What is Netscape Navigator 3.x?

This month's entry in the web-browser wars comes from the 800-pound Mozi11a, as the 1ong-anticipated Netscape Navigator 3.0 dives into the fray. Since Netscape’s 2.0 version, Microsoft's surprisingly competitive Internet Explorer 2.0 has been fighting hack hard; now, in response, Navigator 3.0 arrives with enough new Web goodies to stun the contender from Redmond.

New to Navigator 3.0 is support for different sound formats (including music that can play in the background of Web pages); QuickTime movies; and best of all, Java, which lets you enhance your Web pages with mini applications known as applets. JavaScript, Navigators built-in scripting language, has new commands and bug-fixes. There’s also increased support for HTML 3.2 tags, and as usual, Netscape has thrown in some new tags of its own, including ones for multi-columnar text, background colors in tables, and font control. On the security front, Navigator 3.0 includes harder-to-crack 128-bit encryption keys, up from the 40-bit keys in the previous version. At press time, Netscape hadn’t shipped the Mac plug-ins for Live3D, which implements its VRML support, or for CoolTalk, the Internet phone feature. Also still in beta was Navigator Gold 3.0, which adds a WYSIWYG HTML editor to the program.

RAM Hungry — and Proud of It

Navigator 3.0 isn’t frugal in its requirements: including the Java components, it takes up 8.3MB of disk space, and you’ll probably want to reserve another 5MB or so for the cache folder, which stores pictures and text from your frequently visited sites. The program also asks for a whopping 9MB of RAM. Adding insult to injury, loading a Web page with a lot of text or even a small Macromedia Shockwave animation often causes Navigator to complain that it is out of memory, request more, and abort the page load. In contrast, Internet Explorer 2.0 gets by with 4MB of your hard disk and 4MB of RAM, and doesn’t choke on big pages.

Navigator’s speed in loading Web pages is good, although due to the real-world vagaries of loading pages over the Internet, my tests were necessarily informal. Internet Explorer loads pages from the Web at about the same speed as Navigator, but beats Navigator hands down in reloading viewed pages. While pressing Navigators Back button leads to a perceptible wait, clicking on Internet Explorer’s Back button causes text and graphics to snap back onto the screen almost instantly. Internet Explorer also gives the impression of being faster when loading pages because it displays text immediately then fills in the images.

Getting the Mail, Reading the News

Navigator’s improved integrated E-mail and Usenet news modules are serviceable and convenient, but they lack features found in stand-alone mail and news programs. Both modules display their information in a window containing three resizable frames, Thu largest frame contains the current E-mail message or Usenet posting. The two smaller frames list your selected newsgroups and a list of postings (in the news module) or a list of your mail folders and the mail list (in the mail module). Stuffing all these functions into one window makes the modules feel cramped, even on a good-sized monitor...

The mail module has some unique features: you can send and receive HTML documents, and the recipients (if they’re also using Navigator) see them as if they were actual Web pages, including text, graphics, multimedia, Java, and JavaScript. URLs in mail messages (and Usenet postings) appear as links. You can also create as many mail folders as you wish, which helps in organizing your messages.

As is the unfortunate case with most Web browsers, including Internet Explorer 2.1, Navigator 3.0 crashes. A lot. A long surfing session almost always ends with a crash, usually of the freezing-the-whole-Mac variety. I often take this as a sign that it's time to turn off the computer and just go to bed. Still, there’s no excuse for this sort of instability in an application that has become a basic tool for so many people.

The Last Word

The frenzied pressure to compete in the browser market has brought forth another winner from Netscape. As the only shipping browser that supports Java, Navigator 3.0 gives Macintosh users a much-needed window into this exciting addition to the Web experience. With its built-in mail and news clients, it may be the only Internet program many users need. Unfortunately the program sucks up more than its fair share of system resources, and the pressure to revise products quickly (Navigator 4.0 is expected to begin public beta testing before 1997 rolls around) has made Navigator 3.0 less stable than it should be.

Netscape Navigator 3.0 is still the best Web browser available for the Macintosh. But it comes with enough flaws that Netscape should hardly rest easy especially with the next Macintosh release of Internet Explorer just around the corner.

Negrino, Tom. (November 1996). Netscape Navigator 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 62).

Download Netscape Navigator 3.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II