I’ve read some reviews of Netscape 6 that blast it for its slow performance and lack of stability. So, I downloaded it and, yeah, it’s slow and crashy, but there’s another, more basic problem with this browser.

It doesn’t display tables properly.

Now, you’d think they would iron out a bug like that pretty early on in the development process, but there it is, in the final release.

I’m not too pleased with IE 5.5, either. The animated globe icon that is supposed to spin while the page is loading will just stop, while the page is still loading. And the status bar reads “Done.”

This might seem like picking nits, but the first few times this happened I thought the browser had crashed or my connection had timed out.

Feedback from the computer telling you it’s still working is important. That’s why all the operating systems have hourglasses or spinning disks or something to tell you that it’s still working.

So, I’m not too thrilled with the latest version of either of the major browsers. But I’ll stick with IE 5.5 as my main browser, if only because I have a feeling that trying to downgrade to IE 5.0 would be a major headache. Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize that we might want to have older versions of their browser for testing purposes.