Netscape 3 still hanging around

about 1%

[yonnermark]

Hello. I have a problem.

My target audience is middle-aged people and a lot of them seem to be on older browsers still.

I'm getting the usual 1-2% on NN4 but I'm also getting 1% using NN3!

I've tried viewing my site with NN3 but all of my css coding seems to be ignored leaving a rather ugly site behind.

The URL in question is <snip>

Does NN3 support css?

thanks
Mark

[edited by: korkus2000 at 5:26 pm (utc) on Sep. 17, 2003]
[edit reason] No site reviews please [/edit]

[Sinner_G]

AFAIK, Netscape 3 doesn't support CSS. 1% seems very high though, even for middle-aged people (or did you mean people from the Middle Ages ;)).

Oh, and loose that URL before it gets snipped out by the moderators.

[korkus2000]

You really need to decide if you want to support or dump it. Is it worth the effort or not. How much is 1% compared to your traffic? The percentage that use it will only get smaller and smaller, so I would think about losing support.

[g1smd]

Use the @import command for your CSS instead of <link>, and you then completely hide it from older browsers. People using those older browsers will still be able to read your content. Don't make the site inaccessible, just don't bother applying any style or layout to it. Eventually, those people will realise that your site looks really good on someone elses computer (perhaps a public terminal or at the grandchildrens house) and very poor on their own machine. Eventually the penny might drop that their very older browser is the problem.

[cyril kearney]

My experience is that middle-age people generally use the same kind of equipment as younger people. People with older browsers usually have older and slower modems.

This makes designing very difficult and perhaps cost prohibitive to design for. I'd look at the economics, are the people with the NS3 machines contributing revenue. If not, I'd just forget about them. If they are and it is enough to merit special pages I'd go that way.

Most sites I know are aiming at a minimum of IE5 over a 56kb connection. Dumbing dwon your site might offend the other 99% of your traffic.

[yonnermark]

yeah I'm using the @import method for new browsers to access and I'm using a link import for older browsers.

I've created 2 css files you see. one for the old and one for the new. I've made sure the css file for older browser is compatible with v4 but its no good with v3 browsers.

OK I'll carry on. Was just hoping there was a way to make NN3 use css.

thanks
,Mark

[choster]

NN3 predates the concept of CSS. Just out of curiosity, is it possible that your stat software is misidentifying spiders that report "Mozilla 3.0" as their user-agent? One set of our sites are geared toward retirees, and NN3 usage has been neglible since early 2000 or so because of security certificate expirations, mostly people running Windows 95 on 486 machines who can't load anything more advanced.

[krieves]

My site (a mortgage company) averages about 30,000 visits a month. Since Jan 2003, I have exact 2 visits by people (a person?) using Netscape 3.0. I would guess that my demographic is overwhelmingly middle age and the most common browser is IE5+ at probably about 97% and has been growing.

[hartlandcat]

Almost certainly spiders/bots that are being identified as Netscape 3.0.

Are you able to see a list of all the user agents that have accessed your site?

If you have a lot of
Mozilla/3.0 (Win95; I) or something simular to that then it really is Netscape 3.0.
If it's more like this:
Mozilla/3.0 (Planetweb/1.057.3 MF; Puma) or just Mozilla/3.0 on it's own, then it's spiders.

Simply put, don't bother explicitly supporting Netscape 3.0. You have to draw the line somewhere.

added:\>
Up until I installed AXS Script [xav.com] (a stats program which also gives a list of all the user agents that access my website), I used to think that I had a lot of Netscape 3.0 user on my site. I recently discovered that it was all spiders/bots.