Netscape To Release Communicator 4.5 Beta

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

June 17, 1998 (10:27 AM EDT)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Just because browsers are free, the browser war isn't over. Netscape announced the latest version of Communicator Wednesday, with a number of new features for better searching and communications.

Communicator 4.5 will also try to send traffic to an area of Netscape's (company profile) business that is increasingly contributing to the bottom line: its Netcenter website.

The new client will go into beta early next month, with a full release expected by the fall. The most touted new features center around "smart browsing." Users may now enter search terms directly into the browser location bar. If the user types in a generic term such as cars or computers, Communicator brings up a link to the corresponding area of the Netcenter site. There, users will find news, consumer information, and services related to the search term.

The browser will also do an Internet key-words search to bring the user to the site he/she is looking for. For instance, typing in White House will bring up whitehouse.gov, the president's official site, rather than whitehouse.com, a pornography site that has capitalized on the small differences between domain names.

The key-words feature relies on a growing database of hundreds of thousands of sites. The idea is similar to that introduced in March by a company called Centraal with its Real Names system. Centraal signed a deal with AltaVista last month, whereby the search engine pulls up sites from Centraal's database. Unlike Netscape, Centraal charges $50 for inclusion in its database.

Another "smart" feature is the new What's Related? button, which relies on a database of links from Alexa Internet. A search for the term cars, for instance, would bring up auto-maker sites and Consumer Reports magazine. As with the key-words feature, companies are not paying to be included in the database.

"We're interested in making sure the feature works well for users," said Edith Gong, group product manager for the Communicator division. "Right now, there's no money being exchanged."

In an effort to appeal to home users, especially parents, Netscape has added NetWatch, a set of tools for filtering sites. This essentially gives parents the same power to filter sites that corporate IT managers already have with Netscape's Mission Control Console, Gong said. NetWatch uses the SafeSurf and RSACi Web-ratings systems.

"Users are much more mobile. They're needing to gain access to their messaging and their user environment from a number of different places."
-- Julie Herendeen
Netscape

Netscape has also added a number of new features to e-mail, which is now based on Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. This lets users use boolean searches across multiple folders and address books, both private and shared company directories. It has added easier user-configured spam filtering. Users use a drag-and-drop interface to embed links in e-mail, add colleagues to shared directories, and mail entire folders.

The 4.5 version will also have increased roaming access features for using the same e-mail, messaging, and user environment at work, home, or while on the road.

"Users are much more mobile," said Julie Herendeen, director of marketing for the client-products division at Netscape, in Mountain View, Calif. "They're needing to gain access to their messaging and their user environment from a number of different places."

Herendeen said Netscape's browser share has stabilized at about 60 percent since the company began giving away the browser in January, as measured by analysis companies such as Dataquest and International Data, as well as Netscape's own research. Although the company no longer gains revenue on the browser, it is the most important source of traffic to Netcenter. Netscape will roll out the latest version of its Internet gateway site, Netcenter 2.0, by the end of this month.

Maintaining a strong browser presence will become increasingly important as Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft (company profile) works to integrate Internet Explorer with the Windows 98 operating system as part of its strategy to drive its own gateway site, Start.

Communicator 4.5 does not utilize development from the free source-code community. In the 5.0 version of Communicator, due out next year, Netscape will include code and features contributed by partners in the Mozilla.org free source-code effort.