I saw the new netscape on filehippo, so out of curiosity I installed it.
My first alert to the impending crapness that I was about to experience was the 20mb installer. Thats not huge or anything, but firefox is only 5.6 so obviously AOL has loaded up the same junk they do on everything else. I was pleasantly surprised though that they didn't. It didn't try to install weatherbug or any of the other junk(viewpoint). At least it didn't ask me if it did. (it did have a weather bar, which may have been powered by weather bug, but it didn't ask me to install it in the installer)
Once I had it installed I noticed it was basically firefox(dont get excited yet). The menu structure seemed about the same as 1.5, but the options menu was different(and not in a good way, it was in line with other brain dead aol designs). It actually had the theme and extensions menus like FF 1.5 did, but FF extensions wont work and aol only has a few ugly themes available. So now you have an ugly firefox with no extensions.
It has a few interesting security functions. You can rate sites within the browser to decide if they use the firefox or IE engine. Why you would do this is beyond me. If it loads with the firefox engine, why use IE? It would be the same thing! It had some security center with a spyware scanner(didn't use it, so I don't know what its powered by) and then some things about pop up blockers ect. Pretty useless bloat in my opinion.
Here is the kicker though. I looked at my task manager and it was using over 100mb of ram after only loading a few sites!(and slower than firefox and IE at that). Firefox can get a little hungry at times, but I dont think I've ever had it go over 60mb.
So my final opinion is:
Netscape is a slow, ugly, less customizable firefox that uses more ram than any other browser and most of the programs on my computer. I don't know why anyone would use it, but if you do please tell me what I missed.
Here is the kicker though. I looked at my task manager and it was using over 100mb of ram after only loading a few sites!(and slower than firefox and IE at that). Firefox can get a little hungry at times, but I dont think I've ever had it go over 60mb.
Interesting that you have not had Firefox go over 60 MB. Fire fox loads at about 40-45 MB right off the bat om my machines. It hits a 100 MB regularly for me on all systems and with previous versions. Reading the Firefox forums and knowledge base 100MB is pretty normal for Firefox. How do you manage such low memory usage?
I guess it depends on what extensions you use. I only have like 5(adblock, filter set g updater, color tabs, tab browser preferences, and mouse gestures)
I use 12 extensions and have about 7 skins installed. As long as Firefox doesn't go too much over 100 MB I don't worry too much. The least amount of RAM on my systems is 1.5 GB the others have more. Even so if Firefox started going significantly over 100 MB then I know there is a problem that needs to be fixed. IE uses the most memory of all 6 browsers I have installed.
In my experience IE has always used less ram than every other browser. I've had it running for 2 hours now and looking at my task manager its using about 40mb of ram.
All of my machines have more than enough ram to run any software, but usually if a software is using tons of ram its not going to be as responsive or even as good as programs that don't. I'm not saying that there is a direct coralation in amount of ram used and how good a program is, but one of the most commen issues people have with whats considered bad software is high resourse usage. Maybe it has more to do with crappy coding, but thats just my observation.