A less than half-baked review
Out of curiosity, I downloaded Netscape for OS 9 to discover whether it was any better than WaMCom 1.3.1. I also wanted to see whether it could load the OS X Firefox/SeaMonkey extensions that still work in WaMCom's browser and whether it would accept the URL address bar about:config pipelining tweaks.
Netscape had a habit of crippling its browsers, removing functions that Mozilla had included. This had led me to Mozilla, lo these many years ago. I wanted to find out whether Netscape had done the same with this version.
I removed everything WaMCom Mozilla — in Applications, Documents and the system folder — to ensure nothing of that version could interfere with a clean install of Netscape's version.
WaMCom has a problem with the
Ars Technica site. The left side of the page is cut off — except with the forums — so Ars was the first site I went to with Netscape. The page cutoff remained with Netscape. (A workaround is to copy any story that has the left side missing and paste it into SimpleText.)
The extensions I use in WaMCom are SmoothWheel, Prefbar, Mouse Gestures and an older version of Adblock. However, to make all these extensions visible in the Tools menu, WaMCom requires two more extensions, ExtensionUninstaller API and ExtensionManager 2, loaded in that order.
Netscape loaded Adblock with no problem, and it happily blocked ads. However, though it loaded ExtensionUninstaller and ExtensionManager, neither showed up in the Tools menu, possibly a newly discovered and further example of Netscape crippling its browsers.
I tried about:config in the URL address bar, and the settings appeared, but since no extensions would list under Tools, I didn't try changing any settings and adding any to enable pipelining.
So for me, WaMCom remains the winner. Netscape is slower than WaMCom, but that's without pipelining. And with no extensions control under Tools, downloading any more extensions was pointless. I didn't bother experimenting any further and trashed Netscape.
