Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and Mozilla

Factual Questions
1

OK, two questions.

Using both Netscape and IE, one thing that I notice is that there are plenty of times when IE, or a related browser, won’t display some graphics on web pages. Instead, you’ll just get the box with an X in it. Yet, I don’t notice this problem with Netscape, unless of course, the html code for the graphic is messed up, or the link is now dead, or something like that.

So question one is, why doesn’t Netscape have the same graphics display problems that IE has?

Second question, since Mozilla is related to Netscape, does it also have the same graphics display superiority over IE and related browsers?

Thanks.

2

Do you have an example of a page where this happens?

3

It depends, it’s not allways the same page. Sometimes a page loads correctly, with all the graphics, and sometimes it doesn’t. But with Netscape they allways load correctly.

4

Joel: If some bugs are fixed in Netscape, they’ll probably be fixed in Mozilla, as well. I think Mozilla and Netscape share the same rendering engine (called Gecko), and the quality of the rendering engine is what would determine something like this.

5

Mozilla&Netscape browsers are simply better coded, and are more standards complient the IE. So the simple solution is to only Mozilla or Netscape, as they are just much better browers. I really can’t think of any reason anyone would use IE except out of ignorance of better alternatives.
(Now, there might be some pages that are badly designed, and only work in IE, but I haven’t run into them.)

6

Yes, Mozilla and Netscape are, on the whole, more standards-compliant. The difference is not that great however, and in fact IE supports many standards that Netscape and Mozilla do not.

But let’s not get into THAT battle…

The FACT is that the majority of the web is in fact designed to render properly in IE, and the others an an afterthought. And why shouldn’t it be that way? When sometihng like 95% of all browser usage is IE, why would you do otherwise?

The suggestion that if you have any brains at all you’d be using Netscape or Mozilla will in fact cause you to have MORE problems vieweing web pages over a given length of time, not because they are lesser browser, but because pages are designed to work in IE, and if they work or don’t work in anything else, so what?

Some people meticulously make sure their sites work in all popular browsers, and they are to commended. I do the best I can myself to assure the sites I design do. But IE is the dominant browser, and hence it’s what most pages are designed to look right in.

7

fzammetti: I think all of the `standards’ IE complies to are the ones Microsoft has invented and foisted upon the world. Do you have counterexamples?

As for most websites designed to use IE: prove it. I use Mozilla and Opera to the exclusion of IE, and I’ve never seen a website that the browser hasn’t been able to render. I don’t think the marketshare figures you cite are at all accurate, either.

8

Of course, I meant “all of the `standards’ IE complies to and other browsers don’t”.

9

Alternate browser enthusiast here.

  • Mozilla Firebird 0.7 for Windows has a difficult time on pages with check buttons and Javascript; they just don’t register as being checked. Also, on the SDMB, fonts in messages are rendered a couple of sizes smaller than in IE, even when the same default font types and sizes are entered in each browser’s preferences.

  • Opera 7.22 for Windows can’t properly render pages on match.com.

10

It shouldn’t be that way because browsers display content according to standards that were designed to be vendor agnostic but Microsoft, using the ubiquity of it’s software, introduced non-standard features. Granted, that’s one of the benefits of market share, but the web is not the property of Microsoft.

I use Opera. Love it. But I have problems with some shopping cart applications that are designed for IE and will not display properly with Opera, which is standards compliant.

I also use Linux. Not because I hate Microsoft but because I use Solaris and other *nix flavors on a daily basis. If something goes wrong with my computer, I stand a fighting chance of fixing it. I just don’t know enough (or care to learn enough) about Windows to do that.

Because I use Linux, I don’t have the option of just displaying the page in IE.

I know that loss of my business is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, so I’m not on a crusade. But to those people that design to make sure the site displays correctly in IE I ask: Why not design so it displays correctly in a standards-compliant browser instead? If it displays correctly in, say, Opera, it will display correctly in IE. And no one is left out. Because you are following standards that were even agreed to by Microsoft.

11

Well, let’s see what I can site to support my views…

To support the fact (ok, I’ll be fair and at least call it a quasi-fact for now) that IE is the most widely-used browser at present…

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html

http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html

http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Admin/browserstats.html

To be fair, my 95% number was off… I do think it was near that last time I had reason to check, but I have no problem believing Mozilla and Opera and others have cut into that a bit. I haven’t done the math across all these references to come up with a number, but at a glance I think somewhere around 80% IE usage seems about right, so I think my premise is essentially supported.

