I prefer Netscape for my browsing, but I find that Microsoft sites in particular cause it no end of trouble. Right now, if I go to MSNBC in Netscape 6, I get endless reloading of the page. If I go to Hotmail in Netscape 4, oftentimes it will crash the browser and it will not work until the system is rebooted.
Does anyone else have this difficulty? Not to be cynical, but does Microsoft intentionally put features in their sites that give Netscape fits? Finally, when Netscape dies and no sites respond (Generally it will say “3K Read” forever), is there a cure other than rebooting?
It was recently revealed that Microsoft was intentionally sending the Opera browser a broken style sheet for MSN.com. In this case, if they had sent the regular style sheet (the one sent to IE), Opera would have rendered the page correctly but they intentionally sent Opera a style sheet which moved the content off the visible page in order to make it appear that Opera was flawed. Note that this was not a case of them refusing to make a special Opera-compatible version, but instead making an Opera version that was intentionally broken. http://my.opera.com/dev/discussion/openweb/20030206/
Given this type of attack on Opera, I wouldn’t be surprised to find they were doing similar tricks to make Netscape look bad, but I haven’t read any evidence of that. It might be interesting to look at the content Netscape received and compare it to the content provided to IE to see if they were sabotaging Netscape or exploiting a flaw that did not affect IE.
I wouldn’t be surprised either; they have a long history of this sort of thing. In the mid-nineties, after they inherited some Novell properties, Caldera took Microsoft to court over allegations that they deliberately made Windows incompatible with DR-DOS, an otherwise-100% compatible replacement for MS-DOS. Evidence was presented showing that early versions of Windows would detect the presence of DR-DOS and then crash with a bogus error message. Perhaps unfortunately for the rest of the world, the case was settled out of court without an admission of wrongdoing.
Netscape is considered the worst browser available today. So it’s not too surprising that websites do not cater for Netscape anymore.
And I recall that the Microsoft site when viewed in IE the menus would be easy to navigate and make a lot of sense. But when viewed in Netscape, they’d be circular, confusing, and miss out a lot of links.
Looks like you’re right, GuanoLad. Microsoft’s front page has menus that dynamically pop up with submenus when viewed with IE, but are static in Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera. Don’t you think, though, that this is an instance of catering to IE as opposed to not catering to Netscape?
For what it’s worth, devedge.netscape.com has similar dynamic menus that work in all four browsers.
This is a property of a badly done website and not of a browser. There is no reasonable need for a website to set up things this way, but some sites are stupid and/or evil.
Guanolad, I object to that. The worst browser, by intense effort, is the Browser of Orville the Orc, or BOO.
In an attempt to eliminate errors and screwy page formatting, and even improve HTML to where you can place things anywhere you want and not care too much about closing tags and so on either, BOO reads pages manually. The code is sent to Orville, who retypes and recodes it into what you see on the screen. This makes the browser a tad slow.
It’s not that good on displaying graphics, but Orville’s taking lessons and so far he’s getting real good at fruit.
Mail is handled by the postal service, and Orville kindly asks that though his browser is free, it would be nice if people could send him some stamps. This is also relatively slow for email, but on the other hand the spam filter is amazing.
For news, Orville will send your post to the local paper The Soggyville Gazete, and they’ll print it in their Letters Frum Our Readur column. Any replies, including on other subjects, will be presented to you as newsgroup posts as soon as Orville has time to type them. This will not necessarily, apart from the speed, appear different from a normal newsgroup.
In it’s next version, Orville wants to tie BOO to the operating system, like IE, so that it can bring down as much as possible in a crash. Plans are to do this using a rope and a hook to pull the user’s monitor down from the desk, but this will require either a closed version available only to Orville’s neighbours, serious jetlag for Orville, or a lot of practice to improve his aim, and he would prefer spending his time improving the graphics.
As for websites, MSN.com is written entirely in Bork, how crappy is that? I mean, they could at least make an English version.
…So much for informational posts… =)
Um, yeah. 'cause HTML, CSS et al. aren’t standard at all, and you have to specifically code for each browser.:rolleyes:
That was true for a few minor features back when the <blink>blink</blink> tag was insanely popular, and there was a rush to develop specifications for doing all the nifty stuff you can do nowadays.
