Sep
18
2004

Netscape 4.x support dropped

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, September 18, 2004 - 10:50:45 pm
(Posted Under: Web Development)
That's it, I don't think I'm supporting Netscape 4.x anymore. I can hear the Motile crew's evil laughter from here. [wink] I know they've all been waiting for me to break - it's taken just under a year.

I find it extremely frustrating that virtually impossible to get a nice looking site using today's standard to render half decently in Netscape 4.x. Well, at least without going to the extents I did with browser detection both client and server side on Lost Horizons . Especially since I've done this new design very basically and cleanly, yet Netscape 4.x still chokes. Eh!

While I've virtually come around to the thinking that supporting Netscape 4.x is a ridiculous task, I still feel dirty. I remember when I'd first tried both Mozilla (0.x) and Netscape 6 on my lower end machine (circa 2000?), and couldn't uninstall them fast enough. Well, partly because they were buggy, but largly because of how much of a resource hog they were, in comparison to Netscape 4.x (4.78 at the time, if I recall). I always like supporting the most basic infrastructure - this applies to code as well as web development. (For example, I must prefer writing to a file than the registry). While W3Schools provides (without source) stats that the usage of Netscape 4.x is on par with Netscape 3.x, a suprising number of machines coming into the office still running Windows 98 is quite suprising.

Added to that, the fact that I only made the complete shift to Netscape 7.1 (for browsing) in the last 9 months, and how much I'd detest winding up at a site that wouldn't work in Netscape 4.x, it's hard to think that I might be forcing someone like myself to, gasp, IE. It's a painful and frustrating decision to make, especially in light of accessibility, and my whole philosophy on the point of the web being information, not flashing lights. It's such a toss up, but it looks like flashing lights (combined with the fact that the new design is supported flawlessly in both Mozilla and IE6 it seems) are winning out.

Maybe I should take comfort in that css Zen Garden style wise doesn't work in Netscape 4.8...though, it does degrade in NC4.8 nicer than my new site design does, hmmmph. [wink]

Or maybe I'm analysing this too much. [wink] Maybe I should just focus on having a site that looks sexy in Mozilla and IE6.

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