The most important aspect of Netscape 6, by far, is its excellent support for World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. Why is this important? Because standards simplify the work developers have to do to make Web sites and applications work across browsers and platforms, increasing consistency and efficiency. As the Web continues to evolve and new browsing devices (cell phones, PDAs) become more prevalent, standards such as the Document Object Model (DOM) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) will take on even greater importance.

Netscape 6 is built on the Gecko browsing engine, which has been developed as open source code for more than two years now. Gecko is not only standards-compliant (the only engine that comes close at this point is Microsoft's Tasman, built into IE 5 for Mac), it is also fast—Netscape 6 renders pages much faster than Netscape Communicator 4.7x does.

The product has been slammed in some quarters for its (relative) lack of convenience features—for example, you can no longer click once in the URL bar to highlight the address, as you could in Communicator 4.7x and can in IE 5. We think such priorities are skewed. Netscape 6 offers ample convenience for ordinary surfers (the new Sidebar, Password Manager and Cookie Manager are all takes on IE 5 convenience items), while providing better performance under the hood.

Netscape 6 also offers a slick new "Modern" interface. The familiar "Classic" interface is available as an option, as are a number of other interface designs available through Netscape's "Theme Park"—the whole Netscape interface is constructed with XUL, the XML-based user interface language.

There are many, many other cool things about this browser, including its ability to handle multiple mail accounts (including AOL accounts), its incorporation of instant messages and its simultaneous availability for Windows, Mac and Linux. A favorite of ours is the auto translation feature, which gives readers the ability to translate any page from English into French, German, Spanish or one of five other languages (or vice versa). This will be a tremendously useful feature for a great many people.

Finally, although some reviewers have criticized Netscape 6's performance, we have not been able to duplicate such problems. We tested the browser on four different machines—a Windows 2000 desktop, a Windows 2000 laptop, an iMac and an old Mac 6100 (with G3 upgrade card)—and it installed and ran smoothly on all four. As far as we can tell, if you meet Netscape's suggested system requirements, you should be fine. We strongly recommend you give Netscape 6 a try.

(Reviewed December 3, 2000)