"What a lot of people in the industry call this is a portal. And the reason they call it a portal is because it's a place that a user can come and find all the essential services they need like search and email and personalization and also access to all kinds of interesting content and news."

Everybody wants to be your portal these days...your central point on the web. Communicator 4.5 integrates multimedia players from Macromedia and Real Networks so you won't have to download and install them seperately. It also includes what Netscape calls Smart Browsing...

"Which simply allows you to type any English word right into the URL box of the browser and it finds the web site that you're looking for."

So you won't have to remember those www dot whatevers...

"That's right. No more slashes. No more HTTPs, no more WWW. A lot of our research over the last four years has shown that although a lot of folks have spent a lot of money trying to create search engines and other things to help you find information on the net, that's still the hardest thing to do."

Netscape hopes the new release will give it some much needed momentum in the browser battle against Microsoft's Internet Explorer.