Netscape vs Mozilla vs IE (Score 2)

Well, every time any of these three are mentioned, comments start about all three, so here's a few comments.

First of all, IE is built into Windows nowadays. It loads faster. Period. If you think I'm wrong, why can't you uninstall it? Why is Microsoft in court? Some of the DLLs are used by regular Explorer as well as IE, so it is loaded at boot, and it's in your system's memory...

With that in mind, opening the program is one thing, _*rendering*_ speed is another. As near as I can tell, they render differently, but loading a page seems close enough time-wise.

Netscape 6 is based on an earlier build of Mozilla. Basically if you want all the Netscape features, use Netscape 6 and have a nice day. If you like the browser but don't care about the extra features (or you just hate AOL), go use some of the nightly builds of Mozilla, or at least the Milestones (which are gone and we're now looking at version numbers like .6 instead of Milestones for the future).

Something else you might want to keep in mind is that Mozilla has that nice little Debug menu. It's got extra code, unless I'm mistaken, to help further development. Eventually the extra code will be removed, and at the same time things like memory footprint, load times, etc will be worked on making it *gasp* faster. Are we at v1 yet? No, we are not. Mozilla 1.0 won't be out 'til next year sometime. Which means it's lovely beta software. Beta software means bugs, beta software means slower than it could/should be. Netscape 6 is based pretty darn close to beta software.

And while I'm rambling on here, does anyone know of any commonly used program that gets a new version but takes up less resources? Or that is faster to load? The more things the program can do, chances are it will take more resources than the previous version. The point releases address things like speed, memory, and of course bugs...

Currently I use IE5.5 and some Mozilla nightlies at home. At work it's IE5 and Netscape 4.x. IIRC, Netscape 4.x still has some advantages over IE5.x: JavaScript. Are Netscape 4.x's strengths enough for me to use it regularly? No. Netscape 6? Not when I can use Mozilla... :)

Bottom line (not literally): Use what works for you.

That's enough ranting for one night. :)

R