After playing with the new preview version of Netscape 7, released yesterday, I found myself asking, "Why?" More specifically, why is AOL Time Warner releasing this thing? Don't they know the browser wars are over and that Internet Explorer won? It reminds me of the knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, arms and legs long since hacked away, defiantly shouting, "Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!" That said, Netscape 7 is a very nice browser, with much to recommend it.

THE BEST NEW FEATURE in Netscape 7--new for Netscape, at least, but apparently lifted from the Opera browser--is a tabbed user interface that allows easy switching from one open Web page to another. You can, for example, create bookmarks that open a specific set of tabs; I used one such bookmark to open all the pages I use for reading the news each morning with a single click. These tabs sit just below the menu bar and are a nice feature, though not turned on by default. Another really convenient feature cribbed from Opera: one-click search. Highlight a word (but not a link) in the browser window and right-click on it, and you can start a search for it from whatever search engine you want to use.

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