We agree with Mr. Brown, and agree also with his statement that "you could advance your knowledge much more quickly [than by watching television] by going onto the Web." Doubtless he had MSNBC in mind, and we would agree with that, too—the site has improved significantly over the past year and is, for the most part, quite competitive with ABCNEWS.com, CNN Interactive, The New York Times on the Web and two or three other major sites as one of the Internet's premier news sources. But sometimes rapid progress comes at a cost, and in MSNBC's case, unfortunately, it has. An extensive redesign, intended to separate MSNBC from its competitors, has technical glitches serious enough to undermine the site's usefulness.

It's an embarrassing stumble. After all, MSNBC is in the process of promoting the new design with expensive direct-mail brochures and splashy parties. What's more, the difficulties seem to be Java-derived (the site runs two applets on its cover page), and there are reports currently circulating that Microsoft has generally banned the use of Java on its sites, precisely out of concern over incidents like this. Perhaps a rogue ActiveX control is the culprit—it should be noted that all of MSNBC's major competitors manage to employ Java successfully.

We experienced problems accessing the site across platforms, using both Internet Explorer and Netscape. When the Java applets did not load correctly, our machine would either freeze—as happened with Navigator 3 on Windows 95 and Communicator on the Mac—or bring up the site with "holes" where the applets would normally appear (this happened with IE 3 on the Mac). In the latter case, the site was basically useable, but hardly functional from the standpoint of its new design. IE 3 on Windows 95 and Netscape 3 on the Mac succeeded in running the site correctly some of the time.

This snafu aside, the new design is nice enough, though it brings no aesthetic or functional advantage that we can see. A few new features have been added—notably "Personal News Alert" (for Windows 95 and Windows NT only), which delivers breaking news to your desktop without interrupting your work. The site's continuing strength remains the depth and breadth of its coverage, however, and we think the new design makes this coverage somewhat less accessible than before.

Our three-star rating, unchanged from last year, is based on the assumption that the site's technical problems will prove short-lived. Until then, try the Times or CNN "when you really want to know."

(Reviewed September 15, 1997)