There's a new browser on the block, vying for the attention of surfers everywhere. For experimentation purposes, I've been using Netscape6 (www.netscape.com) for the previous seven days and, boy, it's been more than a bit of a tough ride.

Actually, without wishing to give the plot away in the first scene, I'm more inclined to report that I've been 'putting up' with NS6 over the past seven days.

Anyone who reads Big Dave at all regularly will be familiar with my preference for Internet Explorer over Netscape, but I genuinely entered this comparison period between the two browsers with an entirely open mind. Despite my approach, and the fact that part of me actually wants to prefer Netscape to IE, I'm afraid my experiences with the new browser have not been great.

One of the biggest problems with previous incarnations of Netscape (which has sneakily jumped from version 4 to version 6 in an attempt to assume superiority over Internet Explorer 5.5) was its speed, or rather lack of it. The rendering engine was so sub-standard that, rather than attempt to fix it, NS6 throws it out altogether and starts from scratch. The result is called Gecko but it's still much, much slower than IE.

In fact, much of my time with the new browser seemed to be spent waiting waiting for the program to start, waiting for pages to load, waiting for Java applets to initiate (many of which never did). Netscape's creators know they have lost the browser war.

Three years of stalling with a new release has left Internet Explorer with a larger than 86 per cent share of the market.

In an effort to bridge this gulf, Netscape has crammed in a host of 'innovative' (their word, not mine) features, some more useful than others. The best of the bunch is a new level of security that warns of 'cookies', encrypts passwords, and keeps a watchful eye on the things that others are trying to find out about you Microsoft could well take a leaf out of Netscape's book here.

Playing on the success of other 'skinnable' software (i.e. applications that the user can apply a custom-built look and feel to, the popular MP3 player, Winamp (www.winamp.com), being the best example of this), the new browser can take new themes that change its appearance.

Unfortunately, the themes tend to slow the browser down even more and I want to browse the Internet, not the browser itself!

It is conceivable that some people could make good use of the new sidebar on the browser, a tabbed, configurable area for news feeds, stock information etc. I found that it got in the way of my regular browsing and took up too much of my screen (and I'm lucky enough to have a 21in monitor!), so heaven knows what it would look like on smaller screens.

The e-mail integration does look and work very well and Netscape deserves full marks for this, but the bottom line is that NS6 is not as good as IE5.5. It's as simple as that.