Forum Moderators: open
(Browser / Hits / Visitors / Percentage)
1. Internet Explorer 6.x / 28,587 / 842 / 68.07%
2. Internet Explorer 5.x / 2,070 / 97 / 7.84%
3. Netscape 4.x 211 / 60 / 4.85%
When can I realistically stop coding for Netscape 4? When it reaches only 1%? Is 5% still too high? I mean, it's the third browser listed!
I will continue to monitor these stats, though I feel many of our users will carry on using Netscape until their IT department finally changes it. Some users cannot install programs on their PCs (being universities) so what to do but wait...
I now longer developer for it, and have a message on my sites with a link to upgrade your browser if I detecet its use
Is your stats package recent BTW? Older packages can report wildly innacurate figures, as they are unable to differentiate newer browsers from older ones (such as NN4).
If you're targetting a university / institutional audience, you usually have to support older browsers for much longer than on a general-interest site. That doesn't mean you can't use CSS, but you need to take those users into account, even if their experience is slightly (but not completely) diminished in their browser.
1. Internet Explorer 6.x / 2,489 / 91 / 54.49%
2. Netscape 4.x / 84 / 29 / 17.37%
Now it's in second position!
Realistically, I am aware of the ability to supply less style to older browsers, though I always assumed it was all or nothing. (Use the @import trick to turn off all styles, so Netscape 4 and lower just get the plain content.) But this is not an option as I have carefully coded the site to look the same across all browsers. So to suddenly make the site plain for Netscape users would have people asking why I couldn't carry on styling the site.
I would love to drop support for Netscape 4 though, so I could minimise hugely the code required for the site, by using solely divs and CSS. One day!
You can use two separate stylesheets, one for general styles (for all browsers including NN4), and one for advanced styles (for newer browsers). Then link the advanced stylesheet using @import:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="simple.css"><style type="text/css">@import "advanced.css";</style>
In that case, you've got no choice but to respect their browser choice.
I'm just speaking from a very personal standpoint here, but I find it difficult to have any respect for that kind of browser choice.
Firefox is free. And it downloads in a couple of minutes. What on earth are people doing with Netscape 4.x?
Unless something happens, these people are still going to be using NS4.x in 2020...
Corporates that refuse to let people upgrade their browsers may still be using older versions of netscape.
I think it depends on how much 'worthwhile' traffic you are getting from people using a particular browser.
Sorry but firefox doesn't take a couple of minutes to download on a dial-up.
Indeed. It takes about 20 mins -- or about the time someone might spend checking their email and catching up on their favourite sites. It's about the size of a good quality MP3, in other words.
The only reason I can see to continue to support NN4 is if you're supporting the academic community -- they tend to use it with unix boxes for various reasons. But even that's pushing it -- most institutions have rolled out a newer browser on most of their terminals.
17% is incredibly high. Either you have a very atypical user base or something is wrong with your browser detection scripts (remember that there are many Mozilla/Netscape variants). You should never consider outright blocking a user section from your site, but it really sounds like you need to actively look into why NN4 use appears to be so high.
Secondly, where's the email client? Netscape 4 (Communicator) has an excellent email client, and that tie-in is what keeps particularly corporate environments from moving to another browser. Yes, the Mozilla suite has email, but there is no easy upgrade path, and it won't run on older machines anyway. Thunderbird? That's even more beta-quality than Firefox.
Thirdly, many users can't just download a new browser. Again, NN4 may be the corporate / university choice, and they don't have the control of the machine in order to do it. What's more, they may not know how, they usually don't know why, "Mozilla" and "Firefox" mean nothing to them, and if your site was working for them one day and not the next, they will blame you, not the browser.
Finally, and most importantly, it is never the role of the web site developer to dictate browser choice, whether NN4, IE6 or a Nokia phone. If a single person is turned away because they are unable to view your site in their browser, then you're not treating your visitors with due respect. If they use an older browser (or a newer one like the phone) they may not get all the fancy layout, but that's an acceptable compromise. The site is for your users, not for you.
Bravo (or brava, depending)! That's a marvelous statement you just made....
If a single person is turned away...
While I sympathisize with that idea, there are often business practicalites to consider that make it unrealistic to accommodate every single user.
It can even be a survival question -- whether to cut off certain archaic user agents in order to create a site that converts a higher percentage of the visitors. Developing for "everyone" IS an extra business cost. There's a LOT of variation out there and you've got handle your balance sheet, or you'll close up shop.
That being said, many developers are overly cavalier (or just plain stupid) in bouncing people out of their site, and that is extremely foolish - and not sound business either.
