Netscape 4.X ... do you worry about it?

[fctoma]

I've been designing for years now and have always worried about Netscrape (scape) 4.X and the display, compared to IE and the more recent versions of Netscape.

I'm curious to know how many people worry about Netscape 4.X browsers and check them also...It can be such a pain in the a*s!

Thanks!

[fctoma]

agree with that pageoneresults....

On a side note for all...just because someone is reporting 30%, it doesn't mean jack...the real meaning is in the numbers.

For instance...someone receiving 2% 4.X users can have 10 times the amount of visitors than someone who has 30% 4.X users... it all boils down to numbers, not percentages.

You can also look at it this way...even if you have just a 1% NS 4.X visitors, that 1% could be a possible HUGE sale...

[claus]

well, the numbers... Based in Denmark, Europe, i had two (2) Netscape users on a random recent day (August 4, 2003) on a general interest site (directory-type) - both used version 7.1. That's... well, let's just say a good deal below 1% and that is for the most recent version (or actually for all Netscape versions grand total).

Apart from that i had the IE's from version 3.0B to 6.0 and the Gecko, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, and of course the "Mozilla" and "Mozilla 3.01" - both the latter are bots. I had Windows, Linux and Macintosh, all three in a few flavours. I can assure you all that my pages can be seen through NN4 - and Lynx as well for that matter - although they look their best with recent equipment.

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Now... this might sound controversial or radical or whatever... None of this - absolutely none of it - will make me optimize for any particular browser. IE has a share well above 90% but i will not optimize for that browser either. No.

This browser (IE) will be served exactly the same as other browsers (eg. NN4) - the users decide how they prefer to watch my content and what facilities of the web (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) they wish to support. They do this by choice of user-agent and the settings on their system. Even if they choose to overrule my stylesheets in all cases as some browsers permit, they're absolutely welcome to do so.

If they want to look at something that may look "unprofessional", it's their own decision, not mine, and as long as they are happy with it (which they indicate by their browser choice) then i'm happy with it too... Browsers are no longer my headache.

Standards means that i just have to write code in one way, and that's the proper way. I am still in the process of converting the mentioned site from hacked code with bug fixes to validating code and it is an extreme pleasure to know that you either do it right or you don't - it's no longer right-for-that-browser and wrong-for-that-browser. The document type definition decides, it's that simple.

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That said, i must emphasize that i do not use the very advanced stuff for pages aimed at a larger audience. I'm always just a few steps behind and keep all pages as simple as possible - that is totally deliberate, and i prefer to use the term usability for it, as web users are generally much more slow to accept recent developments than web developers.

/claus

[fctoma]

exactly... you said it:

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If they want to look at something that may look "unprofessional", it's their own decision, not mine,
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So then its safe to assume you don't care about what your first impression is to possible leads...thus possibly losing a potential customer.

Your website is your store, for most of us, its a first impression to any visitor, thats all I'm trying to say.

As far as one way to write HTML...well NS 4.X is so not advanced in many HTML coding ways... Even good code doesn't show up well sometimes.

Thanks for the feedback!

[hartlandcat]

Yes, it's definately the actual numbers that counts, and if you have a very small site (especially the sort that get repeat visitors, such as blogs), your percentages could be much higher (like 30%) or much lower that average. I have website that recieves around 140 visits per day, most of which are actually new people visiting for the first time. However, I rarely get more than 1 or 2 Netscspe 4.x visitors in any one day. If I had a small blog/diary/journal website which was visited by just four or five friends every day, and one was a Netscape 4.x user, then I would have high Netscape 4.x percentage. That situation would never occur, because friends don't let friends use Netscape 4.x. ^_-

But the 30% that was mentioned earlier in this thread is on a totally different scale. I agree with tedster on this one -- Google, Yahoo! and the like are not going to be getting 30% Netscape 4.x, regardless of where they are based. Do we have any ideas of what countries in Europe they were from? And you say it would be more likely if they were Eastern Europe countries... I'm not so sure. I know quite a lot of Mozilla developers are Eastern Europeans.

Also, anyone what browser is used mostly in Japan? IE? Just wondering as the Japanese often like to do their own thing...

[claus]

>> then its safe to assume you don't care

nah... i think it's the opposite. I do care, i just don't want to spend my life redoing stuff every time some stupid browser manufacturer get a new brilliant idea:

"i do not use the very advanced stuff for pages aimed at a larger audience"

Basically i just try to avoid stuff that i know will **** things up beyond belief. Minor design flaws, eg. inside-outside cellpadding/spacing/whatever (even in most recent browsers), not so-perfect colors on old screens and such (*) i can live with as long as basic functionality is there and it doesn't exactly look like <insert appropriate four letter word here>.

/claus

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(*) even absense of support for graphics or tables or JS or whatever in very odd browsers.

[claus]

>> Google, Yahoo! and the like are not going to be getting 30% Netscape 4.x,

Google percentage here: [google.com...]

Just below "Top events" - just a graph, but the Netscape grand total does not seem likely to be anywhere around 30% and the NN4 not either.

TheCounter.com global stats: [thecounter.com...]

Here Netscape grand total is actually ... well .. around 3%. NN4 is 1% it seems, so i am perhaps a bit low on these UA's.

/claus

[hartlandcat]

I don't believe thecounter.com's stats to be accurate:
[thecounter.com...]

Those stats say:
13,200 more people use Unix than Windows ME
47,535 more people use WebTV than Windows ME
122,190 more people use Linux than Windows ME
178,161 more people use Windows 3.x than Windows ME

How likely is all that? It's probably recognising most Windows ME users as Windows 98 users. I'm also suprised that more people on there are using windows 3.x than Linux -- I'm guessing that Windows 3.x actually means "16-bit Windows", which would also include Windows CE.

