Netscape's latest will satisfy users but not win many converts

By Peter Sinclair


The Empire strikes back: latest figures confirm the increasingly successful onslaught of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with a reported 59 per cent of US businesses now choosing it as their primary browser against 41 per cent for Netscape.

But the Force is still with us. While Netscape's mirage-like Communicator 5.0 continues to glimmer in the distance, the company has released its latest catch-up.

Netscape Communicator 4.6 (www.netscape.com - full download 15,454 Kb), while unlikely to woo back users who have switched, will certainly consolidate the loyalty of its existing base. As the latest province of the AOL empire, it will also improve its popularity with a new generation of surfers as they flock to join the world's largest online service.

As with IE5, its emphasis is on ease-of-search, the key to unlocking the resources of the Web. SmartBrowser, allowing users to input keywords into the location bar to help them find everything from a pizza to a tornado alert, takes IE's AutoSearch to a new level, although this feature will perhaps be of more use to American users than us.

And once you've found your site, Netscape Open Directory and a What's Related feature match developments in the latest Microsoft release.

It's noticeable, though, that all roads lead to Netcenter - or at least, a good many of them. Many of the resources you're steered to are those branded by Netscape itself, and this increasing "portalisation" of the browser may not be welcomed by all surfers.

Audio/video streaming, the hottest area of Net action right now, is more than covered by Netscape's wholehearted integration of RealPlayer G2. With its searchability and customisable interface (choose from more than 100 RealChannels from the Net's main content providers), G2 amply deserves its more than 80 per cent share of the market. Microsoft's Media Player, despite recent enhancements, still comes a distant second.

Speed: in spite of Microsoft insinuations to the contrary, comparative tests have shown that Communicator 4.6 still comes out ahead when downloading and displaying Web pages; and this, after all, is what surfing is mostly about. It also claims to access big portal sites 15 per cent more quickly than its rival - latest figures suggest the waning popularity of the heat'n'eat Net experience, though, so this may not be as significant as Netscape hopes.

Netscapers should be downloading 4.6 upgrades as fast as their modems will let them. But IE turncoats will probably prefer to wait for Netscape's Second Coming with version 5.0 before they're prepared to be born again.