Netscape launches ad-free personalised homepage

Netscape, which last year remodeled itself as a Digg-like user-organised news portal, will today roll out a NetVibes-like personalised start page service.

The new site, My.Netscape, will include around 100 modules that add news, weather and more from destinations around the web, and will allow users to create modules consisting of custom RSS feeds.

In an unusual move, the homepage will carry no advertising. A beta version will be available from today, wrote Netscape.com lead developer Tom Drapeau.

Although personalised homepages have been around since the web of the late 90s, with early starters such as My Excite and My Yahoo! getting off the blocks early, the field has been hotting up of late with forays from Ajax-heavy upstarts like NetVibes and Pageflakes, as well as Google's own effort, helping those unfamiliar with RSS hit a rung on the news customisation ladder.

NetVibes just launched a new visual engine that allows people to resize columns. Like NetVibes, the new My.Netscape will allow users to customise the look and feel of subscribed content.

"The modules can be dragged and dropped to enable easy configuration of your layout," Drapeau wrote. "Our programming staff has worked hard to create a framework that allows for scalability and UI elegance."

He said there would be "a minimum of ad clutter".