The Windows ME user-agent is this:
Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90

Rubbish stats programmes recognise Windows ME as Windows 98, and it seems that thecounter.com is one of those.

[Visit Thailand]

We have some very unusual Netscape Stats on one very busy site.

For August 2003 so far:

IE6 - 58.89%
IE5 - 29.76%
Netcape 3 - 2.55%
Netscape 4 - 2.21%
Netscape 5 - 2.11%

then others are below so while we do not target them we do try to make sure it works to some extent by at least validating the code.

[hartlandcat]

As I've said before, if you have a high number of Netscape 3.0, they are most likely search engine robots, as they tend to have user-agent strings that begin with "Mozilla/3.0" -- if they say that, and then don't say "(compatible: MSIE 3.0;)", then many stats programmes will recognise them as Netscape 3.0.

[claus]

>> probably recognising most Windows ME users as Windows 98 users

- sounds probable. It was the browser stats though and not the OS-stats that i wanted to share. Well, here's more:

(a) four sources: between 1.1% and 3.4% NN4 (note special target groups)
[upsdell.com...]

(b) one website, fairly large: 0.6% NN4
[w3schools.com...]

(c) another website, fairly large: 1.2% NN4
[webreference.com...]

(d) Onestat measurement service (Press Release, Oct 2002): 1.1% NN4
[nua.ie...]

(e) Various hosted sites (13M requests) : 2% NN4 (NN Total 3.6%)
[doctor-html.com...]

I do think we can bury the 30% rumor safely now. Some special sites may still have 30% or even above that, but the general rule seems to be around 1%.

For a site with 100 visitors that is 1 visitor in numbers
For a site with 1,000 visitors that is 10 visitors in numbers
For a site with 10,000 visitors that is 100 visitors in numbers
For a site with 100,000 visitors that is 1,000 visitors in numbers
For a site with 1,000,000 visitors that is 10,000 visitors in numbers

The stats do not indicate anything about the ROI on such users.

The (e) site has this very interesting breakdown of Netscape versions:

4.0 25%
4.7 29%
6.0 7%
7.0 40%

- concluding that: "Version 6 has been almost entirely bypassed, and there is a trend for people to upgrade from version 4 or 4.7 to the latest version, 7.0"

/claus

[hartlandcat]

Why would people still using Netscape 4.x now want to upgrade to Netscap 6.x when there is a more recent Netscape 7.x? Anyhow, version 6.x isn't exactly advertised on the Netscape website.

[claus]

>> would people still using Netscape 4.x now want to upgrade to Netscap 6.x

You're right. I think the real explanation behind this breakdown is that people that previously used NN6 have now mostly upgraded to NN7 and that the people using the NN4 are very slow to upgrade.

That's a completely different story, and perhaps there are other reasons for this - is there some OS'es that NN4 support that NN6+ does not (such as very old hardware running 16 bit OS)?

/claus

[krieves]

Yup, it's my experience that Netscape 4.X users make up around 1% of total visitors. While I hate to write off these customers, the company has made the decision that costs associated with maintaining/adding to a site while accomodating old versions of NS isn't practical.

[fctoma]

Ya, we thought about writing NS off also...but the question non of us could answer is "what if that one customer that left your site because it looked too screwed up.... that the visitor who left wasn't a $100K customer or higher?".

So, with that said, we spend the extra one or two hours making sure all works in NS 4.X to be 100% assured we do not lose a customer for that reason...something that takes so little time to correct, could have such a huge benefit!

Frank

[mattur]

I design my sites to work on all browsers, degrading gracefully. I even still test in NN2.02 - like fctoma says, money talks!

Incidentally I know a large, Russell-group university in the UK still has about 20% of its ~30,000 users using NN4 - mostly staff and postgrads.

I would hate to lose a sale for one of my clients from a Uni staff member who has to use NN4 and is looking for that big purchase during their lunch break at work :)

[g1smd]

I use the @import thing to hide the CSS from Netscape 4.

Did you know that there are several valid versions of the syntax of @import (single or double or no quotes, with "url" word or without, etc) and each works with a slightly different subset of old browsers?

See [centricle.com...]

[claus]

>> university in the UK still has about 20%

That sounds very probable and does not contradict the general rule of 1% - universities are often special places technology-wise. Some larger companies have the same hrm...problem; that users cannot decide for themselves which software they want to use no matter if it's free or not.

/claus

[TheDoctor]

For what it's worth, running a UK-based, academically-related site, about 2% of our visitors in July used NN4 - up from just over 1% in June and back to the May level (but down from 16% at the begining of 2002).

I suspect the fall in NN4 users in June was due to the UK university marking season, since the fall and subsequent rise in the number of NN4 users went along with a somewhat smaller fall and rise in the total number of visitors.

Whatever the reason, I'm not going to ignore one visitor out of every fifty. I use CSS to gracefully degrade the site. If you want to see my site in all its glory, you have to have the latest browser. But, if you use an older browser, you get the same content anyway. The pages just look as if they were designed by someone with the artistic tastes of Jakob Neilsen.

Incidentally, I'm not sure where the figure of 30% for NN4 users in Europe came from, but it's highly unlikely. Most people change their browser when they get a new machine - which is how come IE dominates the numbers. For the proportion of NN4 users to have remained at that high a level, there would have to have been a major slump in PC investment in Europe over the last four or five years. There hasn't been such a slump.

But because browsers usually get upgraded when the hardware does, I'm expecting to see a fall in the proportion of NN4 visitors to my site in the Autumn, as new machines get installed in UK university departments. How big a fall is, of course, another question.