Netscape 6 Problems Continue with Latest "Final" Version

Last Thursday night Macs Only! broke the story that a potentially final version of Netscape 6 was on Netscape's servers but it was removed by 9am Friday morning. As we reported, we got copies and installed them. Dana Baggett had problems with importing bookmarks but I did not. I had a problem with extreme slowness after clicking the Bookmark menu and general slowness from time to time. Dana also had a problem with a disappearing email message. Then late Monday night the file reappeared on Netscape's servers and it was listed on Netscape's Download page as we first noted yesterday morning.

Are the files the same? Dana got the new files (10 of them) using the installer stub and got a message saying that older Netscape 6 files were located and asking if he wanted them removed. This could mean that Monday's Netscape 6 is different from last Thursday's. He had no further problems with Netscape 6.

I installed Netscape 6 via the installer stub on four computers and had bookmark-related problems with two of them. On a G4 Cube, the bookmarks did not install properly and under Manage Bookmarks they could not be dragged and dropped. Otherwise Netscape 6 worked fine and seemed to be fairly quick. On a PowerBook (FireWire) clicking the Bookmarks menu caused the PowerBook to freeze every time. A second installation resulted in the same problem. Netscape 6 mostly worked fine on an 8500 and a Power Mac G4 except for a couple of crashes until I raised the whopping default 20,000K memory allocation to a humongous 32,000.

Further on the positive side, Dana was able to import his address book and local mail from Communicator 4.76. Here's a positive TechWeb article and a ZDNet review.

I had hoped to have more but I have been and still am struggling with getting Netscape 6 to work on my PowerBook.