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I mean, sheesh! the browser isn't even supported by Netscape itself [home.netscape.com] anymore, and hasn't been for months!
Let's push that old stinker off the cliff. Life would be so much easier if we didn't have that ancient junk pile around any longer. :)
It is not all that diffcult to build in support for any given browser. The question is not if there ever will be
any I.E. 1.0 visitors, but if the client is willing to pay.
Ask the client if they would want support for any browser,
most of the time the client would accept the few extra hours. As a devoloper you could get more paid hours per client, and buy more nice accessories for your BMW520 :-)
(or whatever you spend your money on).
Is this unetical? I don't think so. Let me take an example.
One of mye clients had a total of 1646379 hits in April.
If we breake that number down we get:
Msie 6.0 993891
Msie 5.5 118017
Msie 5.22 1302
Msie 5.16 937
Msie 5.01 66402
Msie 5.0 61845
Msie 4.01 13857
Msie 4.0 744
Msie 3.0 2511
Netscape 7.0 7308
Netscape 6.2.3 1421
Netscape 6.1 406
Netscape 6.0 1827
Netscape 5.0 19488
Netscape 4.79 5278
Netscape 4.77 3249
Netscape 4.72 613
Netscape 4.51 4474
Netscape 4.05 78
Opera 44679
Safari 2464
Galeon 3939
Nokia Browser 84
Unknown 168217
So, you see if that client had opted only to support the latest browsers the client would have missed a lot of potesial customers (there is an average of 27.44 hits per visit and each visitor did 1.36 visits on average in April).
[edited by: requiem at 3:45 pm (utc) on May 19, 2003]
I have a valid reason though. You convinced me to download 6.0 quite some time ago (about 2 years ago) and that browser was a nightmare! I had a heck of a time uninstalling it and finding my beloved 4.7 again.
IIRC, 6.0 was pulled from a pre-1.0 milestone of Mozilla. At the time, I'd been using Mozilla milestones for quite some time as my primary browser, because under Linux NN4 is even more of a dog than it is under Windows. I did much the same thing - tried NN6, then desperately scrambled to get my old Mozilla milestone back, cause it was much easier to use. Since then, it has continued to be my experience that NNx is *always* inferior to the current Mozilla.
As for what I support, I'm with the bunch of people here who make sure everything validates and only worry about presentation in Gecko (Mozilla-based browsers), Opera, and IE. Sometimes I check it in Konqueror, too - I probably ought to do that more, since it shares code with Safari and is therefore probably as close as I can come to testing on a Mac w/o actually owning one.
Honestly, I'd just as soon ditch all IE support, but even in my happy little corner of the web about 40% of my hits are with IE. The few other pages I work on are in the high 90's just like everyone else. In addition to the long list of HTML and CSS features it doesn't support, I find IE pretty much unusable from a user-interface perspective. In fact, yesterday I red a list of reasons why you should switch to Mozilla Firebird, and it sounded to me like a list of minumum features to be considered a modern browser. It wasn't until I fired up IE to test a page that I remembered that a lot of people think that's a real browser and therefore valid to compare against.
I'm a happy Mozilla user, but NS4 has to stay on my computer. One reason is to check my web sites, but the main one is my bank. They have a billpay service (via CheckFree) that won't accept standards-compliant browsers, but will accept NS 4.x. Get CheckFree to update, and NS 4 will have another nail in its coffin.
-- Rich
Could be wrong!
I see to it that all my sites aren't only compatible with Netscape 1.0, IE 1.0 and Mosaic, but also with the Viewmaster Viewer [gasolinealleyantiques.com].
My Mother works in a school system and they used NS 4.52 (I think). It was just last month they upgraded thier systems.
I worked in a hospital system (large) where some dept's were (are) still running Windows 3.1!
Depending how heavy your site is CSS wise, it's not so hard to serve up a page that if not beautiful, is functional.
AW
"In the Beginning there was HTML and it was good. The Creator saw that HTML was lonely so he brought CONTENT. Together, HTML and CONTENT served a purpose and that was very good!Then came DESIGN and tempted HTML with colors and extravagance, and HTML was sorely tempted and left CONTENT behind. Many suffered at the loss, for no DESIGN, beautiful as it might be, could ever serve as a replacement for true CONTENT.
