Netscape 7 released

Netscape has released a new version of its browser, which it hopes will end the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the web.

According to Netscape, its new browser is faster and easier to use. Microsoft wrestled market dominance from Netscape in the late 1990s, and now its internet Explorer accounts for 96 per cent of the browser market.

The new version of Netscape is based on Netscape Gecko, a cross-platform program which controls how a web page appears on the screen and supports accepted web standards such as HTML, XML, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript.

Netscape Gecko was developed as part of the Mozilla.org open source community.

Among the new features in Netscape 7.0 are:

• Quick Launch to speed startup time for the browser
• Tabbed Browsing to keep track of multiple sites or pages within a single window
• Download Manager to save files, pause and resume a download
• Click-to-Search to conduct a search on a highlighted word in a web page
• AOL Instant Messenger built in

However, AOL, who owns Netscape, has yet to decide whether to drop Explorer from the new version of AOL and replace it with Netscape.You can check out Netscape 7 for yourself by downloading it here.