Netscape Communicator 4.6 has been posted to Netscape’s FTP servers, and the inevitable backlash has already begun in the public Mozilla newsgroups. People are unhappy that Netscape is doing any work at all on the existing codebase when the developers could be working on Mozilla. It’s amazing how myopic some of the people in the Open Source community are. Why do people think that version 2.0.37 of the Linux kernel was released even though 2.2 was almost out the door? You have to support your existing software while you create new versions if you want to keep your users happy at all. I imagine that there will be plenty of people who stick with version 4.x of the Netscape browser long after Mozilla has been released (and it’s going to be quite some time until Mozilla is released anyway). By the way, international users will be happy to know that the major change between 4.5 and 4.6 is that 56 bit encryption is supported instead of 40 bit now.