PCCRLNTS.RVW 980505 Comparison Review Company and product: Company: Corel/Netscape Address: 1600 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1Z 8R7 Phone: +1-613-728-3733 Fax: +1-613-761-9176 Email: custserv2@corel.ca pradmin@netscape.com Other: http://www.corel.com http://www.netscape.com Product: Netscape Communicator 4.01/Netscape Navigator4.01/Corel Central 8 Summary: integrated email agent, newsreader, and Web browser Cost Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good) "Friendliness" Installation 3 Ease of use 2 Help systems 1 Compatibility 2 Company Stability 3 Support 1 Documentation 1 Hardware required 2 Performance 2 Availability 3 Local Support 1 General Description: Netscape Communicator is shipped as the communications part of Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8 for Windows 95/NT. This review is part of a set looking at communications suite software. The Netscape browser, probably the most widely known aspect of this suite, is not dealt with in detail in this review. Comparison of features and specifications User Friendliness Installation The mail and news portions of the program are not particular easy to configure for use with the Internet: complete "Preferences" may not be available depending upon where in the program suite the selection is made. Setup of news can be particularly problematic in view of the performance issue dealt with below. Ease of use Selection of items and moving between panels can be confusing. Most items are selected with a single click, but some must be double clicked in order to activate, and this is not necessarily immediately evident. Having used a great many email agents in my years, I was surprised at how difficult it was to use the mailer in this product. While it is fairly straightforward to read and send mail, finding other functions can be very difficult. (I am still trying to figure out how to make a posting to Usenet news without replying to a posting.) A rather ironic bug is that the "Close Window" button (the "x" in the upper right hand corner of the frame) does not work on the "Security" window of the browser. In addition, when you submit information to a secured server, you are warned that you are doing so. This warning is odd enough, but you are given the *same* warning when you then move to another page that is *not* secured, possibly leading users to believe that they are communicating with a secured server when that is not the case. Security seems to be an area with more than the normal level of bugs. Help systems Integrated help files are part of the program, but there is also a help facility that uses Web site links. Compatibility Most attachments and links are handled properly and automatically. However, in some cases they are not, for no apparent reason that I could determine. News does not use a standard newsrc file, but creates separate directories for each NNTP server, plus individual files for each newsgroup subscribed to. For some reason a non-functional dummy news server is established on installation. The bookmark file is well known to be a simple text file, despite the dire warnings not to edit it. However, the largest impediment to editing of the file is the fact that the file structure is not standard DOS text. (The internal structure, at a binary level, appears to be more closely related to UNIX text files.) This also makes it difficult to share portions of bookmark files. Under Windows NT, pages with Java applets almost always freeze the program. This may be related to the slowdown in performance seen when Java is started while the program is operating under Windows 95, but the NT performance monitor does not indicate excessive CPU activity. Company Stability While company stability is problematic for anyone these days, both Corel and Netscape are significant players in the market. Company Support Corel support for the package appears to be non-existent: indeed, accessing the "help" Web site is quite the exercise in frustration. The feedback/comments page which is the sole link behind approximately half of the help options does not appear to function at all. Toll free lines for support appear to have completely disappeared, and some support lines are now 900 (additional charge beyond long distance) numbers. (The title of the graphic on the Customer Service page is ban_cusomerservice.gif. Is this company policy, or merely an ironic comment by the Webmaster?) A promise of email addresses for contact information is empty: no such addresses appear anywhere. Several updates to the program have appeared since it was released, and even since I started this review. One interesting aspect of the Web site is the lack of an option to update the program. Netscape is not much better, although after searching several pages I did find a press contact to which I could submit an early draft of this review. (I should note that this produced a request that I hold the review until such time as Netscape had a chance to respond. Despite waiting an additional month, no response was ever received from Netscape.) Documentation Printed documentation shipped with the product is minimal. Many administrative tools and utilities included with the package are simply not mentioned. A separate "official guide" is available from McGraw-Hill, but does not include the CorelCentral product, although it does have some coverage of Netscape Navigator. System Requirements Minimum requirements, as specified for the product, do not appear to be sufficient for effective operation. News operation particularly requires CPU and disk speed at the top end of current desktop machines, while Java appears to push even that. Interestingly, however, performance monitoring during operation of the suite components shows relatively low levels of CPU and memory activity. Performance I'm sorry, but this combined product, as opposed to Netscape Navigator itself, is pig slow. My first test was on a 486/33, not the swiftest CPU in the world, true, but with lots of memory and disk space. I would invoke, in order, CorelCentral, the PPP dialer, my preferred mailer, my preferred text only newsreader, a word processor, Notepad, and still have time