image, leaving only the ALT attribute text behind. Also, be careful if you choose to insert a comment tag when it is inside <table><center> tags. Your comment will magically turn into a <BR> tag.

Screen redraw strangeness

Certainly, before you deploy this product on any platform, you should take a walk through mozilla.org's online bug tracking system, Bugzilla, to get a clear picture of the problems that shipped with Mozilla Milestone 18.

Recommendations

Netscape 6 is a strange animal, melding benefit and bane equally. And, like the monster that tore up Tokyo, Netscape 6 is a powerful force that must be reckoned with. Like any powerful force, it can be put to good use. Web developers need a product like Netscape 6 to ensure that their Web sites and applications maintain a high level of support for accepted standards. Remember, most browsers--including Internet Explorer--fail to enforce such coding practices as ensuring proper table nesting. And most Web sites still cling to the HTML 3 and 4 standards. Very few have embraced emerging standards, such as XHTML and CSS2. IT managers who need to maintain a high degree of platform neutrality or client configurability will like Netscape 6 for its immediate multiplatform parity, though the applications they deploy in version 6 may not work within other browsers for some time. For the rest of us, the choice to use Netscape 6 rests in our ability to deal with its mixed bag of features and bugs. The good news is that, unlike other Web browsers on the market, you can have a say in how Netscape 6 turns out. Assuming you have free time, you can join Mozilla.org and report bugs, create test cases, hack the browser or just write your own code. What you do there may find its way into future versions of Netscape 6. Alternatively, if don't care about bugs, you can jump fully into the open-source movement by deploying Mozilla itself. Just remember that what you get with Netscape 6 is a tested and finalized application. Until Mozilla 1.0 hits the streets next year, you'll have to contend with the ups and downs of open-source beta software.