Well, smack our butts and call us Spanky-- the Mac version of Netscape 6 Preview Release was actually released at the same time as the versions for other platforms! We were first alerted to this happy development by faithful viewer Robert Brockman, who wrote in to tell us that AtAT looks peachy-keen in Netscape 6, excepting the default 16-point text that's infecting all new browsers. Pardon our earlier platform-delay pessimism, but given that we had to wait a whole year before Microsoft deigned to ship a version of IE5 for us second-class Mac users, we just figured that Netscape would make us wait, too-- especially since the company's now owned by AOL, who always releases Windows software before the equivalent Mac ports. But you know what we say: the true benefit of unparalleled pessimism is the occasional pleasant surprise.

Er, actually, let's qualify that "pleasant" a little. We decided to download the N6 Preview Release ourselves, just to take it for a test-drive. Not being fooled by that 200K "smart installer" that just downloads other components as you install them, we instead downloaded the full self-extracting archive version directly from Netscape's FTP server. It's a 10.5 MB download-- smaller than Mac OS 9.0.4, at least-- but after expanding it, it's a whopping 26 MB of data (1,759 items taking up 34.4 MB on a Mac OS Extended disk). This is the end of bloatware? Sure, that's with all the bells and whistles, but still, we were a little taken aback.

Once we got over that little surprise, we fired up the application itself-- only to watch our system crash hard at the splash screen. After a lengthy forced restart, we decided to give it another try. This time, after what seemed to be an interminably long wait, a browser window finally appeared. And guess what? It looks just as ugly and un-Mac-like as those Mozilla builds that disappointed us so badly. After playing around with it for a while, we've come to the conclusion that Netscape 6's "Gecko" HTML rendering engine is fast, fast, fast-- but everything else about the browser is slower than dirt. For instance, on a G3/266, after clicking the Fonts option in the Preferences panel, we waited nearly four seconds before anything changed on the screen.

All we can say is, we hope this "preview" is previewing the kick-butt Gecko engine and not anything resembling Netscape's idea of a finished Mac application. Where are all the hot keys? Why doesn't Tab let us activate the URL box? Buttons aren't Mac buttons, text boxes aren't Mac text boxes, scrollbars look stupid, and even in HTML pages themselves, form elements look like demented refugees from some half-assed Motif-based UNIX application. Fire up N6PR1 and take a look at a radio button on Netscape's own bug-reporting form to see what we mean. Yuck!

In fact, Microsoft may have made us all wait a year before we got IE5, but it's a Mac application through and through, right down to the choice of fruit flavor for the interface elements. On the other hand, Netscape 6 reminds us of-- dare we say it?-- Word 6.0. Its interface has apparently never heard of the Macintosh, and response from everything that isn't the HTML engine itself recalls the actions of an anesthetized slug. And that's surprising, because AOL Instant Messenger is definitely purebred Mac software; heck, it even supports AppleScript and Text-To-Speech. Unfortunately, AOL's Mac development practices don't appear to have rubbed off on Netscape at all. Here's hoping that there's a lot of work done on this "preview release," or else what few remaining Mac-using Netscape holdouts are left are going to run screaming to Microsoft for solace. (Or iCab. Or Opera, if they ever release the damn thing.)