May 19, 2005

Netscape 8

I just downloaded the latest Netscape release. This is an odd one, in that it offers two rendering engines. You can choose to view pages in the IE rendering engine or the Firefox (Mozilla) engine. The idea is you'll be compatible with everything out there. PC World has more details.

As with all recent Netscape release, this one packs in a ton of features. I don't really need a browser this jam-packed with stuff, so this isn't a big deal to me. I'm quite happy with Firefox for now.

But, I do find the two-headed nature of the rendering interesting. For web developers, this could be an easy way to test pages in one app, without having to switch apps (which, admittedly, isn't a big deal). And, it introduces another little wrinkle, in that if you ever get an error report from someone using NN8, you won't know which rendering engine they're using...heh. Lastly, I wonder if they're solving a problem that doesn't really exist. I rarely find sites that don't work in Firefox. And if I did, and I really wanted to see the content, I'd just fire up IE. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal...