Netscape 8.0

Netscape, the browser that dominated the Web in the 1990s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took over, has faded into obscurity since it was acquired by America Online in 1998.

But AOL is hoping for a Netscape comeback, starting today. The company is releasing a beta, or prerelease, version of an all-new edition of the storied browser, called Netscape 8.0. This new Netscape, which works only on Windows, sports some unusual features designed to help bolster security and compatibility on the Web.

We reported earlier how Firefox was gaining on IE in popularity. Firefox is based on Mozilla, which in turn was based on an earlier version of Netscape which was released to the Public Domain as open source software.

What goes around comes around, because Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox, but it adds two major new features. First, Netscape rates every Web site for trustworthiness. This includes whether the site is genuine, and not a fake created by crooks for so-called "phishing" schemes; and whether it can be trusted not to secretly load spyware or other malicious programs onto your PC.

Second, Netscape has the capability to render a Web page in two ways: as Firefox would present it or as Internet Explorer would. This is useful because some Web sites don’t work properly in Firefox and rely upon special features available only through Internet Explorer. With the new Netscape, you can see the Internet Explorer version of a page without launching Internet Explorer.

If a site is considered trustworthy, Netscape automatically renders it using the Internet Explorer method, for maximum compatibility. Internet Explorer’s method for rendering Web pages opens security vulnerabilities that Firefox’s doesn’t. Netscape figures that, at trusted sites, it’s OK to take that risk.

On the other hand, if Netscape isn’t sure about the trustworthiness of a site, it uses the Firefox method for rendering the pages, which is safer but might have compatibility issues.

Netscape 8.0 beta can be downloaded here or here or here.

A Washington Post review said Netscape's new browser crashed twice during our four-hour test. Worse, it was painfully slow, taking much longer than Internet Explorer or Firefox to render streamlined sites such as Google News.

Another flaw is how America Online has cluttered the top toolbar and left-margin sidebar with links to AOL's own Web content, including CNN, MapQuest, Netscape News and AOL Yellow Pages.

The links across the top toolbars are the most annoying, because it is not as easy to change them as it should be. Users may have to dig deep into the help file to decipher how to add and delete links from this new, multi-level toolbar.

There are a number of comments from users that have tried the beta at BetaNews.