I just looked at my watch, and it’s not 1999 anymore. The only thing IE does that other browsers don’t is ActiveX. And if you’d bother checking out the number of ways your browser is being hacked with that junk, you’d turn it off.
Netscape is considered to be one of the more superior browsers and has remained that way since the company started 10 years ago…there is a reason M$ created a stipulation in their OEM contacts that Netscape could NOT be installed on any computers shipped with Windows installed…they realized that it was a superior product and had to get it out of the way somehow. As it stands, Microsoft has developed a reputation for seriously messing with standards in order to make competing software look broken, or even older versions of their own appear “broken.” The MSN/Opera incident is a prime example of this…as is the fact that the .doc file format changes drastically with each version of Office to the point that documents are near unreadable by an older version of the software.
for those of you looking for a cite there is an aritcle called “What’s so bad about Microsoft?” that you can find here . While the site itself may be a bit biased the facts stated in that article are corroborated in many other places…I’ll provide those links as I can find them again.
To add to my last post. I just recently got back into the world of web design after a few years’ hiatus. As a rule I use Homesite for my coding and Dreamweaver when I need the WYSIWYG environment and as I was putting this site together everything looked fine in it’s view, in Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Chimera, and even Safari…but I simply couldnt get it to work in MSIE. When it finally DID work in IE it wouldnt work in the others…I had to resort to writing a browser detect script and two separate pages one for IE and one for all the other browsers. When you arrive in this kind of situation you have to wonder…WHICH browser is it that’s broken?
It doesn’t surprise me that Microsnot deliberately makes its webpages unfriendly to Netscape. On the other hand, about 50% of the pages out there aren’t friendly to Netscape, either. Bill Gates’ quest for global domination continues…
As for fixing Netscrape when it “breaks” – hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the list of running programs. You’ll see one that says “Netscape”, even if the browser isn’t running. Click on “Netscape” and hit “End Task”. Wait a few seconds for the “program not responding” message, and hit “End Task” again. That’ll fix it without having to reboot.
On a semi-related topic…how is Netscape 7.0 compared to 4.7? I thought about upgrading but I don’t want to completely break it…
Well, they’re totally and completely different. Whenever someone (who knows what they’re talking about) calls a browser Netscape, they’re talking about Netscape 6 or 7. The older browser is called Navigator 4 or something else like that. The name change isn’t the only discontinuity: the Netscape browser was never intended as an upgrade to Navigator; it’s a whole new browser. It really makes Navigator obsolete. I for one fully suggest making the switch, because Navigator is going to get more and more obsolete as time goes on. As you can see, switching fixed the OP’s problem.
Netscape 7 (and, indeed, all of the new mozilla-based browsers - mozilla, phoenix, etc) is vastly superior to 4.7. Included are tabbed browsing and built-in popup suppression.
LOL!!! I was wondering if someone would mention this. IMNSHO this was one of the BEST things anyone has ever done to Macroshaft.
For anyone reading who doesn’t know what Kjetil is talking about…after the dirty trick M$ pulled with the MSN site the makers of Opera added a little easter egg to version 6. It was set up so that when an Opera user viewed the MSN site it would be presented entirely in Bork…the language of the Swedish Chef
You guys are the first I’ve seen who stick up for Netscape. Everywhere else I go it’s always cursed at and ridiculed.
I was just going by the status quo, though I’ve certainly had to wrestle with Netscape a lot when coding my pages.
I admit that 7.0 is better than the evil 4.x, but it’s still pretty annoying some of the time.
I admit I code for IE, but I try to use standard HTML and CSS as much as possible and allow for when I use proprietary code, but when Netscape can’t figure out what proportional measurements refer to consistently (container or page or image or what?) it drives me somewhat doolally.
See, I get the impression that a lot of people that are haranguing Netscape really have a problem with Navigator, and can’t tell the difference between the two. I don’t think they realize that it’s possible for a company to make more than one product.
But I’m open to being shown that Netscape actually does have a problem or two. GuanoLad, would you please post some code or a link or something that shows any sort of deficiency of Netscape 7? That proportional measurement thing you mention, for instance?
Ah. Well, I haven’t actually investigated 7.0. I pretty much gave yp at 6.0, and preliminary tests suggest to me that NS7.0 and IE6.0 are now much closer than ever before.
So I can’t actually say for sure that 7.0 is a problem at all.
However, I imagine that most Netscape users aren’t all using 7.0 yet.
