Lottery Post Journal

I downloaded and installed the new Netscape 8.0 browser, and I am very impressed!

One of the best features is its ability to run just about any web site perfectly, because if the Netscape browser doesn't have a particular feature, it uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) browser engine to render the page and display it inside the Netscape window — seemlessly!

As a user, you would never know that kind of thing was happening in the background; you'd just see a page that works perfectly.

For example, one of the things that IE users have always seen is that the Lottery Post menus and popup menus have a cool transparency to them, so you can partially the see the content beneath the menu.  All other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, etc., cannot display the transaparency, and instead just display an opaque menu (solid background with no transparency).

Well, to my surprise, the new Netscape browser shows the transparency just fine!  Also, other IE features are present, such as the "click" sound that lets you know when the browser is going to a different web page.

Fro a Webmaster's perspective, if you look at the browser's user agent string, you see "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Netscape/8.0.2", which is really unique.  It is a kind of morph between IE and Netscape, as both are listed in the string.  As a result, all the IE features from a web site are shown.  Cool stuff!

That really only scratches the surface though.

The new Netscape 8.0 has the best integration of security features I have ever seen on any browser.

Going back a step, the browser has a tabbed interface, something Firefox and Safari users Are accustomed to.  So if you have multiple web pages open, the are represented as different tabs within one browser window, rather than separate windows.  It works just like the Internet Explorer "Internet Options" dialog box, which has the various tabs at the top.  When you click a tab, it shows that page on top of the others.

Getting back to the security features, when a site registered with Verisign (an indication of a professional, legitimate web site), a small green shield symbol appears in the tab for that web page.  So you know right off the bat if the site is a good one.

If the site is not registered with Verisign, a gray symbol appears instead of a green one.  That doesn't mean it's a bad site, but the fact that there is a green symbol for registered sites is a very nice way to signify a trusted site.

With either symbol, when you click the symbol it opens a small popup menu, where you can directly control just about every aspect of security for that particular web page.  It is just completely awesome that the menu is so tightly integrated with the web page, exactly where your senses would tell you it should be.  From that small menu you can:

• Change the security "trust" settings for that site
• Tell Netscape which other browser to use for rendering the page if it uses features that are not part of Netscape (the IE rendering engine thing I talked about above)
• Enable or disable the popup blocker for that site
• Tell Netscape whether to open popups for that site in a new tab or a new window
• Allow images to display for that site
• Control cookie usage on the site
• Enable/disable JavaScript, ActiveX, and Java for that site

There are many other things that are great about this browser; way too many to list.

For someone who not completely satisfied with their current browser, I'd highly recommend giving the new Netscape a try.  It's a free download.

Also, joy upon joy, when I installed the new Netscape, it did not create icons and programs all over my PC advertising AOL, AT&T, and a million other things.  In fact, I have not found any advertising installed on my PC after installing Netscape!

There was a time I would resist installing Netscape just because of all the crap that it installed on my PC.  (Escpecially the ultra-annoying AOL.)

Here's the link to download Netscape:

http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/download/default.jsp

If anyone does give it a try, please post back what you think about it.  I'd be interested to see if others have the same overwhelming feeling about it that I have.