First off, it looks a lot nicer than version Navigator 3.0. The toolbars are movable and easily minimized. It feels a little like Internet Explorer in the way that you move your cursor over a button, it "jumps out" at you with a textual explanation. The buttons icons are also re-designed, and look a lot better than before. Bookmarks are a lot easier to manage, with the ability to "drag" an icon of the current page into your bookmarks folder and into the right location.
Netscape Composer, a Java-based HTML editor derived from the "gold" portions of Netscape Gold, added some much-needed features to web editing like the ability to add additional information to image and anchor tags to more easily work with frames. Also, it looks and acts a bit more like a word processor, complete with a spell checker. Composer is also used to send outgoing email, which allows you to include HTML into your email messages, though you will only be able to send those emails to people with HTML-compatible mail readers. You have the option to turn on HTML for certain recipients only or, as I ended up doing, turning it off altogether.
Once the released version of Communicator was available, I began to use Netscape Messenger, the email client. The main reason I chose to use it was that there was the support for IMAP, which basically allows me to continue using existing methods for maintaining my email with my shell account and take advantage of the capabilities of a GUI-based mail reader. With POP, the more typical standard for email retrieval, all email is downloaded to your local PC. If you work on multiple PCs like I do (one at work, three at home), using a GUI mail reader is impractical because you have multiple copies of your email on each machine. Look for an in-depth comparison between POP and IMAP in a future article.
Netscape Conference, which is their newsreader, looks better than in
3.0, but still lacks one important feature: The ability to automatically
decode and join together
multi-message binary files that typically appear in the alt.binaries
newsgroups. Oh well, I guess if you want to look at those nudie pics and
don't want to work for it
you should use some other newsreader like News Express or any of the
other newsreaders that do it. Other than that, it's a pretty run-of-the-mill
newsreader that does show in-line pictures.
Communicator also supports VRML (implementing the Cosmo Player), but as one of my friends wrote, it's not quite up to snuff:
One thing that Communicator suffers from is the bloatware syndrome made famous by Microsoft -- shove everything you can into one huge program. The load time for Communicator is definately longer than with Netscape Gold 3.01. During this time, it monopolizes the CPU resources. It also sucks up just about all available free RAM in my computer and dips into swap. The preview versions were much worse, causing resource shortages and system lockups requiring the ever-popular "three-fingered salute." A "three-fingered-salute" is what you give the system when you push the Control, Alt, and Delete key at the same time. This key sequence "reboots" any system running DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. Since it usually takes three fingers to do this, and you're usually tempted to give the computer a "one-fingered salute" because of the need to reboot the computer, it is called the "three fingered salute." Most comptuers don't respond to the more obscene and offensive one-fingered-salute at all. And for my sake, that's probably a good thing. ;-)
In general, I like this product, at least on Windows 95 and NT 4.0. I haven't tried it under Windows 3.1 or the Macintosh yet. I'd rather see them pair-down the main program so that I only load the components that I need (which is just the browser and the email client). What little I've played with Communicator under Linux (using Preview Release 3) was just unbearable -- it crashed way too often to even be considered usable. Hopefully, Preview Release 6 is much more stable on the Unix platforms.