MozillaZineNetscape Browser 8.0 Beta Released

Stephen Donner wrote in to tell us about the public release of Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta. Based on Mozilla Firefox 1.0, this beta of Netscape’s newest browser offers support for both the Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines. A new Site Controls feature lets users enable and disable features like ActiveX, JavaScript and cookies on a site-by-site basis (the browser includes self-updating whitelists and blacklists of safe and dangerous sites). The new Multi-BarLive Content

Netscape released a prototype of a Firefox-based browser last November to a group of registered testers; an updated version was circulated in January. Netscape planned a public beta for February but bugs caused it to be delayed and the build was only made available to the previously registered testers.

Read the Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Release Notes for a list of what doesn’t work right yet and download Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta from the Netscape site. It’s only available for Windows 98 Second Edition or above; there’s no Mac or Linux versions. Feedback can be left in the Netscape Browser Review forums (requires an AOL/Netscape/CompuServe ScreenName).” functionality lets users have more on-screen widgets than ever before, including like RSS feeds, weather forecasts and map searches.