Why is Netscape still there?

[NeedScripts]

[statmarket.com...] says

Microsoft --- 95.97%
Netscape ---- 3.39%
Other --------- .64%

[vibgyor79]

My website stats are somewhat similar -

IE - 94.64%
Netscape - 4.99%
Opera - 0.29%
Mozilla - 0.00%
Others - 0.08%

[txbakers]

It's the same reason Apple is still here. It's a viable alternative to Microsoft. Netscape is still big in the Education sectors, and several large companies are still deploying it throughout the Enterprise.

It's the old story - if your logs only show 4% Netscape, could it be that the site renders so poorly in Netscape that visitors don't stay?

I'm no Netscape fan, but it is still here. We all tout the virtues of Opera, and I don't think Opera has a big a share as Netscape.

[chameleon]

We all tout the virtues of Opera, and I don't think Opera has a big a share as Netscape.

Yes, but we should be actively trying to push those stuborn Netscape 4.X users over to Opera! It's just as small, twice as fast, and still not Microsoft. There's no excuse for not switching.

[deejay]

There's no excuse for not switching.

....except for the having to have ads or pay for it.

I'm a long time NS user and recently an opera user. As much as I appreciate Opera's virtues, I just can't get past that ads/pay thing.

[Slade]

I'd rather have that little ad, than to have a fresh copy of AIM installed every little update...

I mean hello, anyone ever heard of checking for existing files?

I'm enjoying Opera, it's help me find some errors I didn't know we had in a webproject I'm working on.

[tedster]

"We must stop thinking of browsers as trivial pieces of free software that aim at nothing more than rendering web page pictures on the screen. We need user-supportive environments that facilitate navigation and protect users from the excesses of bad websites."

Source: Jakob Nielsen [useit.com]

[c3oc3o]

Why should they switch to Opera and not Mozilla?
The browser comes with an interface skin that looks and behaves exactly like N4, comes with better versions of the same mail program and WYSIWYG editor, and is ad-/free.

Also, Moz 1.1+ has the links toolbar (it's called differently though, never remember the toolbar names) which has the potential to be Nielsen's wildest dream: unified navigation from a standard menu for all websites (of course provided the web masters include proper <link> tags specifing the chapters and sections, next and previous pages, help page etc..).

Also, Mozy's DOM inspector, page info dialog and "view selection source" option are great tools for developers.

Plus, it has the holy 'position:fixed' grail and the very cool typeahead thingy in the newest release, 1.2a (typing the first couple of letters from any link on the page selects it, instead of having to tab through all of them one by one)

Okay, I'm done with the soapbox now.

[edited by: tedster at 12:07 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2002]

[Staffa]

if your logs only show 4% Netscape, could it be that the site renders so poorly in Netscape that visitors don't stay?

Txbakers, you are absolutely right. I still run NS 4.7 and I see no reason why I should change. When I a site does not render it's almost always because of sloppy code writing and that I don't consider being my problem. ;)

[pageoneresults]

Unfortunately the Opera stats are inaccurate. I'd be willing to bet that the percentages are at least twice that as being reported for Opera.

NN4.x? That's all of us geeks checking out the site to make sure it still functions! ;)

[c3oc3o]

Staffa: No, that's simply wrong.
N4 is on the technical level of 1997.

To name some examples:
Not understanding "right" and "bottom" CSS positioning (as well as heaps of other CSS) is not caused by sloppy code, just by an outdated browser.
N4 still internally translates any CSS to JSSS (JavaScript Stylesheets), which Netscape submitted to the W3C in 96 expecting it to become the official standard. When CSS1 was chosen instead, they hastily wrote a translation engine, which is also why JS needs to be turned on in N4 to see any CSS formatting effects. This led to dozens of stupid and inexplicable bugs like this one: "SPAN text loses background color when font-size, font-weight, and the same background color is specified for the SPAN class and for a DIV class on the same page" [source: css.nu].
N4 also recalculates any pixel frame sizes to percentages for no reason at all, which makes pixel-perfect matching/aligning impossible because the screen is only split up into 100 units [yes, I know pixel-perfect design is not what the web and/or HTML were really meant for].
And the list of N4 oddities goes on...

You can't deny the fact that the Netscapers themselves saw what a mess their code was, which led to skipping version 5 and creating the Mozilla project as well as doing the largest part of the work on it, which has produced an excellent browser that unfortunately still has far too few users.

pageoneresults: I don't think so. Even if you configure Opera to identify as IE, it clearly sticks the word Opera to the end of the UserAgent string (just tested in Op.6b a few days ago). Sensible UA identification systems (checking for "Opera" before looking for "MSIE") should as far as I can tell detect Opera all the time without any problems.

[BlobFisk]

I feel that we will see an increase in Mozilla user-agents being reported in logs sooner rather than later. AOL are currently test-running the Mozilla agent on their Compuserve customers, with the aim of basing the AOL browser around it.

AOL 8 will still be MSIE engine based, however, all going well with the Compuserve trial, we could see AOL 9 reporting a Mozilla Gecko.