Netscape Communications is denying reports that it's bailing out of the PC browser market it once dominated.

To further that point, the company has issued the first beta of its new Netscape 6.1 browser. Earlier this month, Reuters quoted Netscape president Jim Bankoff as saying that "six months from now, you won't consider Netscape to be a browser company," and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Netscape was "stripped of responsibility for creating its namesake browser." Those reports set off rumors that Netscape was ready to throw in the towel on the browser market. This came after a poor reception for Netscape 6.0, the new from-the-ground-up version of its browser released at the end of 2000. After more than two years of development and using the open source community's help, Netscape 6.0 was buggy, slow in places, and had a hard time with many websites that worked just fine in Netscape Navigator 4.x, the previous browser. Netscape took a pounding, and the new browser ended up failing to make much of a dent in Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance. Still, Netscape stands by its browser. "Netscape 6 was absolutely the right product at the right time. It delivered the standards support the market was clamoring for," said Sol Goldfarb, director of browser product marketing for Netscape, an AOL subsidiary. Goldfarb said Netscape is "absolutely committed to continuing development of the browser on an ongoing basis, both as a stand-alone browser and as an embeddable solution." Because the embedded product and stand-alone product have a shared technology base, all versions will stay current and there won't be any preference given to the embedded product, where Netscape is rumored to be putting more emphasis. Preview Release 1, the first of two betas, was released last week. Netscape developers took into account all the feedback the browser had gotten in the six months since 6.0 was released, Goldfarb said. For starters page loads are far faster, for two reasons. First is optimizing the code base by continuous feedback, both from end-users and the open source developers helping the company through its Mozilla project. The second effort has been to beef up the developer support program, which has gone to major websites to examine their HTML code to look for places with content coded for Communicator. Apparently Netscape found that many sites had coded to Netscape 4.x and not standard HTML, which broke those pages in Netscape 6.0