Early adopter problems and benefits seen with Netscape 6.0.
Items are listed more in order of encounter than anything sensible.
This informal technical note could just as easily have had another title.
Netscape 6.0: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly,
the Wonderful, and the Totally Insufferable.

• Problem Pointless Change
  The bookmark "bug" for dragging a URL link has been moved from outside the location requester input window widget on the left, to inside the location requester input window widget on the left. This does nothing to clarify the function of the "bug", and adds clutter to the location requester input window widget.
• Problem Lost Feature
  The clean cascading menu / folder functionality in the Bookmarks > File Bookmark menu to file a bookmark directly to the target bookmark folder as supported in NS 4.7 is missing.
• Praise Functional Workaround
  The workaround is similar to the NS 4.7 "Edit Bookmarks" window and the well disguised functionality there to drag the bookmark "bug" from beside the NS 4.7 location widget to the spot in the "Edit Bookmarks" display where the new bookmark should be filed. This workaround is considerably less convenient when it works, which is only sometimes, because the levels of bookmarks don't unfold automatically as they do in the above mentioned NS 4.7 "File Bookmarks" capability. Open the Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks menu item, which needs another whole window, grab the little bookmark icon from the location widget (just to the left of the page URL), drag it into the Manage Bookmarks window and you can put it where you want it. The functionality is about the same, perhaps better, time will tell, but the screen real estate sacrificed by merging the "edit bookmarks" and "file bookmark" functionalities is a major loss.
• Problem Feature Failure
  In circumstances yet to be determined, but I had been running some extremely stressful Java applets just beforehand, the Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks menu choice sometimes brings up a window blank except for a low contrast bar naming the bookmark file path. The Manage Bookmarks window does not close in response to CTRL-W when NS 6.0 gets itself wedged this way.
• Problem Feature Failures
  NS 6.0 gets itself wedged a lot. Briefly:
  • The location widget for entering new URLs can get wedged in a state where you cannot modify the data it contains.
  • The menu bar can get wedged in a state where menus work in some windows but not others. This may be related to having a Java applet idling in the window where no response occurs.
  • A secure window wedged itself after a non-response from the interacting site, to the point where it did not refresh itself on an expose event, even though the other, unsecure windows remained functional. It proved necessary to kill this window from the frame kill button, as no part of it worked correctly thereafter.
• Problem Administrative Headaches
  "Registration" is tied to ones old AIM ID, old email account, and old zip code, none of which are necessarily what one wants or in any way "useful" to the user, though AOL may benefit somehow.
• Problem Administrative Headaches
  To get a new username, one must have Netscape remove ones old AIM account, a distinct nuisance and delay.
• Problem Clumsy New Feature
  There is a fairly huge left sidebar area that gobbles a lot more screen real estate than it provides any obvious benefit, and no easily evident way to be rid of it. [It turns out that this can be done. Grab the vertical bar between the sidebar and the main window, and drag it over the sidebar. It took me a while to find that one. There is a tiny arrow in the midst of this vertical bar, which can be clicked to open or shut the sidebar. It took me a month to find that one. More disconcerting yet is to have a window open at a desirable size, then have the sidebar pop up and shove part of the window out of sight to the right side. The workaround for this is to exit NS 6.0 cleanly with the sidebar hidden. The initial browser window will then open with the sidebar hidden too, as will derived windows as long as the sidebar is not open in the evoking window.]
• Praise Improved Feature
  If the optional Java 1.3.0_01 component is included, it runs visibly much faster (perhaps fourfold) than the one Java 1.1.5 vesion bound with NS 4.7, and survives multiple different Java applets running in different windows, so far without a crash.
• Praise Improved Feature
  The optionally included verion of Java is also much more robust. I managed to get five simultaneous versions of my favorite surplus CPU cycle consumer demos going, one with enough elements that it alone would have crashed the NS 4.7 browser's Java, and this one just purred along. It also did a good job of sharing the processor among the five applets and their respective windows, not the case with NS 4.7.
• Praise Improved Appearance
  This Netscape 6.0 version is much more attractive than previous versions, depending on the user selection of "theme". Some provide rounded edges, a 3D look to the window border and sliders, and a halftone screen look to the background real estate in the top and bottom control areas. [One provides pulsing red valentines hearts, too. Stay away from it, that much sugar will rot your teeth.] There are currently two themes delivered with the installation package, and six more available for download from the Netscape pages.
• Problem Modified Legacy Bug
  The buggy HTML table printing of NS 4.7 has been replaced with a different, but also obnoxious, behavior for NS 6.0, though the developers' hearts were in the right place. It does not make me happy to have only the top 25% of a page used because the whole of the next row of cells won't fit in what is left. It will be wonderful when Netscape's developers learn how to adjust lines of text so cells can be split along the leading whitespace internal to parallel cells in a row.
