Lotzothoughtz

I’ve been using Safari 3’s public beta for the passed four hours or so of internet time and I’ve gotta say I’m impressed. This is hard for me to say, I wanted to hate the browser because honestly folks I have a problem with Apple due to their iPod products (typical techie dislikes). So I wanted soooo much to write this new product off as simply an overstylized piece of crap…but I can’t, so i won’t.

Instead I’ll tell you my first impressions: on most pages the browser is very fast, much faster than IE and Firefox and on some pages faster than Opera. It has very nice way of displaying bookmarks, kind of like information is displayed within iTunes. Safari has a very clean and open interface, not too much clutter and the tabs are very streamlined and don’t get bulky and in the way.

I haven’t utilized all the features yet and I am keeping in mind that this is a beta product. So far the only issue I’ve had is that some flash based interactive objects on a web page were static and I wasn’t able to interact with them. Although I am confident that is just a beta bug.

Overall I am shocked and how much I have liked using the Safari browser thus far. These are just first impressions tho, so things could change.

Today Apple announced that they would be making their Safari browser available for the Windows OS.  This is the first time the browser would be available to non-Mac users.

As with everything it produces, Apple claims that Safari is the best browser out there, posting comparative stats on the Safari 3 site.  Right now there is a public beta available, I’ll put up a review of sorts as soon as I can get into the program for a night or so.

The other day I was doing whatever it is I do online and for some reason I landed at the Netscape portal. Remember Netscape? Early internet company that helped pioneer the browser and define what an internet portal was. Well, after Microsoft nearly destroyed the company in the 1990s the company persisted, was eventually purchased by AOL, was reinvented as a social networking news portal and through all of this has continued to produce the Netscape browser.

Well just seeing the teal color scheme and little N with that swoopy thing made me nostalgic, reminded me of a vivid memory I have of my logging into a computer at my middle school library on a computer that utilized Netscape internet and the browser. Reminded me of how magical the internet back then seemed, it wasn’t a tool back then, it was something special, something amazing.

Which brings me here, to the latest edition of the Netscape browser which has once again been rebranded as the Netscape Navigator 9. That’s right guys, Netscape has returned the browser to the original name (Navigator) which had since been rebranded as simply Navigator and then as the Netscape Browser. Right now the browser is a standalone application, they will release a browser suite later on which will include an email client (just like the Netscape suites before it).

Netscape Navigator is based on the popular mozilla browser, in other words it has the same bones as Firefox and any extension except skins that are made for FF 2 can be used in the new Netscape Navigator 9.

The new features in NN 9 are:

• Visual Refresh
• URL correction
• News Menu and Sidebar
• Link Pad, News Tracker
• In-Browser Voting
• FF Extension Compatibility
• Sidebar Mini Browser
• Restart Netscape without losing your tabs
• Resizeable Text Area
• Tab History (history follows tabs opened from links within other tabs)
• OPML Support
• Throbber (the N that takes you to Netscape.com)
• Combined Stop/Reload button
• Friends’ Activity Bar
• Netscape.com Sitemail Notification

Not surprisingly the browser integrates with the Netscape Portal, allowing for in-browser sharing and voting as well as the abilities to track friends’ activity on the portal and the headlines on the portal.

I’ve been using Netscape Navigator 9 as an IE7 replacement with no problems whatsoever, in my daily usage I find it to be a lot faster than IE7 and somewhat faster than FireFox 2. If you like FireFox but want something a little different with a little bit more out of the box, try to Netscape Navigator 9. Go on, try it.