Now that Apple’s latest feline is days away from arriving in your city, or at your home or office, I’m sure many of you are going to be thoroughly digesting Apple’s officially certified list of 316 new features to see which ones please you.

Indeed, there’s probably plenty of meat for anyone, whether you’re a consumer, business user or programmer. There are lots of across-the-board changes and enhancements extending from the surface to the guts of the system that promise improved ease-of-use and greater security.

When Leopard arrives here, I’ll be installing it and working through the weekend to deliver one of the early reviews, which will appear as a Special Report in our weekly Tech Night Owl Newsletter. So if you subscribe, you’ll get an advanced look — and it’s free of course. Just enter your email address and click Subscribe on the top of this page.

Of course, it goes without saying that my Macs should have no problem whatever with Leopard. But I can’t say the same for some of you, who are going to be disappointed by the fact that your Mac isn’t eligible for the Leopard upgrade. According to the latest system requirements, if you have a G4 with less than an 867MHz processor, forget about it. You’re not on the short list.

This may come as a surprise to some of you who hoped that only the G3 would be discarded to history’s dustbin. Indeed maybe it is possible to induce Leopard to install anyway on some of the “lesser” versions of the G4, perhaps with an updated version of Ryan Rempel’s XPostFacto utility, which allows you to install Mac OS X on unsupported models. But that doesn’t mean performance is going to be acceptable to you. Although Leopard holds the promise of snappier performance on supported models, the same may not be said for other Macs.

Why this should be can probably be quickly discerned from the laundry list of new features, which show lots and lots of eye-candy sure to tax a lesser processor, or perhaps the elementary graphic cards on slower Macs. Indeed, some of the Core Animation effects in Time Machine and other Leopard applications may simply refuse to run, or run with a lesser range of special effects.

This is apt to remind you of the Windows Vista situation, where the highly-touted Aero interface, with its 3D overkill, simply won’t function on anything but a high-performance graphics card. A PC box older than a year is considered a poor candidate for the complete Vista experience.

So it may well be that Apple has decided that it doesn’t want anyone to get less than a complete Leopard environment. There is but one version, which Apple, in a snide aside to Microsoft, calls “Ultimate.” There are no basic versions, and no graphically-crippled user experiences. What you see is what you get, so long as your Mac is officially supported. You will never be a second-class citizen with Apple.

Too bad for Windows users that Microsoft doesn’t seem to feel that way.

Although the news that millions of Macs can’t run Leopard may be saddening to some of you, bear in mind that we’re talking about about excluding models that are mostly more than four years old. That’s not so bad a deal, considering all the millions of units that have shipped since then. Moreover, Leopard will probably remain a current operating system for another two or three years, which will give time for many of you to upgrade your old computers and buy something new with Mac OS 10.5 preloaded.

Of course, it’s easy to indulge in conspiratorial thinking about the non-unexpected turn of events. Maybe Apple really didn’t seriously consider ways to make Leopard run acceptably on those abandoned Macs, because it wants to sell you a new computer. Obviously, Apple makes the lion’s share of its money on hardware sales. Industry analysts suggest that Leopard will contribute some $250 million to Apple’s coffers during this quarter. That doesn’t sound too shabby, but now that Apple is expected to earn over $6 billion during the same period, it’s really a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. It will, of course, cover R&D for Leopard and then some, so Apple’s could, if it wanted, give Leopard upgrades away free of charge. But Apple monetizes everything, so there isn’t a chance that they’d consider such a move for even a nanosecond.

However, when you consider the costs of a Windows Vista upgrade, particularly the Ultimate version, Apple’s price structure seems incredibly cheap. If you want to be street legal for more than one system in your home, in fact, you can buy a five-pack for $199. With Windows, there’s a critical reason for buying extra “seats” of Vista, and that is that only one computer can be activated with each user license. No activation, and your installation self-destructs into a very limited mode after 30 days.

Yes, Microsoft surely knows how to grow its bottom line and ensure that 80% profit it garners on Windows licenses.

I do hope, though, that Leopard won’t come with a serial number or online activation scheme. I’m sure nobody wants Apple to be influenced by Microsoft in that fashion, although I suppose it’s tempting. No, I better not give Apple any fancy ideas. Just forget I said that!

There are two things that are certain. Apple loves Friday for shipping operating system upgrades, and they were going to deliver Leopard by hook or crook before the end of the month. So these two events have coalesced with the unsurprising news that Leopard will officially arrive on October 26 at 6:00 PM local time in your city. Talk about cutting it close. Sporting some 316 new or improved features, Mac OS 10.5 will require a G4 with an 867MHz processor or faster, a G5 or an Intel-based Mac. That not only leaves the G3 buried in the sands of history, but also excludes many G4 Macs built more than four years ago. Oh yes, if you bought a new Mac on or after October 1st, you can get Leopard for $9.95. So readers, start your credit cards, and let’s begin our 10.6 wish lists. And you have to wonder just how long the PowerPC will be supported in future Mac OS releases.

Before Microsoft pulled a few notorious stunts to dominate the browsing world, which got the attention of antitrust regulators, there was Netscape. But over time, it grew fat and buggy, which is something you’re apt to blame Microsoft for.