Unfortunately, I cannot find references to support the point that IE supports more standards. In fact I did NOT mean standards that MS has invented. I was referring to a point in time not terribly long ago (some time this year) where I read that IE actually supported more standards than did Mozilla. As I’m thinking about it now, I believe it was referring to CSS-2 support, which IE had a leg-up on other browsers. I don’t know if that’s still true or not, and as I said in my original post, it is NOT the case now in general. Mozilla and Netscape at least, probably Opera and I’m sure some others are in fact currently more standards-compliant than IE overall. I find plenty of reference to support that, so I’m certainly not about to dispute it.

The other point that many, perhaps even most people, design their sites to work in IE and worry about other browsers as an afterthought is a logical extrapolation based on the larger market share of IE. I suspect if you concede the point that IE is the dominant browser by a large margin, then you would also logically conclude, as I do, that sites are primarily designed for IE.

Note that I’m not saying people IGNORE Mozilla, Netscape, Opera or any other browser. I would hope no one does that. What I’m saying is that if a site works in IE, most people will feel that’s good enough, since 80% or so of people will be visiting the site with IE.

Unfortunately, just designing for standards isn’t a sufficient answer either because all browsers don’t support all the standards, or support them incorrectly. Maybe IE is the worst offender, but if it’s also the dominant browser, does it really matter?

12

Well, actually, I use Avant Browser which is awesome in my opinion, but it claims to be an upgrade for Internet explorer, and it seems to be based on the IE engine.

Anyway, I was just thinking how sometimes Netscape seemed to work better but since it’s pretty bloated (sorry but it takes up a good chunk of disk space and memory) and thought that maybe Mozilla would be a good substitute, and just wanted to make sure that it’s based on the same engine as Netscape, which it appears to be. So, thanks everybody.

13

Getting back to the original problem, the following page gives a registry tweak which solves the image problem (it did for me anyway):

http://www.la-kopi.com/miscdl/ie6sp1.pdf

14

Is this true? I’m asking honestly. For me, my Mozilla directory holds 20.0 MB, and my Netscape directory holds 20.8 MB. (Meanwhile Opera and IE come in at 14MB and 16MB, respectively.) They probably all have other directories off somewhere, but it doesn’t seem like a huge difference to me.

15

Cool, I’ll give it a try. Thanks.

16

Well, as far as I know, downloading Netscape means more than just downloading the browser. Besides that, there’s also Composer, and some other programs too I think, which is why I figured that it was bigger. But if it’s only 4 to 6 megs bigger, I guess that’s not too bad.

17

Well, if you want a light weight browser, goto mozilla.org and get Firebird, which is what I use. It is pretty much Mozilla with all the extra junk removed.

18

On the subject of browser market share, I think attributing about 98% to IE is a realistic estimate.

For example, I just ran a quick analysis on the logs of the site I currently work on (it’s a general B2C site covering multiple sectors, so it’s not just for IT geeks like me). I picked a day at random: Wednesday 5th November 2003.

On that day there were 557,071 individual page hits (we don’t record hits on images, just pages). Of these 97.89% were from an IE browser. The remaining 2.11% included hits from search engine spiders, people stealing our content with scraping tools, and all other browsers. 1.44% of the total hits came from browsers reporting Gecko as their layout engine (note that this does include Safari since it says in the header that it’s “like Gecko”).

We got a pretty good spread of browsers - I think I recognised at least one of every major browser on the market, including a couple of people using Lynx and NCSA Mosaic(!).

For an even wider analysis look at the Google Zeitgeist analysis which includes a graph of browser use on the site (albeit with the disadvantage that it’s not all that clear).

Of course, the distribution of browsers will vary from site to site depending on the target audience. Slashdot probably gets a far higher ratio of IE/Mozilla hits than either Google or the site I work on.

I’ve been guilty of the “Let 'em use IE or screw 'em” attitude in the past (mainly when it was IE4 vs the dreadful Netscape 4 and before the Mozilla project really got its act together with the Netscape 7/Firebird version). I’m less likely to act like this now that the subset of stuff that works on all the major browsers is much less restrictive than it used to be.

19

I use IE & Netscape 7.01. I was using 7.0 & got some blank areas of pages that IE could see okay. So I updated to 7.01 & that cleared that up, but then other pages were blank. Turned out the person coding the pages had to change the code for Netscape 7 which they did for me. Kind of like a box of chocolates I guess.

20

Opera, at least, self-identifies as MSIE by default. So you could have a much larger amount of non-MSIE browsers that simply say they’re MSIE because web designers dump non-MSIE browsers to a page telling them to download MSIE. Which makes Microsoft really happy and everyone else on Earth really angry.