When to drop Netscape 4 support

At what percentage of hits

[Hester]

What is the lowest percentage at which you would consider dropping support for Netscape 4? By that I mean simply turning off styles, so you can use divs and floats and so on without worry.

Here are the recent stats for Netscape 4 from our site. Bear in mind they might be larger due to me testing in it!

October (so far) - 3.66%
September - 3.90%
August - 5.97%
July - 7.70%
June - 4.11%
May - 6.39%
April - 4.85%

[BonRouge]

Do it now! Set yourself free! Why do people have Netscape 4? I guess that if people stopped worrying about Netscape 4, the users of said instrument may realise that it's 2004 (nearly 2005) and erm... we're a bit past that. We've kind of gotten over the whole Netscape 4 thing. We've moved onwards and upwards. How about this idea? Use a brower sniffer and if you find Netscape 4, redirect the poor soul to the Mozilla / Firefox site. That would really help a few people.

[BlobFisk]

I feel that these stats are unrepresentative of mainstream browsing habits. I've got access to stats for some very large eCommerce sits (gifts, beauty, electronics) and I've never seen NN4.x rise above 0.1% in the past year or so.

It obviously depends on your market, but in meetings with clients when discussing browser support they tend to be only interested in IE. We say that we will build for IE, Mozilla and Opera. The client says "Great - but only if it doesn't cost us anything more!". The stats and the bill payers all point towards browsers well over version 5.

I feel that a lot of people stopped designing and developing for NN4.x in 2003...

[encyclo]

October (so far) - 3.66%

You're nowhere near yet, unless you have a very low-traffic site. I wouldn't drop NN4 support unless it was under 2% consistently over a period of several months, and probably not even until it was under 1%.

Each site is different, and you seem to be attracting a particular crowd with older browsers. Perhaps all of your competition has already abandoned support? If so, keep that competitive advantage you have.

Whether you like Netscape 4 isn't really the issue here - it's your visitors who make the choice for you.

[isitreal]

On a large site I do Netscape 4 and IE 4 users are a higher percentage than Safari, Konqueror, etc.

<<<< Do it now! Set yourself free!

When you do commercial sites it's about your users, not you. The user stats should determine what you do or don't do. Personally I only serve up straight HTML to netscape 4 users, they don't seem to mind, our numbers actually went up this week for NS4.

[edited by: tedster at 9:59 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2004]
[edit reason] thread cleanup [/edit]

[isitreal]

<<<< The client says "Great - but only if it doesn't cost us anything more!".

This is exactly the point. Current stats are running about 92-94% IE, 6-8% Netscape/Mozilla based browsers. Then the rest.

[edited by: tedster at 10:03 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2004]
[edit reason] thread cleanup [/edit]

[cabowabo]

Those are the highest Netscape figures I have ever seen. You might want to exclude your IP range in your stat program - this should always be done so the numbers are accurate. We dropped Netscape support a long time ago, and we've never looked back.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[Hester]

Those are the highest Netscape figures I have ever seen.

They used to be even higher! Over 10%.