to do my first mail message *and* my first news posting before CorelCentral was up and ready to function. Reading mail is slow. Having selected a message, you can hear the disk rumbling away, and have several seconds before the message displays in the lower box and the mail reader will allow you to enter keystrokes again. Using the keys to move through the list of messages is therefore an exercise in frustration. Having selected more than one message the messages no longer display in the reading box, and so moving through the list of messages with the shift key down (and adding more to the selection) is considerably faster. Even so, you can tap the arrow keys at the rate of about once per second, and expect to have the key read only once every second time. In fact, the program itself is so slow that it continues even after the window disappears from the screen and the icon disappears from the task bar. In shutting down the system, I closed CorelCentral, then several other programs, and then, since both window and icon had disappeared, shut down the system. An alert appeared stating the "the program was not responding." Since no program was visibly active, I selected the immediate end option. Next time I started CorelCentral, it complained that it had been abnormally terminated, and went through the entire, tedious recovery procedure. Reading news is painfully slow. Having selected the news server, it takes the system a while to get new information about your subscribed groups. (Selecting a group is so slow that I thought the computer had locked up. Which is another thing CorelCentral/Communicator is good at ...) Having selected a group, the newsreader reads all the information it has locally, seems to get some quick check from the server, and then expires old messages, thereafter asking you if you want to download new headers. Downloading the headers on an active group can take ages: downloading several thousand headers (and, remember, we are still talking about headers, *not* the messages themselves) can take close to an hour. If the complete download of messages is not received, you cannot read any of the messages whose headers *have* been downloaded: you must select another group and download the headers for that, or go back to mail and then return to news again. There is an option to get only the next few hundred messages, and I would strongly suggest this for large newsgroups. Once you have the header information there are functions for downloading both selected and flagged messages "for offline reading." However, if you do choose that route, you can't do any further reading while downloading is going on. Also, at the first error (such as an expired message) the entire download aborts. At times the reader will report "Done" even though no message has collected, but also not returning any error message. In this case the download aborts as well. (For some reason downloading selected or flagged messages does not always collect attachments. Also, on occasion the message are not readable unless you are, in fact, connected to the news server, even if you have downloaded the message itself. And downloaded messages can take so long to display that you sometimes are not sure whether they *have* downloaded except for the fact that no traffic is flowing over the modem.) The Communicator Suite is very tightly coupled. Suppose you have selected some messages for download, and while you are waiting for that you start a couple of copies of Navigator and download some long pages. One of the sites insists on trying to send you cookies. Navigator, of course, gives you the option of deciding whether you will accept the cookies. However, when the alert box pops up telling you of one, everything stops. Both browser windows, and the news download. No traffic moves at all until you have dealt with the one alert. If you have selected to block JavaScript applets, then accessing a site which uses such applets will *not* generate any type of alert, but will stop that particular browser window without any notice about what is going on. (In that case, most others functions do seem to continue.) Start a download from a Web page, and the program starts a (seemingly native Windows) "Saving Location" box. Start a download of a large-ish newsgroup, and the file download pretty much stops. The Suite is even more tightly coupled. During one run, I happened to have a browser window open. Not doing anything, just open. I was doing a download of news. I got an alert box saying that CSCAPE had preformed an illegal operation. Normally this seems to refer to the browser operation, and, indeed, when I clicked on close it was the browser window that did close. Communicator shut up the newsreader window, and greyed out the menu bar, but did allow me to click on another of the Suite icons, and, once that application had come up, to click back to mail and news. (I considered myself fortunate. If Corel Central/Communicator does abort, it runs through an interminable recovery process the next time you start it.) Running Corel Central/Communicator under Windows 95, the suite locked up almost daily: certainly several times per week. This could range from a minor fault that would shut the browser down (which shuts down all browser windows that may be open at the time) to a full system crash. Interestingly, although I experienced several crashes that would completely lock the shell, keyboard, and mouse (not even responding to ), I was sometimes able to access the computer over the network even after it was no longer responding locally. Printing of email is nicely formatted in most cases, but printing of Web pages, particularly complicated ones, often simply generates a blank page with a URL header. Local Support A curious icon whose shape can be vaguely interpreted as a question mark and a C seems to link to a Web page like help system. Support Requirements By and large the program operates well under the default settings. With the expansion of functions there are a great many settings to be established, and changes to default settings can be difficult to find. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998 PCCRLNTS.RVW 980505