Netscape Communicator: failure or delay in printing

Recently, we ran an item about a failure of Netscape web browsers to print Source pages, especially when running Mac OS 8.6. It now appears that there are even greater printing problems with Netscape browsers:

Amir Caspi was unable to print some (not all) ordinary web pages from Netscape Communicator 4.5.1. Of possible relevance, he adds: "I noticed that Netscape prints in a weird manner. It 're-downloads' the page, and renders it into the print-spool, rather than sending the already-rendered version shown on-screen."

Leon Oldale confirms this redownloading issue, and has seen it even with older 4.x versions of Communicator and other versions of the Mac OS. He notes that this is a cause of a printing delay: "They seem to want to download the information again (rather than using the cache) to create the print information - before popping up the familiar old Print dialogs while actually spooling - sometimes the delay has been up to ninety (90) seconds before the spooling starts."

Jon Mircea similarly adds: "If the page you're printing is from the Internet, and you have the cache turned off, the page will take forever to print. It either reconnects for each element to verify that it's current, and if it contains too many graphics, it'll even have to redownload a few, it seems. The problem is less severe if you have it caching pages and set to 'never compare,' but there is definitely a problem there. Even with the cache turned on, it will compare the pages to the ones on the network before printing." Another consequence of all this: "If the page changed since you started trying to print it, you may lose what you wanted to print!"

[Several readers have now confirmed this last glitch. For example, Rob Costain writes: "I have frequently been unable to print transaction records or confirmations because the original page has expired before I have the chance to print it."]

Gabriel Dorado offers yet another general confirmation of this matter, adding: "Some web pages take longer than others. In any case, you must wait until you see the small rectangular window indicating the number of pages to be printed. If you surf to other page or link or site before that window shows up, nothing will print out (even though background printing is on)."