Taking a first step toward commercial release of a product based on the Mozilla project, Netscape released a beta of Netscape 6.

Installation is performed through a network-based setup program, somewhat like the Internet Explorer 5 installer. The primary changes to the Mozilla project appear to be cosmetic and commercial, like an "Activate Netscape" box that connects users to Netcenter functionality but doesn't appear to be necessary to the program itself.

The preview release feels very much like the recent Mozilla builds, except that some of the layout is slightly different and the stability seems better. (This story was written using the preview release on a Windows laptop that refused to run Mozilla M14 at all, for instance.)

As always, preview releases are 'run at your own risk' software.