In case you haven’t been following its latest fiasco, Netscape is apparently rushing Netscape 6 out the door with a host of problems, including poor support for standards. One of the folks at Slashdot just rips into Netscape on the Slashdot’s frontpage saying,
It seems clear to me that Netscape cares a lot more about shopping tabs and similar deadwood – things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user – than they do about putting out a decent browser. Personally, I’d recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it’s clearly a better browser – and will remain so.
Ouch. But is IE 6 really going to be any better? As ZDNet notes, IE 6 is going to be loaded with the same sort of extraneous options,
Version 6.0, according to ActiveWin.com and WinInformant.com, will get a more digital-media facelift. Microsoft will add Explorer toolbars that will allow users to work more easily with digital images, music, and video clips, the sites said.
Yeah the other day I was thinking to myself, “Gees, I wish I had another button on IE that woudl let me play video clips easily.” Not.
Plus it’s still an open question as to whether or not Microsoft is finally going to get around to supporting standards consistently in its browser. ZDNet claims that, “And Microsoft will almost certainly add the new dynamic HTML and cascading-style-sheet technologies to IE6 that it unveiled last week as part of its service pack 1 update to Version 5.5,” but I won’t believe it until I see it.