• Problem Unimplemented Legacy Feature
  There is as yet no page setup available (the menu item is there, but hazed out) when printing. As a casualty of collateral damage, the usual printed page headers and footers do not appear, which was probably the best default while users lack the means to control them.
• Praise Good Use of Resources
  No piece of the window border goes wasted; there are teeny little things to poke at and explore pretty much all around the box. It was a bit of a surprise to see how much these varied from one "theme" to another.
• Problem Feature Failure
  Changing to an imported theme using the Edit > Preferences menu item left me with a completely different preference editing widget, and one without the capability to change back to a different theme. The workaround is to notice that you can also change themes from the View > Apply Theme > Theme Preferences menu item, which as a "side" benefit, brings up the whole usual Edit > Preferences menu to the left side of the theme selection widget.
• Problem Feature Failure
  In a situation where the connection was being pretty much instantly reset by the peer machine, NS 6.0 failed silently to change pages, while NS 4.7 correctly showed the HTTP error message to the user before failing to change pages.
• Problem Feature Failure
  Without apology or explanation, NS 6.0 subtly changes the bookmark URL for this NT share drive mounted file, currently:
  file:////Kdolan/xanthian.pub/docs/NS6_bugs.html
  to
  file://///Kdolan/xanthian.pub/docs/NS6_bugs.html
  by adding a fifth slantbar after the "file:" part in the location widget, while opening the URL, and then off and on has problems reloading the file using that modified name. This becomes much more an issue when a file at a URL has HTML anchor points, which get implemented by reloading the URL at the anchor point, and a file with lots of internal navigation via built in anchor points sees lots of these problems occur. More generally, NS 6.0 doesn't handle files mounted on NT shares spectacularly well yet.
• Problem Lost Feature
  The "set image as wallpaper" function has gone missing in NS 6.0. Bringing up the same image in NS 4.7 allows it to be used as screen wallpaper.
• Problem Lost Feature
  A right mouse click in the location widget does not evoke the pop-up menu containing "paste" as it did in NS 4.7. The workaround is to left click in the location widget, then paste using the Edit > Paste menu function, or the <CTRL>-v keys, instead. This adds excess motion and clicks to pasting a URL from another NT window into the NS 6.0 locaton widget.
• Problem Feature Failure
  NS 6.0 when running Java applets, consumes memory without perceptible limit. An applet that runs in 819224 bytes of memory in NS 4.7 using Java 1.1.5 was above 11.3 megabytes and rising before I killed it in NS 6.0 using Java 1.3.0_01. The problem seems to be a failed ordering in an algorithm related to garbage collection. The behavior seen or implied is this.
  • Applet consumes allocated memory.
  • Java runtime checks for sufficient free memory for useful operation.
  • Check fails, there is no free memory.
  • Java runtime allocates an additional 128Kbytes to provide sufficient free memory for useful operation.
  • Java runtime does a garbage collection pass.
  Probably the behavior intended was this, instead.
  • Consume allocated memory.
  • Garbage collect.
  • Check for sufficient free memory for useful operation.
  • Check succeeds, there is plenty of free memory.
  • Continue without allocating an unneeded additional chunk of memory.
  The errant allocation can be suppressed by repeatedly forcing a garbage collection from the Java console window, which supports the above scenario.
• Problem Clumsily Changed Feature
  One chooses a "blank page" as startup page to save time in several ways: to avoid loading a page in which one has no interest, to cut down on clutter and confusion, and to save time when pasting a URL into the location widget by removing the need to select or delete the old contents. NS 6.0 sabotages this latter savings by filling the location requester with an "about:blank" string rather than leaving the location requester empty.
• Problem Annoying Popups
  The perception is that there are a lot more annoying advertising popups associated with NS 6.0, though this may be merely a change with Netscape's acquisition by AOL rather than a browser specific problem.
• Problem Legacy Misfeature
  When a plug-in module is called out by a URL's web page, but not installed in the browser, these difficulties arise.
  • The popup requester asking if the user wants to download the plug-in does not identify the missing plug-in by name or type.
  • Acceptance by the user of the chance to download the plug-in leads to the Netscape generic and confusing plug-in downloads web page set, rife with Netscape ads and still with no identification of which plug-in is required, rather than to the plug-in's original vendor or other source, or to a list of vendor or other sources of suitable plug-ins for the missing functionality.
  The obnoxious workaround required is to search the web page source for the web page needing the plug-in, in an attempt to identify the kind of plug-in required, then use a web search engine to identify a vendor or other source for that kind of plug-in.