Now Netscape are 6 – and a nation yawns

Netscape unveiled its new browser, Netscape 6, in Britain this morning -- a day after it launched it in the US. So bang goes one of Netscape's nice lines about it now being a global, rather than US-centric outfit that accepts that there are now more Net users outside North America. Not a particularly auspicious start for the company, but nice to know it does a cracking line in contempt. Still picking up the scraps from the US launch, British hacks were treated to a juddery edit of Steve Case's speech at Internet World yesterday. Sounding like a campaigning politician selling his dream for the future, he received a round of applause just for saying that Netscape 6 was being launched. And after explaining a few features of the new software he said: "I hope you'll agree that the Netscape magic is back." Trouble is, watching a demonstration of Netscape 6 this morning it was more mumbo-jumbo than magic. Still, this witchcraft obviously didn't put off everybody. According to one Netscape sorceress today more than a terabyte of product was downloaded from the Net yesterday following the official launch. Gosh. Product wizard Rick Elliot, said Netscape 6 was "cool stuff" even though the software goblins had "taken their time and suffered the necessary pain to develop a new product." If you really want to know more about this hubble bubble toil and trouble product, you can download it here at Netscape's Netcenter. Apparently. ®