Netscape 3 and 4

What are the differences?

[Hester]

I'm horrified to find users in my web stats using Netscape 3.01. I design for the main browsers, including Netscape 4.8. But what are the key differences between versions 3 and 4? Are there any major issues I should be aware of?

[BlobFisk]

Hmmmm, I wonder if this is a Spider/Bot of some sort? They sometimes identify themselves as unusual user agents...

[Nick_W]

Yeah, 3 is even worse. Download a copy Hester it'll give you a good laugh at the least ;)

I agree it's most likely a bot.

Nick

[Hester]

Interesting as in May 2002 I got 123 hits from it. But nothing until this month. However, my stats only show the top 10 agents and I was viewing the new months' with only a few days of hits counted. So it's possible I've been hit before but not enough to show.

[universalis]

The most important thing about NS3 it that has no CSS capability at all. Anyone surfing with this will have major problems on a vast majority of sites. If you want to make your site work for NS3, dump all your CSS and stick to HTML 2.0 as much as possible. It can do tables, though (very advanced!)

When I was young, all we had was Netscape 2 Gold on UNIX... And we were happy!

<edit>Can you post the user agent from your logs?</edit>

[celerityfm]

I'm horrified to find users in my web stats using Netscape 3.01

I am too! I agree with Nick_W though-- download it and see your site in it, its always interesting to check it out.

But then be sure to browse the rest of the web and you'll quickly realize that as long as your site is 'usable' then you'll be on par with NS 3 and 4 users-- as the rest of the web looks like crap too in NS3/4, not just your site! Old NS users sadly just don't know the difference.

Or is it just me?

[Hester]

The stats (what I can get into) just say "Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)". The hits are very low this time, so I'm not too bothered.

I code using properly written markup, so it shouldn't be a problem if CSS is turned off. Indeed I have tested for this by turning off Javascript in Netscape 4.

[universalis]

"Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)"

It's either a bot - possibly an email harvester or similar, or it's someone using a proxy server like Cacheflow:

[webmasterworld.com...] (see msg #4)

Whatever it is, it isn't some old Granny using her 486... What pages are being hit? Does it ask for robots.txt?

[waldemar]

Wasn't Netscape 3 HTML 3.2 compliant?

[Hester]

I don't know. The stats are quite basic, generated using Webalizer 2.01. I know mine at home allow me to download the full list with more detail in them. I'm going to nip on the FTP to our site and see if I can view them from there instead.

[hartlandcat]

Simply put, here are the main differences.

Netscape 4:
HTML 4.0 (sort of)
No inline frames
Limited CSS
Limited DHTML
A few minor table errors

Netscape 3:
HTML 3.2 (sort of)
No inline frames
No CSS
No DHTML
Errors with nested tables
No table background pictures
A lot of other table errors

But yes, they are most likely robots.

[g1smd]

Two months ago, I upgraded someone who was complaining that their browser crashed on many web sites. They had a 300MHz Pentium, with Windows 98, so I couldn't imagine what the problem might be until I took a look.

Turns out that any site with Javascript trashed the browser, as they had Netscape Gold installed... when they had bought the new machine they had ported everything off the old 486 running Windows 3.1, and then upgraded the OS to Windows 98, somehow losing all of IE on the way.

They now have Mozilla 1.2.1 and the net seems a completely different place to what it was before.

There must be millions of people like that out there.

Eeeeep.

[waldemar]

LOL

somehow losing all of IE on the way.

How did that happen? :-]]

[hartlandcat]

Too funny... although to people like us, upgrading browsers every so often seems like the obvious thing to do, but to many people it's not. I bet loads of people bought Windows 95 computers at around the time it was released, thinking that they may have to get a new computer eventually, but the thought that they would ever have to upgrade the programmes it came with probably haven't even crossed their minds. -sigh-