“America Online released a preview edition of Netscape 6 on
Wednesday, April 5, 2000. Preview 1 is not merely a typical
whole-integer sort of upgrade that adds some new features, improves
other features, and gets rid of some bugs. Rather, it’s a complete
makeover from the ground up — not just some cosmetic improvements.
Netscape 6 PR1 is far from ready for prime time, however. It’s not
even close and it gets no cigar — yet.”
“This “makeover,” in fact, could end in a divorce between
Netscape and some, if not many, of its loyal fans. A big factor in
that could be what Netscape/AOL does with NS6 in the two remaining
scheduled preview (beta) releases and in the final shipping version
of its new product. If things remain the same, AOL might
succeed at doing to Netscape Navigator and the ever-popular Lizard
(Mozilla) what Microsoft and its Internet Explorer were never able
to do — kill it….“
“The other side of this strict W3C Gecko engine compliance is if
site managers do not bring their Web pages into the Gecko-required
strict W3C compliance, Gecko-based browsers might not correctly
display those pages, if at all. The possible result: Web surfers
might react by ditching the Gecko-based browsers and going back to
their good old Netscape 4.x browser, Internet Explorer, or some
other browser.”