Esoteric old browser question: Netscape 4.0 & Lotus Notes 5.0

Is the Lotus 5.0 bundled browser really NN 4.0 or not?

[contracosta]

I work someplace which uses Lotus Notes 5.0 (2002) for most internal communication. I like it, actually, except for one thing. It has an internal web browser which is nasty and barely responds to CSS. It is possible to configure Notes to use a different browser, but most people never do.

Both WebTrends and Funnel Web Analyzer include this as "Netscape 4.0" -- I've written a mod for FunnelWeb to break it out. Here is a sample UA tag.

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Lotus-Notes/5.0; Windows-NT)"

Two things: First, is this even a version of Netscape at all? I admit I don't even remember Netscape 4.0 -- I went from 3.01 to 4.7. I can't believe Netscape 4.0 was ever this bad!

Further, all of you folks might take a look to see if this is in your logs. Trust me, this browser is butchering your pages. both in appearance and functionality. It makes Netscape 4.7 look like Opera 7.0 :)

[tedster]

The browser engine of IE4 will become part of the Lotus Notes 5.0 client, which is due January 1998...

Reference [sigpc.net]

Thanks for the history project!

[contracosta]

Thank you very much!

Amazing that this is still in use. Lotus Notes is still on R5 (at least, we have a 2002 dated version of 5.0) and still bundled with this pretty unsophisticated browser. Savvy users are configuring the program to use a different web client. The majority are probably not.

I'm new to this forum, but let me say I'm very impressed.

[tedster]

I'm also amazed that Lotus didn't update their browser engine somewhere along the way - but I can find no record of it on the web.

FWIW, the Google search that uncovered the information for me was "Lotus Notes" "browser engine"

[tedster]

Aha! There's finally an upgrade to version 6 available from IBM Lotus - and it's being called "The first major upgrade since 1999."

Reference [pcmag.com]

Funny that it's from IBM, and the client will run on Windows and Mac OS X -- but not on Linux, at least for now. I thought IBM and Linux was a big love story.

[BlobFisk]

Hey contracosta,

If you click on the Office/Home button on the bottom right of the end bar, and then click on Edit Current, you will be brought to your Settings for Location preferences.

In this window there is an Internet Browser tab. Clicking on this allows you to changethe browser that Notes uses by default. You can change this to any browser that you have installed on your system. Notes will pick up IE by default, but you can hit Other and browse to any one on your system.

Beware: There is a Notes with Internet Explorer option, and this will embed IE in Notes when you browse and disable some features - I'd advise using a IE (or any browser of your choice) standalone.

HTH