Netscape 4.x

Time to wrap it up

[ronin]

Once in a while the issue of NS4.x comes up.

Remind me again why the braver amongst us still design for NS4.x? (I have to confess I stopped at the beginning of this year).

Mozilla Firefox is no longer in Beta development - FF1.0 is an offical release.

Firefox is free and it takes less than fifteen minutes to download on a dialup connection.

It strikes me that while Mozilla is ratcheting up the campaign to get people to use FF instead of IE, they would also do well to tell lots of people - who I'm sure don't know - that FF is the legitimate successor of NS 4.

Time for all those library networks to update, surely?

[encyclo]

I think all the library and university networks have all updated, ronin - NN4 is virtually dead now.

When I see it turning up these days, it is always in combination with an older, non-Windows OS: I have one client still using NN4 on Mac OS9 (mostly just for the email), and on one site with a scientific, university audience there are still a few NN4 users running on Solaris workstations. The only people still running NN4 on Windows are web designers checking their sites.

Trouble is, there is no version of Firefox for Mac OS9, and as the email client tie-in is often the reason why they've stuck with NN4, you'd need a stable Thunderbird release too to be able to fully replace NN4. On the Solaris workstations, the users don't tend to have root access, so they can't install easily Firefox anyway even if an appropriate version exists. I guess that Firefox isn't targeting NN4 users because there are none left would could upgrade.

As I said, though, they are the stragglers. Sometimes, you have to support them because the numbers demand it in your particular situation, but in most cases, a quick check to make sure the site is accessible and doesn't crash the thing and you're OK.

One final point: I've often seen designers supporting NN4 not because of the users, but because of the browser requirements as stipulated in their contract. Work still needs to be done in that area to update the contract requirements probably decided upon by committee in 1999.

[RammsteinNicCage]

I go to a relatively large, well known university that has Windows XP SP2 on machines that are pretty up-to-date in hardware and still have NN4 on it. Although, most people will use IE6.

Jennifer

[Robin_reala]

In the UK (at least) we have a legal obligation to create accessible websites. Done properly this means proper content/layout seperation, which in turn implies the use of CSS for layout. CSS for layout and NN4 is near impossible for any non-trivial design, so purely on a cost analysis it's not worth it for the vast majority of people. Better to serve the people using NN4 the unstyled content, and spend the time that would have been used on NN4 compliant layouts on enhancing the rest of the site.

[Hester]

I still get a lot of NS4 users for my work site - it's a university sector site, hence the high numbers. Here are the most recent stats:

November 2004 - 3.43%
October - 4.11%
September - 3.90%
August - 5.97%
July - 7.70%
June - 4.11%
May - 6.39%
April - 4.85%

So you see I still have to support it.

Worse is supporting Netscape 6.2, which one university have chosen to replace Netscape 4! This is so slow and buggy it defies belief.