In those days, forgetting the dirty tricks, the original Internet Explorer, particularly on the Mac, was a fast and slick little application for its time. Rather than try to give you a boatload of features, they included pretty much what you needed, and directed you to Outlook Express if you needed a reasonably efficient email client.

I’ll admit it. I did indeed switch to Internet Explorer, and abandoned Netscape, as did most of the public. Of course, when Internet Explorer left the Mac in the wake of Safari’s release, I switched yet again.

Forgetting the odyssey of Netscape being bought by AOL for too much money long after it’s time had passed, and the origins of Mozilla and all the rest, it’s a sure thing that today’s Firefox is a terrific browser. I have high hopes version three, due later this year, will fix the printing limitations and other concerns.

Meanwhile, after a full version absence from the Mac platform, Netscape is back, renamed to its original moniker as Navigator. After some public betas, the final version 9.0 came out Monday afternoon. The simultaneous release also includes a Windows and Linux version, all sharing the same code-base and near-identical look and feel.

On the surface, it has the requisite Netscape green color scheme, but underneath it beats the heart of Firefox, using the same engine, and sharing many of the same features, for better or worse. However, the reborn Navigator adds some delights that will give it more of a consumer appeal.

These include, from the official spec list:

• Visual Refresh — Netscape Navigator 9’s theme has been updated to save screen-space and leave more room for the websites you visit.
• URL Correction — Navigator 9 will automatically correct common typos in URLs. For example, if you accidentally type googlecom, Navigator will fix it be to google.com. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation).
• Link Pad — The Link Pad is a new sidebar feature that allows you to save links/URLs that you want to visit later without cluttering your bookmarks. Just drag a link over the Link Pad status bar icon and drop it to save it in the Link Pad. By default, clicking on an item in the Link Pad will open it in the browser and remove it from the list, saving you the step of deleting it.
• Extension Compatibility — Navigator 9 shares an architecture with the latest Mozilla technologies; as such, Navigator 9 will let you install extensions that are compatible with Firefox® 2.
• Sidebar Mini Browser — You’ve always been able to have bookmarks open in the sidebar, but we’ve improved this functionality and extended it to all links, not just bookmarks. Additionally, we’ve added a navigation toolbar to the sidebar for even easier split-screened browsing. Just right-click on a link and select “Open Link in Sidebar” to get started!
• Restart Netscape — A small but oft-requested feature: you can now restart Navigator (and keep your current tabs intact) by selecting “Restart Navigator” from the File menu.
• Resizeable Text Area — Drag the bottom-right corners of text fields in forms to add more typing space.
• Tab History — Opening a link in a new tab will give the new tab the same history as the source tab for a more seamless tabbed browsing experience.
• OPML Support — Netscape Navigator supports importing and exporting your bookmarks in OPML, a popular format for sharing lists of newsfeeds.
• Throbber — By popular demand, the Netscape 7-style throbber is back. Click on it any time to visit Netscape.com.
• Combined Stop/Reload button — To save space in your toolbar, we’ve combined the stop and reload buttons. Because you never need both at the same time, the toolbar will only show the relevant half of the pair.

In passing, I should mention that the ability to resize a text area is also part of Leopard and Safari 3.

Performance-wise, Navigator 9 is a near-identical match to the latest Firefox, as is the rendering quality and site compatibility. If you didn’t notice the shortened toolbar, or the weather display on the lower right (courtesy of a bunded extension), you might never notice the difference. Indeed, as I was writing this article, our WordPress blogging system functioned identically.

If you’re using Firefox already, you probably won’t care all that much that there is also a Navigator. But if you want something a little more user-friendly, it’s certainly an alternative. Indeed, I installed the “Foxmarks” extension, used to create an online backup of your bookmarks, and I was off and running.

While I abandon Firefox for Navigator? I can tell you that, today at least, Navigator is a little nicer looking, so I might stick with it for a while.

But tomorrow I might go back to Firefox and, yes, I also run the latest Safari 3 beta and even Opera to make sure my sites are as compatible as possible. Oh yes, that means running Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. But that’s the games we play until Microsoft learns that the standards that count aren’t always the ones they control.

From the time we are children, we instinctively know how to find a reason for doing something wrong. For example, when you slap your brother or sister, and your mother is justifiably angered, you make the excuse that they hit you first, that you were only fighting back.

Unfortunately, this sort of behavior sustains itself into our adult years, and companies pay corporate communications people to give smart-sounding reasons for foolish behavior. The best of the lot may even work for governments, but this isn’t a political discussion, so I won’t go any further.

The best way for a company to prove its mettle is how it reacts when bad things occur. Over the years, both Apple and Microsoft have had plenty of opportunity to show ways to recover from unfavorable developments, from the failure of a product to catch on, to a serious product defect.

Just recently, Microsoft delivered a particularly lame excuse to reports that they had been feeding Windows updates to customers who had actually turned off the automatic update feature. Their answer? Sorry, folks, it didn’t happen. They must have configured their PCs incorrectly.

Of course, the implication here is that their customers are too stupid to know how to click an off button in a settings panel. But I could be insulting and add that they did buy Windows, which entitles you to be abused in some fashion. Yes, I could say that, and perhaps I just did, but this isn’t an article about platform wars. Rather, it’s how the companies behave.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.