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Screen Shot of Netscape Communicator 4.5 beta 1

Netscape Communicator 4.5 beta 1 is not really a new product. A revamp of it's user interface and an addition of some new features. In this review, we will talk about some of the good and bad about it.

The Good

To my surprise, NC4.5b1 loads much faster than it's predecessor NC 4.05 and IE 4.01. On my overclocked Celeron running at 400mhz, it took less than 3 seconds to launch. Gone away is the annoying initialising Java when it first loads up.

Looks like NS4.5b1 is also non Java compliant. When I click on the About Communicator, the Java logo is missing. Thus it implies that certain Java applets might not run properly depending on which camp the applets are written for.

The other thing that I took notice is the button "What's Related". I did a test on it but nothing seems to happen. From what I could gather, the reason is because I am behind a proxy server. According to some reports, this will be rectified in later betas of NC4.5

The Bad

I did an experiment with both IE4.01 (Win98) and NS4.5b1 running side by side. I keyed in the URLs of a foreign site which I have surf before e.g. http://www.essex.ac.uk

I gave NS4.5b1 a 3 seconds lead, and guess what, IE4 loads much faster than NS4.5b1 by at least 5-8 seconds on average.

Another experiment I did was to load the page first, shut down both NS4.5 and IE4.01. Later I launch both and load the old pages http://www.essex.ac.uk. It looks like IE4.01 beats NS4.5b1 totally in terms of speed. Most of the sites I tried using the two experiments generated the same results.