Netscape 4

[DrDoc]

Netscape 4 is how old now? Five years?

There have been tons of threads on here about whether to support NN4 or not, about cross browser compatibility (which normally can be translated as "NN4 tweaking").

My question is - How long is Netscape going to support this antique, stoneage browser?

For crying out load, they have NN6 now .. and they have stopped developing NN4 .. so why still support it?

[pageoneresults]

Its on the decline. But, its also relative to the industry. 4% as of April 2002, this is an overall statistic from the W3Schools.

Netscape 4.x 7% 5% 5% 4% 4%

I'd guess another 9-12 months before we see that number at 1-2%.

[papabaer]

I think the point DrDoc is making is referring to Netscape's actual support of the v4 family of browsers. At the end of November 2001, Netscape released Netscape Communicator 4.79 which addressed a few minor bug fixes. The browser still supports propriety code, still does not meet all of the five-year-old HTML 4 recommendations and offers no added support for Web Standards. And they wonder why they have trouble convincing the public to accept NS6/7 Talk about fence sitting!

On one hand you have the big push and pr activity touting NS6 (and now v.7) as THE Web Standards compliant browser, and on the other, you have the very same company releasing a trivial update for one of the two browsers that have made standards such a necessity. Go figure....

[Nick_W]

I wish they'd just give it up as a bad job.

As far as I'm concerned Netscape 4 can go <insert naughty phrase of choice> itself!

I've been of the opinion that 'if you can at least use a site in nn4 that's good enough' for some time now.

Death to nn4!

Nick

[piskie]

I try very hard to ensure functionality with NN4x
and try to a limited extent to maintain the desired visual effect.
"Functionality but obviously not visualy as intended" will hopefully persuade some visitors to upgrade.

[pageoneresults]

> Death to nn4!

Where's Marshall at? ;)

[Purple Martin]

> insert naughty phrase of choice

uninstall ?

> Functionality but obviously not visualy as intended

That's my attitude now as well. Trying to get sites looking the same in N4 as in IE, N6 etc can easily double development time. So I can get 200% the work done by not making things look pretty for 4% of users. It's been said many times before by many people, but once more won't hurt: CSS and @import!!!

[rewboss]

Netscape 6 was a flop -- people simply didn't like it. It made a mess of a lot of pages (especially ones with sloppily-written browser detection scripts) and managed the interesting trick of almost fully implementing W3C standards while at the same time being almost completely incompatible with other browsers that implemented W3C standards. It has a mystifying tendency to add whitespace to some block-level elements some of the time (but not always), changing its behaviour depending on whether it has retrieved a document via the file: protocol or from a local or remote host via http:, refusing sometimes to execute JavaScript code but without outputting any error message. I have tried all sorts of fixes recommended by various people, which work sometimes but not always, and usually patchily if at all.

I gave up accommodating NS6 on my personal homepage -- the layout started falling apart, so I thought, "Well, &@!$ this for a game of soldiers," and uploaded anyway... then discovered to my amazement that it suddenly started looking perfect. Even NS4 never pulled that kind of trick on me.

Users also didn't like NS6's user interface (even though skins are available). An awful lot of users who refused to use MSIE tried installing NS6, said "yuk" and went back to NS4.7.