As a long-time Web designer, I have to say that Netscape 4.x is the biggest pile of sheep’s droppings I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to cater for, and should be eradicated from the internet. It’s so buggy, and its half-arsed implementation of W3C standards made it triple the amount of time I spent making sites, just trying to get them vaguely compatible with it. Thankfully my logs show that less than 2% of visitors are still using it, so I no longer support it in anything I do.
GuanoLad, I agree that people don’t upgrade as often as they should. I’m not intimately familiar with Netscape 6’s handling of CSS2, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was rather poor. It was released in Nov 2000, and I don’t think any browser that was out at that time (like IE 5.5) had robust CSS2 support.
jjimm, I don’t seem to recall IE being particularly standards-compliant either around the time Navigator 4.x was released. Even today, IE implements less of the CSS2 standard than Opera or Mozilla – try getting it to recognize the “fixed” position attribute sometime and see many hoops you have to jump through to get around the bugs.
I agree, psychonaut MS introduced some rug-pulling proprietary standards, and IE3.x was a disaster. But from IE 4 (5?) onwards, most their stuff actually worked, whereas Navigator 4.x didn’t.
Anyway, I’m not particularly partisan one way or the other - just telling it like I’ve experienced it.
My apologies to GuanoLad, as he’s got a basis for his gripes. NS 4.x was awesome when it first came out, but it was only incrementally upgraded for the longest time, and fell behind in technology to the point where I thought they’d lost it forever.
NS 6 sucked soooooooo bad I’m shocked you even managed to load it. It leaked memory like a sieve, and sucked sucked sucked sucked sucked. (Please note there is no NS5 because it blew harder than NS6 sucked)
NS 7 is pretty damn good though. I personally use Mozilla 1.3, which is the coolest thing ever, but since NS7 comes with Flash, Java, etc. pre-installed, it probably has an edge.
Nobody should have to have separate code for different browsers again. If Mozilla or NS 7 has a problem with your page, report it and it will actually be fixed. (Report to Mozilla or NS.) 
Could someone please explain why companies make browsers? I have both IE and Netscape, didn’t pay a dime for either one. What is the benefit to having people use your browser? Do advertisers pay the browser for each ad delivered? If not, why does Microsoft care if you use IE or not?
It sounds like there are a few anti-microsofters watching this thread (myself included) be careful asking this…you might be opening up a can o worms you’ll later realize you didnt want to 
MSU – here’s a shot at why browsers are important, and why they’re free. Maybe someone else can expand on this.
Short answer: If everyone uses your browser, you control web standards, and that gives you a lot of power to make your things succeed. MS was playing dirty tricks with their web page to make people use IE, but it could also go the other way – for instance (and this is an extreme example, but MS’s history shows that they would do it if they could get away with it) they could intentionally make IE screw up when displaying pages from a server running Linux. Now that so many people use IE, nobody would want to run a Linux server because most of the public couldn’t see their page, therefore they’d have to go out and buy Microsoft-based web servers, making MS a ton of money.
Back in the 90s, Microsoft wanted to make sure nobody else controlled the web, so began giving away IE for free, forcing Netscape to give their browser away (and go bankrupt).
Netscape was always free, wasn’t it? At least to individuals.
IIRC Netscape Navigator was always free but the Netscape Communicator suite cost something like $30
No cite…just personal observation. 
Built-in popup blocker, eh? Ooooh that sounds sweet. Perhaps I can dump crappy IE once and for all!!!
Netscape 4.x sucks because it’s old and obsolete. Microsoft Exploder is new and still sucks. Microsoft is still up to their old trick of trying to be proprietary as possible (don’t even get me started on ActiveX - having Outlook and enabled ActiveX on your 'puter is the digital equivalent booze and sleeping pills; you’re just asking for trouble.)
Netscape 7 and Mozilla are light years ahead of Microsoft’s offering in terms of speed,features,safety, and code-compliance. I use Mozilla 1.3, and the only time I fire up Exploder is to test web pages I design.
