Netscape Browser 8.0 Released
Thursday May 19th, 2005
America Online today launched Netscape Browser 8.0, the first major update to its flagship browser since Netscape 7.0 was released in 2002. Based on Mozilla Firefox, this latest release can render pages using either the Gecko or Internet Explorer layout engines. Other new features include Site Controls (per-site security settings), the MultiBar (a toolbar for personalised content), a new way of automatically filling in forms and a quick way of clearing private data like the browsing history. Unlike previous releases, Netscape Browser 8.0 is just a Web browser (no email application, newsgroups client or Web page editor), though it does include an integrated AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ client. As AOL laid off the Netscape browser development team in 2003, most of the programming work for version 8.0 was outsourced to Canadian firm Mercurial Communications.
AOL is heavily promoting the new Site Controls feature, which lets users select a rendering engine and enable or disable functionality like ActiveX, cookies and JavaScript based on whether or not they trust a site. Every hour, the browser downloads predefined Trust Ratings from Netscape's trust partners (VeriSign, TRUSTe and ParetoLogic), allowing it to automatically set the security settings for a large number of sites. By default, trusted sites (large legitimate businesses and the like) are rendered with the Internet Explorer engine to provide what Netscape calls "maximum compatibility". All other sites are rendered using Gecko (referred to as the Firefox engine in the user interface) by default. At the untrusted end of the scale, Netscape enables "maximum browser security" (turns off features like JavaScript and cookies) and displays scary warnings if you attempt to visit a phishing site or other similarly dodgy page.
Netscape Browser 8.0 also introduces the MultiBar, a space-saving toolbar that lets users easily access multiple 'trays' of Live Content such as weather reports, stock data and RSS feeds. Other major new features include the 'Clear My Tracks' command (deletes the browsing, search and download history and clears cookies and the cache) and a redesigned Form Fill feature (replaces the old Forms Manager and Password Manager). A Flash tour of Netscape Browser 8.0 is available.
Netscape Browser 8.0 is only available for Microsoft Windows, with no Mac or Linux versions in sight at the moment. The installer is quite slick, downloading and setting up the new release in the background while it asks you to specify some simple preferences like which theme to use (either Fusion, which looks like the new Netscape.com site, or Winscape, which looks more like a traditional Windows application). It also tries to persuade you to install Desktop Weather by the Weather Channel (opt-out) and RealArcade (opt-in), though it's quite upfront about this. Unfortunately, both the installer and the actual browser crashed several times in our tests.
The Netscape Browser 8.0 Release Notes and the complete Netscape 8 help files are available online (there's no built-in offline help). The Security Alerts page suggests that this new version is based on Firefox 1.0.3. We hope that a minor update to address some of the quite serious issues fixed in Firefox 1.0.4 is on its way.
Update: Just hours after the official release of version 8.0, Netscape Browser 8.0.1 is now available for download. This minor update incorporates all of the security fixes included in Firefox 1.0.4.