The most prominent is My Sidebar, a collection of small, tabbed windows (Netscape calls them tabs) on the left side of the screen that hold Web information and applications you want to access with a minimum of fuss. The attractive interface offers lots more customisation options than does the competition.

Gecko is not only smaller but is also faster than its Communicator predecessor: given equal network conditions, complicated Web pages load more quickly with Gecko, although we didn't put this early version to formal tests. Netscape 6 got thin by dropping Communicator's least-used components (when was the last time you invoked Netcaster?) and by abandoning Communicator's HTML rendering engine in favour of the newer and nimbler Gecko browser technology. For starters, it's compact in a way browsers haven't been since the glory years of Navigator 2: the full download of Netscape 6 tops out at 8.5MB, compared to 18MB for the bloated Communicator 4.7 and 29.4MB for the soup-to-nuts IE5.

The changes are dramatic indeed, including a slimmed-down profile (the download is less than half the size of Communicator 4.7's), a slicked-up user interface, the first third-party America Online e-mail client and an intriguing combination of Web search tools and instant messaging.Ī look at Netscape 6's first preview release reveals that the intention is to get back to browser basics.

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