HP to Ship Netscape on PCs in 2006

Starting next year, Hewlett-Packard's PC customers will be able to select the Netscape browser as their default window to the Internet, the companies have announced.

The Netscape 8 browser will ship on HP's PCs in the United States and Canada starting early next year, with links to it both in the Start menu and on the desktop of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. Users also will be able to make the browser their default choice when setting up a new HP PC, says Andrew Weinstein, a Netscape spokesman. Netscape is a division of America Online.

Browser Wars

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser currently dominates the market for Web-surfing software, but Netscape developed the first Web browser to enjoy widespread adoption. Now part of AOL, Netscape has continued to develop its browser as an alternative to the much-reported security flaws found in IE.

At one point in the 1990s, most PC companies shipped both browsers on their PCs. However, that practice declined as Microsoft began to integrate IE with the Windows operating system.

"We think this is the first actual non-IE browser to be included on any [Windows] PC since the 1990s," Weinstein says.

Netscape 8 shares the same code base as the Firefox browser, an open-source project from the Mozilla Foundation. But it also uses rendering technology found in IE that Firefox does not, allowing Netscape users to completely view some Web pages that do not load fully in Firefox.

The browser comes with a list of trusted Web sites that require the IE rendering engine to deliver the best viewing experience, and automatically switches to that rendering engine when a user requests one of those sites, Weinstein says. Netscape users can set the IE rendering engine as their default option, but they would then be exposed to malicious code written to exploit IE, he says.

Power of Choice

HP's PC group surveyed customers on their Web-browsing preferences, and enough of them expressed an interest in having a choice of default browsers for HP to move forward with the deal, says Nick Labosky, director of HP's worldwide consumer PC beyond-the-box program. The company chose Netscape because of the dual rendering engines, he says.

However, Netscape also is providing a financial incentive for HP to distribute the browser, Weinstein says. He declined to specify the terms of the agreement between the two companies.

HP has shown more willingness than some of its mass-market Windows PC competitors to offer PC customers choices other than Microsoft's operating system and Intel's processors. Advanced Micro Devices' chips can be found within several HP PCs for both consumers and business customers, and HP's Web site offers small-business PCs running the Linux operating system.

The company is working out its plans for alternative browsers in other regions of the world, Labosky says.