The Creator grew unhappy as DESIGN was meant to enhance, not replace, nor show disregard for the harmony that was HTML and CONTENT combined.
The Creator spoke and said: 'Design, you have tempted HTML when your purpose was to enhance. You, DESIGN, have disrupted the harmony and purpose that HTML and CONTENT once knew. Yet for all your sins, you are not alone in blame. HTML shares your sin, by contorting and disfiguring the order and harmony that was in the beginning. Many sought to add temptations of their own, through convoluted code and evil propriety offerings. When you should have turned and ignored these foul offerings, you embraced them and brought shame and suffering to us all. Here is my judgement:
DESIGN, from this day forward you will live in the land of CSS, never shall you come between HTML and CONTENT again. You will serve your purpose from a place where your disruptive tendencies will be constrained, and as intended, become the enhancement you were destined to be.
HTML, from this day forth you will wear the sign of the X upon your brow, and from hereforth, you shall be named XHTML. Strict constraints will be placed upon you, but with these retraints you will regain the power and purity you once had, free from the temptations of DESIGN, free once more to create the harmony that once was, when HTML and CONTENT served a purpose.
Go forth from this day and do not look back. Build temples of information, citadels of knowledge, fountains of usefullness. From this day forward, never forget that XHTML and CONTENT are forever joined. Let no DESIGN ever threaten or tempt this precious union ever again."
[edited by: papabaer at 8:14 pm (utc) on May 23, 2003]
Give users what they want. Sod the technology.
Assume for realities sack that time is money. That a developer can get a site up and running for IE5+/NS6.2+ in one week. If he/she chooses to support NN4 then that time will take three weeks. Not everyone has the free time to add NN4 support.
Also, why bother with Opera support? Opera is a dishonest browser which when you ask it what Javascript technologies it supports it returns lies to you. I don't want to deal with a company of liers.
Ok now to the point.
Can someone explain to me how if you have a site with frames that you can "easily" switch on functionality for a browser like IE2.0 which does not support frames?
How about a more relavant question. Explain to me how when I code a standards compliant web site that I can "switch on" NN4 functionality by just not showing the CSS. What if I use DIV positioning? Huh. what then? I have a fancy menu and I'm not coding it 5 ways so old browsers can see it.
All Javascript programmers know what a pain it is to write code for many different browsers and versions. When I realized that you have to make a bad looking website to fully support NN4 that's when I decided to forget it and make a website that works in IE and Gecko and write only DOM1/2 standard compliant Javascript.
Another point, how do you support old IE browsers? Do I fly to some back alley village in Mexico to a small school that still has IE4 installed? How do I test it on my WinXP box?
When I browse a website in Lynx. I don't expect the company to support it. Should my bank make their website Lynx compatible. That's rediculous. And as for the office worker comments. If many people in an office complain to the IT Dept. that NN4 no longer works with the Internet then the company will upgrade.
You are making some good points but.....
I just received and enquiry from someone, somewhere, using a pretty old browser.
The widget he is looking for costs somewhere between $250K and $1million depending on the configuration.
Now, do I want to lose this client and send him to the other 25 sites that spam the index, simply because I don't support his browser and I do not respect his preferences?
Why should you serve your customer cookies, if he ordered french fries (chips)?
I try to adjust my business to the clients and I am not asking them to adjust their habits to me.
It is a dog eat dog world out there and I am happy there are many other sites that don't perform well, because they focus on fancy menus, all-singing-all-dancing navigation, bells and whistles.
I will keep downgrading my sites for as long as they are bringing sales, and every trader who is really passionate about their business should do the same.
It is like asking visitors to type a predefined phrase in google, for which you have optimized your site and nothing else. So you can be found in top 10, for example.
imho.
regards.
d_
[edited by: d_fused at 6:21 am (utc) on June 3, 2003]
Actually, it's more a question of having usable content and navigation than a page that looks the same in all browsers. If you have a <div> based layout, well, your older browsers will still be able to view the HTML file, but it will probably look a whole lot more *boring* in the older versions. It will still be usable for those persons though, and let's face it - If you run a browser which is > 5 yrs behind, then you're probably not that concerned about graphics and "prettyness" in the first place.