Thirdly, many users can't just download a new browser. Again, NN4 may be the corporate / university choice, and they don't have the control of the machine in order to do it.
It's usually not that they can't or won't do it, it's that the machines that are running these browsers are simply too old and or slow to run browsers like Firefox or IE > 4. The only browser I've seen that runs decently on very old boxes is Opera, because it's made to run on systems with very limited resources like cell phones.
NS 4 was made to run on boxes that might have only 8-16 megabytes of ram, windows 95 was made with the requirement that it run on 4, that's four, megabytes of ram. Not run well, but run. I have an old laptop with I believe 8 megabytes of ram, and you can run windows 95 and Office 97 pretty much fine with that, if you added opera you would have a perfectly functioning computer able to do everything you needed done, at a reasonable speed.
In this particular case, you can add a fancy menu with CSS rollovers and the like, and for Netscape 4 offer the same links, in the same place, but as blue-underlined text. You will need to preserve the layout for NN4, but certain elements won't look the same, that's all.
Netscape 4 isn't even supported by the company that made it in the first place. Hell, the company itself barely exists anymore. Even when it was current, Netscape 4 was bug-ridden. Now it's antiquated and bug-ridden, and needs to go.
Should I expect Microsoft to carry on supporting Windows 98 as long as I feel like using it? Should I expect game developers to only release games that will run happily on my Celeron 400 and nVidia TNT card? (er, that bit's true unfortunately) No. Why should web developers be forced to offer infinite backwards compatibility when their peers don't?
As for the lack of email client with Firefox, that's a non-argument. It's like refusing to upgrade from Access to MS SQL for web apps because there's no word processor with the latter. Hello? You're talking about two distinct applications which just happen to be bundled together.
Idealism is all well and good, but let us at least keep vaguely in touch with commercial reality.
Demosthenes :)
Netscape 4 ... needs to go.
It's not Netscape the company, or you or me as web designers who decide when a browser is obsolete - it is the users of the product. Ask Microsoft why they're still supporting Windows 98 - it's because people are still using it. They'd like nothing better to drop Win98 support and move everyone to the latest version.
Why should web developers be forced to offer infinite backwards compatibility when their peers don't?
Commercial reality. For the site in question, NN4 is in second place.
As for the lack of email client with Firefox, that's a non-argument. It's like refusing to upgrade from Access to MS SQL for web apps because there's no word processor with the latter. Hello? You're talking about two distinct applications which just happen to be bundled together.
If you replace the browser, you need to replace the email client as well - they are not just bundled together, they are tied together. Click a link in an email and the navigator opens. What are you supposed to do? Ask people not to click on the links, rather to copy the link and paste it into another program?
It's not Netscape the company, or you or me as web designers who decide when a browser is obsolete - it is the users of the product.
We are talking about a product that could be around 5-6 years old here, I don't remember when 4.79 was released. Five years is not, despite rumours to the contrary, ancient history. I had a 20 year old pickup truck that worked great, most of my appliances are at least that old. Why the computer world expects consumers to do these forced upgrades is something that is beyond me. The idea that supporting a 5 or 6 year old product is extremely unreasonably strikes me as disturbing, to put it mildly. Do any of you have any idea what happens to all those old pc's and monitors? They don't just fly off into pc heaven, they are an extremely serious toxic waste management problem, not to bring reality into one of these discussions.
It's not... you or me as web designers who decide when a browser is obsolete - it is the users of the product.
I agree with this, up to a point - there's no reason why new validated pages shouldn't work in NN4.x - I design my pages so that they are unstyled but still functional in Netscape. I certain disagree with the practice of blocking users of a particular browser... if a page degrades it should do so elegantly.
But those who use NN4.x certainly shouldn't be encouraged to continue with that browser... and spending twice as long on a page design to create a page which is not only functional but also fully styled in Netscape shouldn't be necessary... It's a waste of resources (primarily time) and of itself it is a practice which encourages continued use of NN4.x
As for those who work in corporate or university environments who can't update their browser, I am of course saying it is the Network Administrator who should be updating the browser.
Virtually nobody uses NSCA Mosaic now, or for that matter NN2. Why not? Because it was second nature to the generation who did to start using a new browser when the old one was superceded.
It is not second nature to the generation who have been using NN4.x since 1999 (or whenever). They will not change their browser until the majority of pages appear unstyled... what this means - I believe - is that if web designers continue to provide pages which are fully styled in NN4.x, there will never be any incentive to move forward.
There is no benefit to anyone - users or designers - to have to continue creating pages which are fully styled in legacy browsers. After all, there is nothing that NN4 can do which newer browsers can't and there is a number things, like superior CSS rendering, which newer browsers can do which NN4 can't.
