For Mac Users:Netscape 7.0 PR 1 - Quickly taking the reigns as my browser of choice (1 Viewer)

[Peter Kim]

Well, I've now been using IE 5.2 and Netscape 7.0 PR 1, both for Mac OS X.1.5, concurrently for about a month. Since Netscape bogged me down with their 4.x and 6.x versions for the last many years, I switched to IE and was extremely happy.

However, since I began using Mac OS X, I've been unhappy with the way IE rendered some of the web pages I often frequented. Primarily, cnn.com - the fonts are fuzzy and load slowly. Additionally, IE shuts down seemingly arbitrarily. Additionally, for Home Theater Forum, when logging a thread, the visual basic buttons don't work cleanly - e.g., to get a quote function to work, you've got to jerry rig the operation. Really can be irritating.

So, when Cnet.com came out with a glowing review of Netscape's latest version, I gave it a shot. I couldn't be happier. Oh, the fonts...cnn.com looks so clean, so sharp. Also, I can quote to my heart's desire without any extra, aggravating steps. Most importantly, while I've had Netscape up and running, I've also had IE running too. While IE has shut down on me, Netscape never has.

The pages load more quickly in Netscape. And, for some of the sites, I get zero popups while using Netscape. In IE, when navigating the exact same sites, I get an avalanche of popups.

I have no idea why Netscape seems to work better. Much better. All I can report is what I've experienced. And that is that Netscape performs distinguishably better overall. And I have not yet encountered any cons with Netscape yet.

One last important difference - the respective mail clients. My IE browser is linked with Apple's new Mail program for OS X. I don't like it. It drags when I click on any mail that involves html...it takes forever to load up. Plus, I'm always getting one error message after another. Basically, I don't like it that there is no Outlook Express native to OS X and linked to IE. Apple's Mail just doesn't perform cleanly.

On the other hand, Netscape's mail client has worked admirably. In the area of loading mail, it takes no time at all to load up html messages. Plus, I can load up usenet messages - I don't think this is possible with Mail.

 

[Joseph S]

I haven't tried IE 5.2, but have heard nothing but horrible reviews including resetting of home to msn.com and changing the cookie prefs. 5.1 is just awful and seems to pull the spinning beachball trick on every pageload.
Netscape 7 is fine, but I prefer to use Mozilla nightly builds instead. Netscape 6.1 and above have been very reliable as opposed to the original 6.0 release. If they would release a Cocoa browser along the lines of 7 with a Mail/News client as good as the 4.7 series I would switch back. There is currently and open source Cocoa frontend for Mozilla that is showing promise. It is called Chimera .( Link Removed )
Omniweb 4.1 ( http://www.omnigroup.com ) is my overall favorite browser. It is in late beta at this point. It has blocks for popups, browser identity faking, and much more.
iCab ( http://www.icab.de ) is a speed demon and also will check HTML for you.
I use Thoth (Link Removed) for usenet and Mail.app for email. I'm guessing we'll see more Mail.app upgrades soon and I don't have an imap account that would make me more likely to switch to Netscape's mail client.

 

[Michael*K]

Netscape 7 works quite nicely. It's a huge improvement over 6, which was basically unuseable. I love the tabbed browsing feature. My preferred browser is Omniweb and I also use Chimera, which is based on the Mozilla builds.

 

[Peter Kim]

WARNING - Do not download or use IE 5.2. I downloaded the 5.2 upgrade a couple of days ago (I actually used 5.1 as a benchmark with Netscape). The very next boot-up, I could not use either Netscape 7.0 or Mozilla 1.0. I deleted 5.2 from my computer and reinstalled 7.0 and nothing. I never had problems with 7.0 at all, not one problem. And I used 7.0 in tandem with IE 5.1 all most all of the time without fail.

Ultimately, I did a software restore on my iMac. Everything is back to normal. Damn, I should have read your post Joseph. Although I have no evidence, the cause and effect here is startling. Not to even mention the changes to your home page and cookies. Do these companies have to practice such guile when undermining each other's products, all at the expense of the user?

Michael, I use and like OmniWeb very much. However, I visit cnn.com more than any other site. Unfortunately, when I use OmniWeb, the page does not render as nicely as in Netscape or Mozilla - much like IE, the type appears fuzzy or soft. Do you see the same effect?

 

[Michael*K]

Peter, the newly released IE 5.2 now uses Quartz rendering like Omniweb. While I agree it looks a little fuzzy the first time, my eyes quickly adjust to it and I think it's pretty nice.

 

[Tony Aguila]

Mozilla rocks! Netscape 7 is based on Mozilla 1.0, but the nightly builds (1.1a) of Mozilla has gone a step further and now supports Quartz rendering and tab groups. I might add that the latest build will now open a tab group without closing existing tabs. And very stable.
I should probably consider myself fortunate that installing IE 5.2 did minimal disruption to my system. It did change its own home page setting to MSN, but not the system preference. And it altered the ftp helper application to Mozilla!
I must admit that IE still launches about twice as fast as Mozilla, but afterwards, the latter loads and renders pages more quickly. And it seems to work more nicely with Quartz text rendering (screen resolution at 1856 x 1392).
Finally, I just love the way you can block those irritating pop-up windows, and prevent pages from resizing the present window. And you can make those animated gifs stop playing, or even block images from particular servers.

 

[Derek Williams]

I use Chimera 99% of the time. It works great for me. The speed of it is a god send over I.E.

 

[Peter Kim]

I use Thoth (Link Removed) for usenet and Mail.app for email. I'm guessing we'll see more Mail.app upgrades soon and I don't have an imap account that would make me more likely to switch to Netscape's mail client.

Joseph, I've been using Netscape Mail 7.0 for both my Netscape imap accounts along with my mac.com pop accounts - it can be used for any POP accounts. It works very well - brings up the html messages virtually instantly, relative to Apple's Mail.
Please, what is Quartz rendering and Mozilla nightly builds (is this some type of automatic update?)? Thanks.

 

[PS Nystrom]

How strange. I think IE5.2 is awesome. I'm a dual IE/OmniWeb kind of guy, but since 5.2 came out I've hardly touched Omni. I'd give Netscape a chance because of these raves, but I don't want to mess with a good thing!

Does no one use Entourage for email? I used Apple's Mail.app for a while but it was so very lame with all the errors and limited functions. Perhaps with OS X.2, Mail will get some much-needed improvements?

Pieter

 

[Michael*K]

I use Entourage and CE Software's QuickMail Pro. The mail app in Jaguar has been updated with several improvements, but probably not enough to move me away permanently from the two clients I'm currently using.