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Netscape 6 Pr3 Available
Netscape has released Preview Release version 3 of its long-awaited Netscape 6 browser.
Having just installed it and given it a quick once-over, I have a few preliminary observations:
- The most obvious change from PR2 is the updated skin or "theme". The old "Modern" theme -- which produced a chorus of howls for its excess plainness -- is out. Netscape now sports a more three-dimensional, blue-chrome design.
- PR3 is based on the Mozilla Milestone 18 nightly build from 29 September, rather than the latest formally released M17 build.
- As with PR2, PR3 offers an interesting selection of language choices, only moreso: German, French, and Japanese versions of English, and both Japanese and US versions of Japanese. Since there was no English English,US English, or UK English from which to choose, I settled on the German English, and so far it seems pretty Englisch to me.
- The image-swap problems of M17 seem to have been fixed, although occassional artifacts do mar some rollovers
- The Sun Java plug-in, though installed, doesn't seem to be working
- Interestingly, the CSS :hover pseudo-class is broken -- a feature that has worked reasonably well for several Mozilla builds
- The annoying and standards-defiant practice of displaying the <table> "summary" attribute as a tool-tip has been eliminated.
All-in-all, Netscape 6 PR3 appears to be a somewhat more stable browser than PR2, although a number of rough edges still remain.