AOL Concocts a Mess With Netscape 8.0

AOL confirmed that this behavior was a bug and said it would issue a patch for it.

Netscape's other major addition to Firefox's features is a set of "Live Content" toolbar icons that present such snippets of Web data as weather forecasts, news headlines and stock quotes. It's the same basic idea as the Dashboard in Apple's Mac OS X, but here you don't need to switch to a separate layer of applications. On the other hand, AOL has yet to provide other developers with a way to write their own Live Content widgets, which for now limits this feature to a predictable selection of AOL's own fodder.

Aside from Live Content, Netscape mainly sets back the art of browser interface design. This thing just looks ugly, done up in a tacky green-and-orange theme (as if its developers were Miami Dolphins fans). It also works ugly, thanks to AOL's refusal to place controls where users will expect them. By placing a Web-search bar between the back, forward and reload buttons and the address bar, AOL ignores the past five years of browser development -- and by shoving the menus into the top right corner of this application's window, AOL ignores the last quarter-century of software design.

Like Firefox, Netscape 8 allows for tabbed browsing, in which you can switch among multiple pages by clicking on a series of tabs within a single window. Unlike Firefox, this browser enforces a single-window mode; even if a link is set up to open in a smaller pop-up window, Netscape will display it under another open tab.

Netscape provides too many options to adjust its tabbed-browsing behavior (19 instead of Firefox's five) but gets most of the default settings wrong. For example, if you open a new tab, it fills with the same page as the previous tab, instead of staying blank.

The cursor then fails to shift automatically to the address bar, where you could type the address of a page you do want -- unlike in every other tabbed browser I've used. Finally, Netscape clumsily widens the currently selected tab, shifting every other tab left or right and defeating your attempts to select them from memory. These little flaws conspire to waste a little bit of your time every single time you use this program, all without providing any meaningful benefit in return.

Elsewhere, AOL added some options to store user names, passwords and other data frequently entered at Web sites. But it also took away Firefox's valuable highlighting of properly secured sites -- a valuable help to users worried about whether they're on their bank's real site or a fake one set up as part of a "phishing" scam.

Add in the pushy marketing during Netscape's installation -- unless you opt out, it will have a resource-hogging Weather Channel program loading every time you start up your PC -- and this browser's habit of crashing, and it's all but unusable. Forget AOL's history of abandoning the Netscape browser (the company has yet to say if it will offer its new browser with its Netscape Internet service); this is a train wreck in its own right.

It's not as if installing Netscape will even permit you to de-clutter your computer by uninstalling other browsers. As long as you run Windows, you're stuck with Internet Explorer. And it's going to be easier to keep a second set of bookmarks in IE for the dwindling number of IE-only sites than to put up with this sorry successor to Netscape.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.