I would urge everyone to join the 21st century and try Mozilla. You’ll see how truly bad Exploder is. Also, if you have problems reading Microsoft pages, go here http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/ and download the Preferences Toolbar. It will spoof the server into thinking that you are using Exploder and display everything properly.
It’s a pretty smart popup blocker, too. Sometimes when you click a link, you want a popup, because it’s the result of your click. Mozilla is smart enough to allow these popups to occur.
I have to admit, as much as I like Mozilla, you still will need IE for a very few sites. There are some that only work properly on IE, unfortunately. And you must use IE for Windows/Office Update.
Back to the OP, three or four years ago at the MS developer tools web site, they would format lines of programming code like this:
<PRE><PRE></PRE>
line one of code
line two of code
</PRE>
So why would they do this? Navigator would interpret the first </PRE> as wanting to tun off the preformatted tag, therefore display all the program lines all run together, with no line breaks or indents. IE would interpret the first </PRE> as just turning off the last <PRE>, leaving the first one in effect. The way IE did it might have been strictly correct, but it was obviously intentionally done to keep anyone from using Navigator at their site.
micco, the Opera story you tell is Opera’s interpretation of events. However, it’s easier for me to believe that it was an oversight - they didn’t bother to test the page with Opera. Sending different pages depending on the browser is pretty standard stuff, and Opera users got the “default” page which was sent to anyone that wasn’t specifically recognized as IE or Netscape.
Last Mozilla I tried was 0.9.7 and I wasn’t impressed at all, I liked IE much better. However, I tried Opera once and was hooked. I have noticed, though, that accessing things like my company’s mail client requires IE… and I am not aware of why… it seems to run in a server-side engine with javascript in the browser to handle windowing… 
But it knows whether or not my browser is IE regardless of what I set it to “tell” the site.
I haven’t seen any MS comment on this, so I don’t know what their response is. In any case, I doubt they would admit to intentionally sabotaging the content for Opera users. However, no one even mildly familiar with CSS should think that moving content margins 30 pixels left of the parent border would result in proper display. If the Opera-specific style sheet just resulted in an ugly page, you might claim it was an oversight in testing. However, in this case I have no doubt it was intentional.
That said, I don’t really have a problem with it. It’s MS’s site and they’re free to do whatever they want with it. If they want to detect your browser and spin Opera users off on a redirect to nothing, that’s their right. It might even be considered reasonable for them to restrict their free content to people who use their free browser. It’s not really in the spirit of the web, whatever that means, but I’d rather put up with it than have a bunch of regulations telling designers what to do. Everyone should be aware that one vendors’ products may not interop with everyone else. Sure would be nice if they weren’t this petty, but welcome to the world.
I tried twice to “upgrade” but it just didn’t happen.
I’m having a lot of problems with netscape recently but I also have a irritating MS message to install an upgrade.
Don’t know if MS is creating the problem or not.
erislover: There has been a huge jump between Mozilla 0.9.7 and 1.3. The new version is loaded and rock-solid. It still doesn’t load very fast, but that’s the only problem I’ve had.
Also, Mozilla w/the preference bar (see my post above) with the User Agent Spoof set to IE6 will probably fool your mail server.
You’re right, justwannano, it look like Netscape 7.0 requires at least Windows 98. That’s unfortunate. I think Mozilla works on Windows 95, though, and in my experience, Mozilla and Netscape 7 are practically identical. So you might want to consider that instead.
Regarding NS 7 and Win95:
I am currently running a NS 7 on Windows 95, so it can be done. I believe the issue is that the latest verstions of Mozilla require 98, and the particular NS 7 build I have is using a slightly earlier version of Mozilla.
That said, you can’t go past IE 5.5 on Win95. Thankfully, I’ll be rid of this stupid OS in a couple weeks.