Thankfully, there’s some innovation without the incestuous intent. Even the news subscriptions delivery is tied to Netscape news only. Other features also require this Netscape tie-in, such as the Friends’ Activity Sidebar this shows when your contacts post a new story. One is an integrated tool that enables you to vote for news stories and blog postings, and the ability to post stories directly to – but, of course, this is only really of any value to users of that particular social-bookmarking service. In an attempt to distance itself from the inevitable Firefox-by-another-name accusations, Netscape has tuned into the social aspect of web browsing and added a slew of related features.

But the Gecko support does at least mean you get similar performance to Firefox: our page-rendering test took 5.26 seconds (compared to 7.09 seconds for IE7), and memory usage was just 25,268KB.

What it didn’t do was pick up an existing Firefox bookmarks file on our test system, offering only to import the IE and Opera ones it found. This means you get the same across-the-board standards compliance, the same compatibility with most modern web pages, and the same support for Firefox 2 extensions. Firefox users will feel at home, as Netscape has turned to the Gecko page-rendering engine that drives Firefox.

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