Also, why bother with Opera support? Opera is a dishonest browser which when you ask it what Javascript technologies it supports it returns lies to you. I don't want to deal with a company of liers.
Go get 'im Papabaer! :-)
Can someone explain to me how if you have a site with frames that you can "easily" switch on functionality for a browser like IE2.0 which does not support frames?
Use the NOFRAMES tag? Browsers that don't use frames get the content there instead. Frames are only a layout device - in theory the site could still be made to work without them. Two versions might be needed (gulp).
How about a more relavant question. Explain to me how when I code a standards compliant web site that I can "switch on" NN4 functionality by just not showing the CSS. What if I use DIV positioning? Huh. what then? I have a fancy menu and I'm not coding it 5 ways so old browsers can see it
When you switch off CSS, users get THE SAME CONTENT (if your site is written properly using the correct markup). It's just that it scrolls down the page as pure text. A menu is no different without CSS - it just gets listed as plain links. The point is, it's still USABLE.
When I browse a website in Lynx. I don't expect the company to support it. Should my bank make their website Lynx compatible. That's rediculous
Admittedly a bank site may use code that simply does not work in older browsers. But for the majority of websites, if your code is marked up correctly, it will degrade gracefully! CSS gurus are always making this point. No CSS? No problem. IE2? No problem. Unless you use masses of Javascript to generate content.
If the site looks awful, so long as it can be understood, that is the main thing. Otherwise you are going against the idea of the web - access for all no matter what platform they use - and creating a "two browser only" web (IE and Gecko). That is a very bad idea.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[edited by: requiem at 5:38 pm (utc) on June 3, 2003]
Odd, my first experience with browser-portability issues was Javascript -- in the Infernal Exploder. There is no way on earth Opera could lie as much as it does.
The SOFTWARE claims to support all Javascript versions -- doesn't even support the 1.1 specification! The documentation (or, I should say, promotional material, Microsoft doesn't speak documentation, and they don't have a single employee who isn't congenitally incapable of writing it) makes even more explicit claims -- that is, claiming to support 1.1. (And, yes, I know that there are later specifications. I like to know just how portable my code is. And basically, I figure IE for Javascript 1.0 with some functionality removed, lots of virus-vector security holes added, and a hatful of bugs. I've never been disappointed.
However, there are quite a few things I think people misunderstand. All my sites support every browser, I just don't design for those browsers anymore.
If you visit my site using whatever browser the dinosaurs used, all pages will be essentially accessible and usable. However, I do not spend any extra time trying to make the pages compatible with that browser!
In fact, it's easier to support a browser when you're not designing for that browser. All you have to do is make sure you use standards compliant code (which means CSS for layout). Older browsers do not understand CSS, but they will still render a perfectly usable page. Sure, it will be in black and white, but who cares?! :)
Can someone explain to me how if you have a site with frames that you can "easily" switch on functionality for a browser like IE2.0 which does not support frames?Use the NOFRAMES tag? Browsers that don't use frames get the content there instead.
Support for NOFRAMES started in version 4 of IE and NN, according to blooberry...
If you turn off javascript in NN4, that also means CSS is non-functional (a Netscape 4 specialty.) So with one preference change, I can see all kinds of sneaky CSS tricks used in competing websites and know exactly what I'm up against.
Now I can also do this easily with Opera 7 - I just create a blank CSS document and it's a quick toggle back and forth between User and Author mode using the small icon next to the address/location window.
But I already have a strong NN4 habit for my sleuthing, and it works very well.
A side remark - most of the time, NN2 in your log analysis will be a bot, not a human
Hester, I know that NOFRAMES can be used, but how would have any navigation? Are you just going to make the noframes part a list of the links on your site. What if your frames menu changed depending on your page, will you be making all those menus available in the no frames section?
This basically involves making 2 sites.
