Netscape 6 Performance Under Netscape 6.0 Forrest Stroud
Performance Under Netscape 6.0
This is the issue that will be of most concern to the majority of our users, and for this reason we wanted to take the time to fully test Netscape 6 against its competition. Netscape has been touting its new release as much faster and more efficient than previous releases, a claim we decided to put to test immediately upon first running the official release of Netscape 6.0 and being less than impressed with the results.
A caveat applies here, though, especially on our loading time test. Since Internet Explorer is so tightly integrated with the Windows operating system now, it is able to load faster than other browsers partly due to the fact that many of the necessary components are already loaded with the OS. Unfortunately, there is no other way to test the loading speed of Internet Explorer at this time.
We tested Netscape 6 on two computers. Computer A is a Pentium II 300 MHz desktop running Windows 98 with 256 MB of RAM and a 600 Kbps Cable Modem Internet connection. Computer B is a Pentium II 266 MHz laptop running Windows NT 4.0 with 128 MB of RAM and a 56 Kbps analog modem Internet connection. Netscape 6.0 was tested against Netscape Communicator 4.76 and Internet Explorer 5.5 on both computers.
While we expect results to be roughly similar for the browsers across the Windows platforms, performance may be vastly different when the browsers are run under other operating systems like the Macintosh and Linux. For this reason, our opinions based on Netscape 6.0's performance apply only to our test case scenario which was conducted in an all-Windows environment.
