HeadBangers Only Need Apply

If you enjoy banging your head against a brick wall, then you probably love Netscape 4x - the crappy browser that just won't go away. For everyone into pain and suffering, the fine bewildered folks at NS have released an upgrade version 4.8 , now available for downloading .

Opera casts off legacy code for speed
So reads the headline at News.com for the upcoming version 7 of their browser, which they claim will finally support the DOM (eureka! ) More news can be found here:
http://rss.com.com/2100-1023-954561.html

I read in article recently which had a very wise comment by the author. He was talking about standards complaiance and whatnot, and mentioned that a big problem keeping people from being more compliant was NS4. Also, given that so few people (like 5%??) use NS4 now, that the way to force the remaining people to update is to just forget it.... design for the standards compliant browsers using CSS, XHTML etc, and those last remaining NS4 people can either deal with it, or upgrade.

I am SO in agreement with that sentiment. There is no reason to keep kludging code and hacking to make things work with NS4. It's an old, crappy, bug ridden browser, and we need to force people away from it. Anyone still stupid enough to like using it, well that's their problem then. If they don't like IE, there's plenty of other browsers to (Opera does a commendable job)

Thank god for the upgrade. Netscape 4 is a nightmare!

*Hides*

Why? Why, why why?
NS4 SUCKS!
I'd prefer to use IE than NS, and that's saying something!

(I saw this on http://www.mozillanews.org/ a few days ago).

* cough * Moz * cough *

Agreed Mark... those still using NS 4x are most likely on corporate networks running 486's or pentiums. They should be nearing/at the end of their usefulness by now. I only keep a copy on hand to spot-check tables, as table problems will show up quickly in NS 4 (they won't show up at all ). Code validation to xhtml standards usually makes that step moot.

I've never had problems with it before, but I've learned just recently that NS4's rendering engine is cripplingly slow... On the forum homepage for my 7Style test, NS4 takes several seconds to render each category table, it's pretty pathetic. Granted, the tables are four or five levels deep at some points but still...

I found it interesting that in the link Allen provided, they've got archives all the way back to NS 3.04

I remember, way back when the very first NS 4.0 came out, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread cuz it looked so much more cool and modern than the previous version... hehe, silly how that works, eh?

---Jamin

Wha?
I use Mozilla and have done for at least half a year now.

"the way to force the remaining people to update is to just forget it"

I disagree. People moved in droves off of NS3 to NS4 (no longer requiring us to code for it)because it was better. People haven't moved in droves to NS6 because it sucks, and 7 is worse. The answer is not to forget these users, it is to give them something better.

I'm using Mozilla. Not because it's better than anything else. To me the only thing it does better than NS4 is crashes more reliably, more often, and more spectacularly oh, and it renders a couple pages better. But it renders a lot of pages worse too. Why do I use it? Because it runs exactly the same on everything I use as an Operating System. That's it.

So if I wasn't in a place where I use so many O/Ses I'd still stay with NS4. I haven't seen anything that much better. Modern skin. big whoopdy do. Standards. Yup. Todays standard is by the w3c. Tomorrow's standard is "IE does it, we need to do it that way too". Yesterday's was "this embedder says we need to do this". It doesn't feel faster(except deeply nested tables). It isn't any easier to use. No new features I really care at all about except tabbed browsing. It's full of geeky stuff I don't care about. DOM inspector? So what?

Sorry man, I just don't see that ignoring someone is the answer. Give them something better to use, and thus far AOL/Time Werner/Netscape isn't doing that. To me, neither is the competition.

No one said they had to upgrade to Netscape 6/7...there's plenty of other browsers.

I disagree about mozilla though (which IS ns6/7 as most know). I think it does a good job.

But regardless, my point is that we as developers should not have to jump through hoops to support and old, piece of crap, that hardly anyone is using anymore. There's no reason for it. 5 years old is ancient in software terms, and NS4 *needs* to go away.

I was a huge advocate of NS until v4. They made fatal mistakes with 4 (like rewritting the code from scratch), and released a buggy, bloated piece of code (ever see the NS 4 team's sarcastic t-shirts to state their displeasure with having to release?...they only printed them in 5XL and had the "Zero Bugs" motto written as "Zaro Boogs" on the front. Brilliant if you ask me!! )

I don't wish to be picky, but there are quite a few "minor" differences, such as that NS7 doesn't have the popup blocker, comes with AIM instead of ChatZilla and there are many other differences...
The base is Mozilla tho (which is what you were meaning, I guess)...

The reason I don't use Mozillia/Netscape is because about 1/2 of the sites work completely only with IE, and I want to see everything there is in the sites I surf. (yeah yeah, not popup ads, but you can just add the hosts to x:windowssystem32driversetchosts file )

I use IE and Mozilla. IE more for the same reason as LK.

I find that by far the majority of sites work with Mozilla, just some of the more "fancy" things don't work. And that doesn't bother me unless it's site-critical, because I just find Mozilla far better.

Allow me to clear up a few things here.

Netscape 4 does not "suck"--it's just aging. Keep in mind that the first release was waaaayyy back in 1997. It's a no-brainer, then, as to why it doesn't have good support for standards; standards (or more accurately "recommendations") were hardly even around back then. All things considered, it was a pretty decent browser when it first came out.

It's time to move on, though. There are many browsers out there that do a good enough job with standards, allowing us to leave behind the "historic" Netscape 4. To name a few, there are: IE5/Mac, IE6/Win, NS6/Win, Op6/all, Moz1/all, Konq2/Linux, etc., etc.

Since version 1 of my site (working, but no content ATM), I have strived to code valid XHTML and CSS, effectively designing for the newer browsers. However, I still use @import for my style sheets, which is just enough to allow NS4 users to view my content. IMO, that's more than enough, and you should all be doing the same. Don't trust me, though-- listen to an all-star cast of web developers and designers instead .

Actually, Matt, I have to disagree. NS4 sucked ass when it was released in 97, and sucks major ass now that it's had 5 years to rot and get left behind

Uh, Matt, I beg to differ.

CSS1 has been a standard since 1997, when NS4 was released. Saying that the standards did not exist back then is just a little more than inaccurate.

NS4 was bad because IE was better in that time, even though I didn't use it much all the way back then. I will still small small.

But I didn't say that the recommendations didn't exist, you inferred that I said that. The CSS1 spec was published in 1996, but NS4 doesn't even have complete support for it. And that's why I said that the recommendations were "hardly around" back then.