[Synotic]

Does anyone really use Netscape? Because Netscape just renders my page *horribly* while every other browser renders it perfectly. I am not doing anything special, just images and tables.

Does anyone have any input with this? Thanks

[ 04-08-2002: Message edited by: Synotic ]

[yuliang]

I used to care but not anymore because I was too fed up with doing all the extra work to get my tables to render pixel-perfect in Netscape. Granted, I am doing my own personal web site and all my friends use IE, but I guess if ur a commercial developer you can't really afford to lose customers over this. Netscape 6.x and Mozilla behaves very well in my experiences so you don't really need to worry about those. Netscape 4.x was just horrible with aligning tables...

[derbs]

only about 5% of surfers to our sites use Netscape, 90% use IE4 or above.

If you can be bothered to get Netscape support, then do it, but often it's really not worth it.

[Millennium]

Depends.

6.x, yes, definitely. Or at least the Gecko engine. Generally, if it looks good in this, it'll look good in almost everything else.

4.x, not unless you know your audience will be using it (clearly someone is, as Netscape claims it's continuing 4.x development due to "contractural obligations").

[Hobbes]

Millennium hit the nail on the head. Except in very specific circumstances, don't bother targeting Netscape 4.x. It was well known for not complying with standards.

Mozilla or Netscape 6.x should definitely be taken into consideration. If anything, develop your sites based on how they look in Mozilla, due to its very tight compliance with HTML standards, much better than IE for that matter.

As a pro web designer, its not uncommon for me to have sites that look perfect in Mozilla not quite look "up to snuff" in IE 5.1.

[crawlingparanoia]

Write to the standards and you won't have to worry about browsers.

[Justin W. Williams]

I used to not worry about Netscape, until the last two weeks when I didn't have my iBook and had to use Campus computers (Purdue University). They are all IE free, and use Netscape 4.7. It is awful. The pages look terrible. I really wish they would update to Mozilla 1.0 (when it arrives).

I am pretty sure most academics use Netscape.

Also, if AOL switches to Netscape, thats a BIG chunk of users.

[RedStar]

Does anybody else find it ironic how all the posts say that you shouldn't worry about the 5 percent of people using netscape. What if software companies did that to mac users. I mean, I agree with all the posts that you shouldn't go crazy with your page, I just thought that was funny. Anyway, carry on with all the posts that have a point.

[Simon Mundy]

I must say that even though NS has completely and utterly frustrated me for 9+ years in web design that... yes, you should support it.

You should support freedom of choice (even if people make terrible choices), you should support writing more flexible, graceful code and you shouldn't inflict your personal navigator biases on other people's web sites.

Having said that, I always approach a page (unless otherwise directed by a client) to allow full access to a site by any browser. This doesn't mean it'll always look great - browser 3 will look a bit awkward because of lack of CSS, no DHMTL, etc.. But it means that the site is accessible, and everyone can access the information. Which is really what the web is about, isn't it?

Any 'gloss' that gets added to the site - DHTML, javascript-controlled forms, flash, whatever - is added and made as simple as possible so it works consistently across any REASONABLY supported browser. I say that, because NS can reasonably support all these methods, it's just that it uses a proprietary DOM and patchy CSS implementation. So I do go out of my way to try and support any browser I can test (except iCab ) to make sure these added extras work. If they don't, they don't exist and they fail gracefully.

I'd be quite happy if NS dropped a code bomb on all existing copies of NS4 so they were permanently disabled. But they havent, people still use it, so I'll keep coding for it. Full point.

I imagine we'll hit a milestone within the next year or so where it'll be perfectly reasonable to NOT support NS4, the same way 3 browsers aren't, but we should still make the basic information available to all users irrespective of platform/browser/personal choice.

