I'm underwhelmed. You've taken out fetures that were crucial to me and haven't added any of the things I was hoping for. Let's start with the missing items.

Roaming Access. This is the #1 reason I haven't switched to IE or Mozilla. Roaming Access was a godsend to me and lots of people who surf from work and home. You guys obviously put a lot of work into it, and I'm very surprised to see it just vanish. I could put up with the other annoyances, but there's no way I'm switching from Netscape 4 until this comes back.

Colors. Why is this gone? I've been switching the "Visited Links" to red since Netscape 1.1. I guess you figured it's irrelevant now that evry web site in the world specifies its own colors, but it was nice to have the option to override (more than nice for colorblind users, I should think). Why take away choices? Especially since you still let people override the web designer's choice of fonts. More irritating to me is that along with colors, the ability to turn off link underlining is gone (I never understood why this was under "colors", so I wouldn't care if you moved it). I hate the underlining of links and turned it off in every browser I've ever used. Again, who does it hurt if you leave the option in?

Okay, now for what you should add:

Printer fonts. Something that's always annoyed me about Netscape is that you can't specify different fonts (or at least different sizes) for the screen and printer. I find that whatever's large enough for the screen is way too big for a printed page. I can't be the only one bothered by this... the first thing I've checked for in every new version of Netscape since 1.22 after downloading was if you added this. Still no luck.

News stuff. I can't believe you still haven't added support for multipart binary attachements. You must've had many people clamoring for this. It's ironic, because in every other respect Netscape has always had the best support for binary attachments in mail and news of any Windows program. Are there any plans for this?

Another thing I'd like to see Netscape add which nobody has, is a whole different way of implementing multiple news servers. Netscape's support of multiple news servers was always nicer than most programs, but I think a different approach would make more sense. Instead of tying newsgroups to specific servers, why not have a master list of servers, in order of preference? When someone goes to a newsgroup, it would first get all the articles it could from server A, then get the missing articles from server B, and so on. This way, you wouldn't have to bounce around looking for missing articles. To my knowledge, nobody has set up a news reader this way, so implementing it would really set Netscape apart.

A small mail suggestion. It's time to get rid of the need for an SMTP server. This is an archaic holdover from the days of part-time mail servers. There's no reason why Netscape couldn't just internally do the MX lookup and deliver the mail itself. Forcing everyone to specify an SMTP server is like forcing everyone to specify a web proxy. If you put in an option for internal sendmail-like mail delivery (and, preferably, made it the default), you would solve lots of user problems, like for users who don't know what their SMTP server is, users who don't know what an SMTP server is (i.e., nearly everybody), or users who are using winsock programs with an ISP that doesn't provide an SMTP server (you-know-who). Nobody seems to have realized this yet--even PC-PINE forces you to specify an outgoing mail server--so this would be a great way for Netscape to grab the ball.

Thanks for reading this far. I think Netscape's new look is great--much cleaner looking than it has been in a long time. I hope that eventually the features measure up to the UI.

(Feel free to write me if you like: sluggo@unknown.nu.)