Can you explain an easy way to switch off css? there's no <NOCSS> tag.
I'm trying to make a Standards compliant and not standards compliant versions of my site (because some of you are convincing) and it's not turning out to be easy. Plus the non-standard version is very ugly. Looks so unprofessional and retarded.
My vision/goal/wish is to make one version of my site a DOM1 version (CSS1/2 and maybe DOM2) and that's it. What's important to me is the document.getElementById that's what IE5+ and all the Gecko versions support, so I can code once.
hutcheson, yeah IE hasn't been that great with Javascript at all times. but they have fairly good support for it.
DrDoc. Allyourcodearebelongtous...
You don't design for those browsers. Do you test your site in every version of every browser?
My point is no matter how much of a stripped down site you want to have for old browsers it's going to be impossible to test them.
For example many people may switch off the CSS (god knows how) and assume their site works in NN4, but what if they accidentally missed a </table> tag, of course that's not standards compliant but people make mistakes. Unless they dig up and install this old browser how will they know. It gets even worse if you want to test in NN2 or IE2. It's unreasonable.
What about a buggy version of NN6? Some people release browsers to the public that don't support proper HTML. What will you do then.
You physically CANNOT make a site that will work in all browsers. You can however make a site that supports an array of standards and then claim any browser that sufficiently supports those standards will be able to see your site.
My PDA has IE3.02 on it, I wonder if all your sites work on it?
First, I don't miss </table> tags etc... And, even if I did, I would find out when I validate the page.
Second, no, I don't check the page in all browsers (which would require about 200 computers with every version of every browser for every single OS). But the point is - I don't have to! All browsers react in one of two ways when they encounter a particular HTML tag:
Of course, there's no way you can compensate for crappy software (so don't come tell me the site doesn't work in Notepad ;))... But otherwise, the sites are usable. I've been in the business for too long not to have learned how to avoid the most obvious pitfalls. Sure, the page might look funky and behave quite randomly in older browsers, but at least you can use it, no matter if you're using IE2, WebTV, Lynx, Mosaic, Mozilla... or whatever browser it may be.
Once you stop trying to compensate for old and buggy browsers, the page will almost automatically be usable (provided anything buggy is delivered in a way the browser cannot understand).
Yeah I understand your point. I think you guys have good ideas about making the site usable for old browsers. So the website gracefully dies as opposed to breaks.
I used to be a big supporter of NN4 and always made sure everything worked in it. Kinda got tired of that. But I think I may try this "new" (new to me) approach of just plopping the content and menu on the page for old browsers.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="some.css" type="text/css" media="all" />
If someone knows what browsers this code that papabaer posted will block css from, can you post them.
PS Great forum!
So the website gracefully dies as opposed to breaks.
Isn't the canonical term "greaceful degredation" rather than "graceful death"?
Can you explain an easy way to switch off css? there's no <NOCSS> tag.
There are many ways. The most common is to use something like this:
<style type="text/css">@import url("css/styles8.css") all;</style>It doesn't 'switch off' CSS but hides it from Netscape 4. That way you can use CSS for modern browsers but ones that don't understand the @import rule don't get any styles.
Or you could make a link on the page to an alternative stylesheet that had nothing in it. Or you could use Opera which allows you to turn off the CSS on pages. It depends exactly what you want to do.
You can also put style links in the <nolayer> tag. Anything inside the tags won't be seen by Netscape 4. Very handy for hiding various elements in a page.
Plus the non-standard version is very ugly. Looks so unprofessional and retarded.
That's not your worry. So long as the site works. You can always add a message saying that the site looks a lot better in a modern browser.
For example many people may switch off the CSS (god knows how) and assume their site works in NN4
Just turning off Javascript in Netscape 4 is enough! That also turns off the CSS, which is added using Javascript in that browser. (Crazy but true.)
What's important to me is the document.getElementById that's what IE5+ and all the Gecko versions support, so I can code once
Then you've got an easy solution! Test for document.getElementById and document.createElement. If a browser fails, they are old browsers. If they pass, they are new. It's the most efficient way to do a browser detect I've found if you want to use the DOM.