[godzookie2k]

Originally posted by Synotic:
<STRONG>Does anyone really use Netscape? Because Netscape just renders my page *horribly* while every other browser renders it perfectly. I am not doing anything special, just images and tables.</STRONG>

Yes, its your ****ing job to support netscape, especially with such minor market penetration with netscape 6. supporting mozilla is all fine and dandy, but there are more NS 4 users out there than mozilla. Second of all, even though only 5% of web users use NS (my access logs say otherwise but thats a debate) 5% of a few hundred million is still a pretty big ass section of viewers to ignore. Personally, I use mozilla. If I encounter a site that requires my switch to IE, as easy as that might be, **** all if I'm going to switch because some web dev is incompetent and wants to colorize his scroll bars.We (web developers) can demand such sky high rates *because* web development is a pain in the ass, and no one else wants to do it, but you should do what you are paid to do. no matter what kind of a pain it is, thats the nature of a job.

[ 04-09-2002: Message edited by: godzookie2k ]

[Synotic]

Thanks for all the comments, keep in mind that this is just a personal for AppleScript Studio, which now that I think about it is X only.. which means practically nobody will be using an OS 9 browser.. :slaps head: I will try to get it to work with Netscape 4, but I won't kill myself over it.

If anyone has any suggestions on how I can fix the following.. it'd be greatly appreciated..

BTW, the only working links are..

/
/Resources/
/Resources/Projects/
/Resources/Applications/

for now anyways.

[macvillage.net]

If you code for all browsers like you should if you are a good developer, there is nothing to worry about.

The only browser I really don't care about anymore is iCab, since it just plain stinks, doesn't follow any guidelines, and so few people use it, I don't see working. 4 our of 1 mil hits is my average for iCab users (not including those who mask their useragent.) And iCab is only Mac... so that I could see not supporting. iCab also has virtually no Java support, plugin support, JavaScript support... hey wait, this thing is impossible to use!

Netscape 4.x will plague developers for some time since it is and was very easy to implement on a corporate level across thousands of computers, they are continuing to use it. It is also very secure, that is another reason why companies are hesitant. The last is because IE doesn't support Linux.

To help you out... remember Netscape 4.x has pretty damn good JavaScript support. You can javascript and detect Netscape 4 such as:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1"face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial">code:</font><HR><pre><font size=1 face=courier>
&lt;script language=<font color = red>"JavaScript"</font> type=<font color = red>"text/javascript"</font>&gt;

var ver = navigator.appVersion;
NS4=(document.layers && parseInt(ver)==<font color = blue>4</font>)?<font color = blue>1</font>:<font color = blue>0</font>;
if (NS4) {
document.write('if netscape do this');
} else {
document.write('if other do this');
}
&lt;/script&gt;
</font>[/code]

If your pages don't show up correctly in mozilla, then just quit while your ahead

[pcp_ip]

there was a rumour going around a month or so ago that AOL has decided to use the gecko engine as the basis for their next browser (ousting IE). if that happens coding for netscape will be very important... there's a hell of a lot of aol users out there.

[bojangles]

there was a rumour going around a month or so ago that AOL has decided to use the gecko engine as the basis for their next browser (ousting IE). if that happens coding for netscape will be very important... there's a hell of a lot of aol users out there.

Consider the rumor officially dead. AOL just accepted $750M from Microsoft to leave IE as AOL's built-in browser for the next seven years. If AOL (who owns Netscape) doesn't care about it, I wonder if I should stop caring, too....

In related news, Internet Explorer for Mac is officially dead (6/4/2003), so I'm not worrying too much about that any more, either.

Bottom line: W3C standards are the way to go. I wonder if M$ will ever fully support them, though....

[bens1901]

I have done work for the US Gov't. They have always required that any web application be fully functional in Netscape 4.7 on the PC. That's what they test it in. IE is actually easier to code in since it seems to be more forgiving. NS4.7 on the other hand is brutally strict on html rules. I've always developed and tested in NS4.7, and then once it worked correctly, I would then check the site with the other browsers.

By the way, it seems that most academic and government networks use Netscape 4.7 as the default browser...that's a pretty big group of Users.

[Arkham_c]

When I code HTML for a public site, I code for three browsers (well, three layout engines):

1) IE 5/6 on Windows
2) Mozilla/Firebird/Gecko on Windows
3) Safari on OS X

That's it. If someone is using a browser from 1994, then they need to get with the program. If that's all they can run, then they'll likely be used to the fact that 99% of the sites out there won't work for them.

