Which to use? I should say right off that I prefer Netscape, for mainly political reasons. Microsoft would like nothing better than to drive a stake through the heart of JAVA. If the ever had the sort of strangle hold on the browser market like they have on the home PC operating system market, java applets would soon be a thing of the past. So my support of Netscape is only to support my lievelyhood.
Every few days, it seems, MSIE or Netscrape ships off a new version or signs a new deal. And there is much feasting and brewhaha. Many new feature are announced and the users feel happy and warm knowing the product they downloaded last week is already out of date. Everyone scrambles to the FTP site and downloads a bigger and better version of what they already have.
But it's not what they allready have. It's got five new features that the previous one didn't. Inside sources at Netscape reveal that Communicator 4.06 will, in addition to all the features it's inheritting from it's predicessor, have a module which will remotely groom your pet. It's already hard to see how i could manage with out it! (Microsoft is announcing that they plan to have their own version included in windows 99)
And in addittion to that, all the bugs from the previous version... will still be there! These days it seems, beta and even alpha testing are for the birds. Or the end users as it may be. I put the shipping version of Communicator 4.02 on a Sun Sparc Station. It ran once for exactly thirty seconds. Then it barfed on the java code it claimed to support. Thus humiliated, it vowed never to surface again. It claimed that the existance of some imaginary lock file was hampering it, and should that be over-ridden, it would give up and die. How could anyone possibly call that a shipping product? The scary thing is that MSIE seems to be even worse.
My spouse works at some unnamed software company that just a signed a deal to design for MSIE and put their little logos all over the pages. All the web designers hate MSIE and have it only to test compatibility.
So what sort of competition is thius between these two browsers? At least, back in the cola wars, the two companies were good at mixing syrup and carbonated water. These days it's the equivalent of flat water mixed with possibly e-coli infected syrup. And what sort of soda pop is that? Not one I'd want on my computer.