As for having email as part of the browsing suite, I think the successor to Netscape 7, Mozilla, handles that.
isitreal> It's not that NN4.x is five or six years old that's the problem. It's the fact that it doesn't work, that's the problem. Does anybody here spend the same amount of time making sure that their pages are similarly fully styled in IE 3? No, in general, they don't have to, because M$ took care of the upgrades. But Netscape is something you have to update yourself.
From what I can see, the macro world is increasingly dropping support for NN4.x. Visitors so equipped will find unstyled pages, totally messed up pages, or occasionally a message telling them to upgrade their browser. This trend will continue to put pressure on NN4.x users to upgrade.
However, in the micro world of individual sites, NN4.x may occasionally still be important. If a site caters to a population that includes a significant percentage of vistiors using NN4.x (perhaps not by choice), it would be foolish to try to force them to convert. I'd leave that job to the rest of the web, and continue to serve my own visitors as they preferred.
I happen to fall into the group that doesn't worry much about NN4.x. This isn't based on dogma, though, it's based on browser stats - I don't have a single site with significant NN4 usage.
If you replace the browser, you need to replace the email client as well - they are not just bundled together, they are tied together. Click a link in an email and the navigator opens. What are you supposed to do? Ask people not to click on the links, rather to copy the link and paste it into another program?
That's a fallacy. As long as Firefox (in my case) is the DEFAULT browser, clicked links from OE or Outlook, or even Incredimail open in Firefox, NOT in IE, and NOT in any one of the other 6 or 7 I have on my machine. I know this to be true - I just tried it. Now I suppose it's marginally possible that a user of NN4 wouldn't know how to go about making another browser the default - but heesh must have understood that at some point since apparently NN4 IS the default browser....
vkaryl - NN4 doesn't respect the default browser setting when clicking on links in the email client. Nor does the latest Mozilla 1.6 email client either, for that matter. In both cases it's a bug and it shouldn't be like that, but that's how it is.
As txbakers said, here we go again. If we're going to simply engage in browser-bashing I'm bailing out. Whether a browser is new or old, good or bad, stable or crash-prone, compliant or non-compliant, supported or not supported - none of these issues have the slightest bearing on whether you should support it. It certainly has nothing to do with personal preference, either. If your visitors use it, then you must support it - after all, the site is for them, not for you.
Does that make things difficult? Yes, certainly, but if you don't like resolving cross-browser compatibility problems and such, you're in the wrong job! There will always be limitations on what you can do with a web page, but working within those limits is where true creativity can shine. So, you have to support NN4 and you have to go easy on the CSS and fancy stuff - but that doesn't mean you can't build a quality site, work the layout, focus on accessibility and all the rest that makes up the job of web designer.
Finally, and most importantly, it is never the role of the web site developer to dictate browser choice, whether NN4, IE6 or a Nokia phone. If a single person is turned away because they are unable to view your site in their browser, then you're not treating your visitors with due respect. If they use an older browser (or a newer one like the phone) they may not get all the fancy layout, but that's an acceptable compromise. The site is for your users, not for you.
I disagree with this statement completely - it is absolutely the role of the webmaster to decide who they wish to design their sites for. My customers don't dictate how my site looks, I do - take it or leave it.
I mean really, that's like saying I should decorate my store with furniture from the 70's because there might still be some people out there who like it. I decorate my store how *I* want it to look. If you want to live in the past you have that right - just know that you may not be able to view my site properly. It's not "rude" for me to take advantage of features that aren't supported by a browser two or more versions old. If that means you can't view my site and aren't going to buy from me, I can live with that.
I AGREE that one's sites MUST be accessible for most browsers. As an aside, I just today went back through a year's worth of stats on the only site of my own that has ANY commercial ANYTHING - and unless NN4 is disguising itself as Mozilla 3, 4, or 5 I've had only 4 accesses from NN4 in that year, which doesn't surprise me. I STILL put up "biodegradable for NN4" sites.
And I DO NOT attempt to lead those who access my sites to a different browser ethic. That's their choice to make, not mine.
Everybody I know is tired of the extra effort needed to support Netscape 4 - and the restrictions it places on the layout and features you can use. Of course, there are those who are equally antsy about IE 6.0 - and they will have an extended wait.
I no longer have any contract that requires me to support NN4 -- but I still watch the stats and make decisions from there.
Does anyone here capture browser info with sales/conversions or sales dollars? It just occurred to me that on a commercial site, that would be critical information for making a good business decision...but I don't currently capture it.
I know how to do the large type and primary colours, but does anyone have a regular expression to filter out all the words of more than one syllable?
