Netscape 7.1 reviewed

NETSCAPE 7.1, based on Mozilla 1.4 came out officially yesterday, after a long rumored development process. Since the 7.0.x releases of Netscape, Mozilla has gone through some very important changes. From the base rendering engine updates to the built in spam filtering, it has started to leap forward with startling quickness. Meanwhile, Netscape has lagged. It is several versions behind the latest Moz, and its age is starting to show. As of 7.1, they are back in sync, and the product is looking good.

Ok, I hear you ask, what's different? After a quick and utterly painless upgrade from Netscape 7.0.2, I am happy to report that nothing looks different. Same color scheme, buttons, menus, and just about everything else. A quick glance at the help page shows that it is indeed the newer version, so what am I missing?

A rather dry list of many of the updates is at mozilla.org here, but remember, if you are using Netscape, read up on all the updates you missed in Mozilla 1.3 and before. Image resizing, spam filtering, palm sync, included IRC clients, and find as you type are just some of the high points. The only problem is that you have to hunt to find where many of these features are, and worse yet, most just work without needless eye candy. Talk about a release that is the antithesis of a MS release. Wow, programmers who put an onus on functionality, not color schemes.

How does it all work? Well, time will tell, but as I mentioned earlier, the install was perfect, with nothing to do other than pick the parts out of the custom install, and click OK. It found all the old profiles, installed bits, and updated them. Easy. The first menu item that stood out was find as you type. Hitting the '/' key, and typing quickly proved how well this worked. I think this one will be just about as annoying as tabbed browsing when I am forced to go back to IE. Thanks guys, make my life more of a living hell at work in the name of progress. That, other than an intelligently redesigned tools menu, was all that stuck out in my first glance.

I knew the meat of the changes would be found in the preferences menu, so, caffeine in hand, I plunged in. Boy was I wrong. There was almost no difference between 7.0.2 preferences and 7.1. Checking every menu, from memory, and the only things that stood out was a few of the more granular and esoteric settings in privacy and security. Again, what gives with this functionality over flash stuff? Boring.

Moving on to the mail client, there was a truly stunning major change, they put a button in above the email list that allows you to select read, unread, junk, or other flagged mails selectively. Comparatively, this is a huge change. Work with me people, I am reaching here. The mail and newsgroups account settings tab was depressingly similar in its lack of pointless new menus.

The only place in the entire browser that I hit gold was the mail tools menu, and what gold it was. While Mozilla has had a junk mail filter in it for a while now, it is new to us spell-checker addicted Netscape users. It almost brought a tear to my eye to see a useful spam filter integrated into the program. With popup blocking and ad filtering, what more do you need? MS may talk about how spam is evil, but like their security initiatives, I'll believe it when I see it, and I have not seen it yet. The Mozilla version has gotten rave reviews from the online pundits, and from my initial look, it deserves it.

Overall, the Mozilla team deserves a hearty pat on the back. They put out a solid product that has displayed no bumps or warts after a day of use, and solved a few nagging ones. The only problem is that it doesn't look like much. For that reason alone, I was going to give it a 7/10, but as I was typing this article, it caught my first spam message without me training it at all. 8/10. In a week, it will probably be a 10/10, but I haven't beaten it into the ground enough yet to venture out on that exceedingly safe limb. µ

* OUR ARGENTINIAN correspondent, Fernando Cassia, has kindly put together an Add INQUIRER to your Netscape/Mozilla sidebar tab script.