Who is the badshah among browsers?

A preview version of Netscape's browser has just been released even as experts size up a `beta' of Microsoft's next upgrade of `Internet Explorer'. Anand Parthasarathy assesses the promised new features of the two major contenders - and checks out a cheeky challenger.

YOU WANT to send an urgent email to a business associate on the east coast of the U.S. As you type your message using `Netscape Mail', you notice that it's almost midnight.

That would make it about 9.30 in the morning in New Jersey, where the clocks have been set forward for spring. Your friend usually looks at his email around this time - an hour after getting in to his office. Could he be ``online'' at this very moment?

You decide to check - and look up his name in the ``Buddy'' list that pops up on your screen. Hitting the key fetches his email address from the memory and Netscape's Instant Messenger takes over and checks whether the recipient is online.

By luck he is - so you swing into ``instant'' mode and your message pops up on his screen. Soon the two of you are exchanging messages to and fro - many with documents attached - till the details of your business deal are honed.

It would have taken a week of emails to sort out the issues in the old way.

``Instant'' messaging has been around for a year from both the major Internet browsers, Netscape's Communicator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But the upcoming new release of Netscape 6 merges this feature so seamlessly with the Mail programme, that you can switch over to ``live'' exchanges anytime your mail addressee is simultaneously available on the Net. All this at the cost of a local telephone call.

An Internet browser used to be a barebones programme that served as the front end to the World Wide Web. To view a site one typed the URL or Universal Resource Locator, the well known www dot com format, in the locator field of the browser - which then did the rest: locating the server at the address provided by you and establishing the link to your computer.

Today this type of navigation tool is only one of a slate of features offered by the bigger browsers: at the very least, they provide a free email service; remember the addresses of your most used contacts; accelerate searches using multiple search engines; allow you to ``customize'' your browser by clothing it with ``skins'' of your choice; ``push'' pre selected Net content to your computing platform or alternatively reject unsolicited mail (the result of what is called ``spamming'') and deny access to unwanted ``cookies'' - mini programmes that wriggle into your machine uninvited.

``Mosaic'' was the only browser available in the pioneering days of the Internet - but today the two ``big boys'' among Web browsers are Netscape and Explorer.

Netscape's Navigator was omnipresent till the challenger, Microsoft, unveiled Explorer - and in a canny commercial move, offered it free of charge. It soon captured over three-fourths of the browser market, a position further strengthened when it bundled Explorer with its ubiquitous desktop and portable operating system, ``Windows''.

Indeed, this marrying of the two environments - desktop and Internet by a seamless marriage of Windows to Explorer, was at the core of the celebrated court case where many U.S. states joined to challenge Microsoft's allegedly monopolistic ways.

The April 3 finding of the U.S. court agreed that the bundling was more in Microsoft's commercial interest than the customers - but an appeal has been launched.

Legal issues and Microsoft's motives apart, the fact remains that today the customer expects - nay, demands - that any computing platform: desktop, portable or wireless device, provide instant access to the Internet.

On April 6, America On Line (AOL) who bought Netscape in 1998, announced the imminent release of a new version. After almost two years of minor ``point releases'' (4.5, 4.6, 4.7), they dropped a digit and unveiled the first ``pre release version'', of Netscape 6. ``PR 1'' was available last week for free download - and is expected to be followed by PR 2 and 3 before the main release of Netscape 6 in the last quarter of this year.

One of the notable deviations from the past in the new Netscape is the adherence to the new ``open source'' standards that are emerging - Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML 4.0), Extended Markup Language (XML), Cascading Style Sheets (CCS 2), Document Object Model (DOM), Java 2 and Javascript 1.5. The new browser engine which drives the application is Netscape's nod to the ``open'' mantra, where it encourages third parties to add value to the browser. The engine is codenamed ``Gecko'', a successor of its open source initiative, ``Mozilla''.

Unlike competitor Microsoft which was slammed last week for non adherence to global standards, Netscape 6 claims compatibility with all standards for Internet content and access, promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Accordingly the new version runs under Windows, MacOS or Linux.

There are a fistful of new features breathlessly listed in the specifications sheets that can be found on the Netscape site. Many users like this correspondent have hitherto found it wiser to keep both browsers IE and Netscape active on their desktops and switching from one to the other, because each had its eccentricities and strong points.

Such users will find that some of the so called ``new features'' are new only to Netscape. Others will be meaningful only to AOL subscribers in the U.S.

For example, much is made of the new ``search'' capability - Netscape has tied up with a very efficient search engine, called ``Google''.

In fact the last update of Internet Explorer (5.0) inaugurated an equally good search facility driven by Altavista and a search engine called ``Virage''. Netscape had a ``What's Related'' button on the URL line but this usually threw up the most absurd content. Now it is only just catching up.

Netscape's ``Instant Messenger'' was a big hit since it was launched with version 4.7. Now going online with email with the addressee has become even easier because this feature has been merged with the mail box. Internet Explorer has some catching up to do on this front.

The new Netscape feature ``My Sidebar'' is an eye wash: it enables the user to concentrate all the access buttons of choicein a vertical bar on the left hand side of the page and have things like news headlines or stock market quotes flashing even as one is viewing other content on the rest of the page.

If one recalls, Explorer's Search feature or Explorer bar worked just like this.

One worthwhile add-on is the auto-translation feature which when invoked, translates the content in a foreign language site.

However the languages are restricted to the usual European alternatives - French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and a few flavours of Japanese and Chinese.

I don't see this happening too soon with devanagiri or other Indian script languages where special fonts are involved. Netscape would not be bothered.

Another goody for Netscape users is the ``Composer'' feature where you can generate text and pictures using HTML - useful when you want to send such content as email attachments - they make for much smaller files than bulky word processor output.

Perhaps more than the fistful of feature add-ons in Netscape 6, is its sheer size - it is Netscape Communicator 4.72 after a stringent diet.

The size of a bare bones system is claimed to be only 8 MB - though I think a usable configuration exploiting all the new features, would occupy atleast 15 MB. Netscape has thrown away some of the excess baggage - features that were rarely used, like ``Netcaster''.

In comparison the current Explorer is a heavy disk guzzler - taking up something like 30 MB of hard disk.

Internet Explorer: beta stage

The whizzkids at Microsoft haven't been sitting around either.

A few weeks ago, they released a first beta or test version of the 3rd and last Windows upgrade: Windows Me (for millennium).

Tucked into this product was a beta of the new Internet Explorer 5.5. Support for some new standards is promised including CCS and Dynamic HTML.

What Netscape did with its mail server and instant messenger, Explorer does with Outlook and MSN Messenger: marry the two.

Possibly the best new feature will be Explorer's ``Print Preview'' option where you can see how web pages you have downloaded will print - and most usefully - how many pages they will take.

I have often printed out web pages blind - then ended up finding that a document takes up umpteen pages - most of which are useless to me. I cannot think of a feature I would welcome more.

Sizewise, the new Explorer does not offer any signs of slimming: typical install sizes could be up to 40 MB.

And there's the rub: browsers have become so bloated that many users are irritated by how much space they occupy - and consequently , how sluggish they have become.

Indians in particular have learned to appreciate the merits of a compact, fast browser, because they pay twice over for their surfing time - once to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and again to the telephone department.

They may like some of the new features in the upcoming versions of the two browser badshahs. But they are unlikely to break out in an ecstasy of delight. More likely they will say:

``Your stuff is great. Now, go back to the drawing board, guys, and give us a product which does all this - at twice the speed and in half the size.''

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