7 years of Netscape 4

[encyclo]

It's time to celebrate - Netscape 4.0 was officially launched on June 10th, 1997. Bring out the balloons and the cake! Oh, things have changed in seven years - and to think at the time, I was still using Netscape Navigator 2 Gold on a Sun workstation! The place where I worked never liked to rush into upgrading...

Only this morning, I signed up a new client. They kindly showed me round their offices. Guess what browser they use as standard? Yes, Netscape 4.79 on Mac OS7 and 8. They're not likely to upgrade soon either - they haven't ever been affected by a virus, and their ancient Macs are solidly built and ready to go on working for a good few years yet.

This 100% flamebait post was brought to you by the letters N, S and the number 4 ;)

[BlobFisk]

NS4 is going for the prize of longest surviving browser!

I in stalled Mosaic recently... Now there was a blast from the past! Still have Lynx though - my first browser!

[Farix]

I rather pull out the shove and burry it.

[R1chard]

I have working copies of Netscape 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.6. I still use N4 by choice on some occasions (it beats IE4 in my books).

And yeah, it still has a static market share!

[Sanenet]

Isn't it about time we put it out of its misery?

trudges off to put ns4 version back up

[R1chard]

^ I see what you're getting at, but the bottom line is that we as developers can do nothing about it. N4 still "works", so it'll last as long as it lasts, and then some.

People use what they want to use, and they won't upgrade if they don't want to. Most people can't be bothered to change browsers (if they did, then we'd have a 5% IE market share!). We can't force them if they're happy (and if you try to force them, then the chances are they aren't able to upgrade anyway, so you'll just lose their custom).

The solution is to write standards compliant code, since in most cases this will still function in N4 (albeit with poorer visual appearance).