I only support Safari because I use it. No non-Mac sites won't bother.

[calimehtar]

Pick a philosophy and go with it.

see the browser upgrade project. These guys recommend actively pushing people to upgrade because all those version 4 browsers are crap. Can't argue with that.

There are some people still writing in html 2 because they don't want to lose a single user. That kinda makes sense too.

My approach is to build so that my sites will _fuction_ in Netscape 3, and without flash and javascript whenever possible but I can't be bothered to make it look exactly the same.

[Jabba]

Use this one to import your main stylesheet that works with newer broswers:

style type="text/css" media="all">@import "advanced.css";

And then use this to link to a basic style sheet that will work in older browsers:

link rel="basic stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="basic.css"

NN4 doesn't understand the "@import" and will use the basic stylesheet that works for it. Newer browsers see the @import stylesheet first and use it.

And then read Zeldman's book.

[Millennium]

I've found that doing things in this order seems to work best. It doesn't go in terms of marketshare, but it takes into account the way each engine works and what it supports. This order should get you up and running on multiple browsers with the least amount of work:

1) Start by coding to the Gecko engine. It being pretty much the least buggy of the rendering engines out there, you will start out with a good base. You'll also be forced to use cleaner code (come on, people; this is programming, not 3rd-grade grammar. There is no excuse for bad code).

2) Once Gecko is working, check it in IE/Windows. Most of the time, the whole page will work just fine, particularly if you're looking to support IE 5.5 and above. It's usually much easier to code for Gecko and then fix IE than the other way around. This is The Great Secret Of Cross-Browser Development, and it's one that eludes many designers who end up either doing more work than is truly necessary or becoming discouraged and not doing it at all.

3) Once IE/Windows is working, try IE/Mac. If it works in Gecko and IE/Win, you will almost never run into any problems on IE/Mac. The one area where you may run into trouble is with CSS floats, if you use those, but the workarounds are well-documented.

4) Once these three browsers work, check Opera and Safari. By this point, your HTML and CSS should not present any trouble at all. At most, all you should have to fix is your JavaScript, and even most of that should work.

5) If Netscape4 is even on your roadmap -which it should only be if you know that a large portion of your intended audience uses it, such as those under contractural obligation- then check it last.

You may also want to consider simply writing a new set of templates and JavaScript specifically for Netscape4 and serving that up selectively; this is actually not as hard as it might seem, since you don't have to check this code against any other browser and, conversely, you don't have to check your "real" code against NS4. That cuts out a big chunk of QA time, often enough that you can absorb the extra effort of an NS4-specific version.

TIPS:
Sad but true, avoid using position:fixed or :hover on arbitrary elements (anything other than a) if it is critical that these things function as intended in IE/Win. There are JavaScript workarounds for both of these; if you use them, I would suggest encapsulating them in IE's .htc behaviors to ensure that other browsers don't use them. While this invalidates your CSS slightly (because you'll have to use the proprietary behavior: attribute), it won't break any browsers currently out there, and it's the cleanest way of dealing with this code-wise.

Consider using the box-sizing: and -moz-box-sizing: attributes on the body tag and HTML tag, setting them both to border-box. The original IE box model (calculate widths from the borders, not the content) isn't great, but this attribute (which is standard in CSS3) will force Gecko, Opera, Safari, and IE6 in Standards mode to all use it. Again, cleaner code, even if it is a workaround. Note that you have to use both box-sizing (Opera, Safari, and IE) and -moz-box-sizing (Gecko) in order to get all browsers rendering this way. Gecko does this because it supported the arrtibute well before it was a standard, so they prefixed it with -moz just in case it would change before the standard was finalized (at which point they'd implement the standard with box-sizing and then keep -moz-box-sizing for backward-compatibility). Note that this can't be used with Netscape4, but then again, NS4's CSS support is worse than useless.

Use the W3C DOM where you can. Proprietary DOM's should only be used to hide functionality from certain browsers, unless there is absolutely no way to do it otherwise.