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It had a good life, contributed greatly to the competition in browser development, and it's time to lay it to rest. I would suggest we need to stop humoring the visitors as a collective, by halting our extensive labors to support them.
I won't code anymore for Netscape 4. I have to believe it's not realistic to think anyone using Netscape 4 has any kind of money to spend on the commercial sites or any kind of online savvy to contribute to the other sites.
I've gone around to the larger sites I manage and have replaced the small helpful link I had presented to Netscape 4 visitors to a much larger "important notice" with a full page annoucement to get them to move upward. I suggest Mozilla to them with a direct link to get them going, as it is actually free and on nearly every platform, but of course they have a few other options.
No one would expect to code for Netscape 3 or Internet Explorer 3, why do we still feel so guilty/motivated to support something so ancient by any standard?
Why do we still feel so guilty/motivated to support something so ancient by any standard?
I dropped support for NN4.x users about two months ago. It just wasn't worth the extra hour or two to create the NN4.x style sheets. I'm now using the @import where possible and making sure that it appears after other linked references to prevent the brief second of unstyled content. NN4.x users of course get a text only version.
I figure if they are using a browser that does not support style, then they are used to visiting unstyled pages. Or, they don't realize that their entire browsing experience has been wrong all this time. ;)
Or, they don't realize that their entire browsing experience has been wrong all this time
It's really funny, but it seems the remaining folks getting onto the web really have little clue about how things "should look". I have a client that uses AOL 4.0 (16-bit version no less) and really doesn't care to upgrade despite my gentle suggestions. They cannot see/use some of the "features" I put into their site. But I'll still take that AOL browser over Netscape 4 anyday!
I find that the "stubborn against upgrading" folks seem to have that attitude towards everything in life, not just the web. Many of them seem to see the internet as just a tool to send and recieve email at best. Every once in awhile I'll take a question they ask me, and show them how to plug it into Google and they are amazed with the results, but will never try it again on their own. No way to deal with that lack of curiosity unfortuantely, no matter how much you want to help them.
i always used at least two (NN and IE). now it's IE and Opera. i am also gonna look into others soon.
you know, for some website i ONLY use Opera, because IE functionality is just not enough! some site has pop-ups on every page, so the surfing becomes a torture if you are using IE. yet Opera solves the pop-up problem really well.
[edited by: engine at 9:12 pm (utc) on Aug. 1, 2003]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
I use Mozilla for most things though.
So it comes down to, are you going to test in 4.80 and then 4.78, etc. Or are you going to better spend your time testing in IE 6.0 and IE 5.5 as well as Mozilla and Opera 7, which make up 99% of the visitors at this point who are at least using a browser that is less than 4 years old.
Heck I'll rather take out an old notebook and test on IE 5.0, that try to come up with dozens of workaround for Netscape 4.x
because IE functionality is just not enough! some site has pop-ups on every page, so the surfing becomes a torture if you are using IE.
Try to install the BETA Google toolbar it would block them.
I don't code for NN4.X and very satisfied using a mozilla-based brower ... which is kmeleon.
So it comes down to, are you going to test in 4.80 and then 4.78, etc.
Actually, a fairly internet-savvy friend of mine was still using Netscape 4.7 until fairly recently. She knew quite alot about the internet, but had just never thought to upgrade her browser.
As for AOL 4.0, well, that just uses whatever version of IE 4.0+ is installed on the computer. If he hasn't upgraded from AOL 4.0, assume he sees pages the same as Internet Explorer 4.0 users.
