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This article first began life back in 2004, when Netscape (formerly Netscape Navigator) was still a well known internet browser.  At that time, its eventual successor, Firefox, was a mere fledgling still waiting to take off.  Netscape was then at versions 4 and 6 (there was no version 5).  Netscape was subsequently taken on board by AOL but, in 2007, when at version 9, and with virtually nobody using it anymore, relative to Firefox, development stopped.  This article, like Netscape, has, therefore, since become just another part of ancient internet history.
In actual fact, all the versions of Netscape are still available to be downloaded off the internet.  And, at September 2008, Netscape still had 1% of the browser-usage market, which equated to at least 10 million users worldwide.
Using a browser which is no longer in development could, of course, be a serious security risk for its users, and it will be increasingly incompatible with many of today's popular Web 2.0-standard websites.  We have to assume, therefore, that usage of Netscape will sink to zero before long.  Nevertheless, 10 million remaining Netscape users (at Sep 08) was a fair number, so our article may still have some relevance for die-hard Netscape fans and, indeed, for any conscientious web designers wanting to ensure their modern pages (or parallel pages) will still work to a passable degree when viewed by any of those last remaining Netscape users.  There is nothing worse for computer users than being told by a website, or an application, that they must first upgrade their browser in order to view the site, or to use such and such an app.  With that in mind, the dated info in this article may still be of marginal help as it covers the main version of Netscape still in dwindling use.  Most people (at 9/08) were using version 6.  Fewer had version 7.  Fewer still had version 8.  Practically none had version 9.  And nobody is still using version 4.x.
There can be no doubt that it was version 4.x of Netscape Navigator which destroyed the famous browser.  It performed pitifully when compared with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (then at versions 4, 5 and 5.5).  Netscape's programmers repeatedly failed to fix HTML-rendering bugs without introducing new bugs throughout a long series of 4.x re-issues.  Consequently, Netscape leeched market share to IE which, in contrast, at the time, was wonderfully bug-free and performed like God's gift to surfers and web designers alike.  When Netscape 6 arrived, with a brand new, much-needed rendering engine, the browser was, unfortunately, issued prematurely, while still terribly buggy, which put even more people off.  It was not until Netscape reached version 6.2 that there was, at last, something on a par with IE except that it took an age to start up, fifteen times longer than IE.  Thus it was all in vain as something like 97% of surfers had, by then, deserted to IE.  In fact, most surfers, by then, had never known anything other than IE, had no complaints about IE, and had no reason to want to switch from IE to something unknown.  So they didn't.
In 2005, the struggling Netscape came under the wing of would-be saviours AOL, bringing a much-needed injection of cash.  With that help, Netscape dragged on but version 7.2 included ads for AOL and had AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) integrated into it, both things which, predictably, reduced Netscape's appeal even further.  Version 8 came out in June 2005.  AOL referred to it as a 'hybrid' browser because, while it used the same, impressive, open-source Gecko rendering engine as the emergent Firefox browser, it automatically switched over to Internet Explorer's engine when encountering sites which the less-flexible Firefox was not then up to handling.  That was a ludicrous idea.  We never bothered to even look at NS8, like most other people.
Even so, yet more development went into Netscape, leading to version 9.  But, by then, nobody cared, as Firefox had become a viable alternative to IE.  It seemed that very few people tried, let alone changed to, NS9.  It was the end of the line.  The end of a notable part of internet evolution.
The rest of this page from here on is basically our original 2004 article, updated in places where deemed appropriate.  Much of it was previously written in the present tense but that no longer makes much sense so it has since been changed to the past tense in lots of places...
When Netscape 7 came out, it introduced a new section in the Preferences section which had not been in versions 4.x nor 6.x.  That new section defaulted the behaviour of JavaScripts in web pages to the opposite of what had happened by default in versions 4, 6, and in Internet Explorer, and, hence, was the complete opposite of what web designers were assuming to be the norm in viewers' browsers.  That could, therefore, result in viewers experiencing some features of some websites failing to work as the designers had intended.  The new section was called 'Scripts & Plugins', and was hidden deep down in version 7's Advanced Preferences menu (see Fig 1 right).
 
Fig 1 shows how, in 2005, we suggested users should set up the new Scripts' section.  The first five tick-boxes related to web page functionality, and ticks in all five boxes were probably desirable.  The sixth and seventh boxes related to script cookies and should not have needed ticking except in the unlikely event that some interference was caused to the operation of any pages which the user...  continued in RH col. 
 
Fig 1  The screenshot below, originally from Netscape 7.1, on a Windows XP machine, showed the user settings we suggested for the 'Scripts & Plugins' section of the Advanced Preferences menu.




Continued from LH col
needed to see.  In the case of web designers, they, of course, had no control over the way the section would be set up by users.  Therefore, designers with pages using scripts, including popup pages, were well advised to check them in Netscape 7, online, with the various boxes ticked and unticked, to assess if any adverse consequences needed to be catered for.  Netscape users were advised to jot down the original settings, before altering anything, because there was no button in the dialog to restore the defaults if they wanted to restart from scratch.  A small oversight perhaps, but typical of the kind of nice touch that Internet Explorer users were taking for granted.  Netscape 7.x, and its main predecessor 6.2, were vastly superior to Netscape 4 at rendering web pages, so it seemed ironic that version 4 carried on as the most-used version of Netscape for quite some time afterwards.  This was probably because 6.0 and 6.1 were too buggy, also because those newer versions, even the non-buggy 6.2, were taking far too long to start up and, in the case of version 7, there was also a series of tiresome, off-putting registration and activation screens to be hurdled before one could even get to see what the browser looked like.  This imposition of slower startups and needless registration on a failing product merely added to the agony.
However, one of the great things about Netscape, at the time, especially for web designers, was that several different versions of Netscape could readily be installed on the same computer, and could be opened and run at the same time, off-line, to test pages for cross-version compatibility, before the pages were uploaded to the server.  That is something which could not be done anywhere near as easily with different versions of Internet Explorer.  However, it was also a fact that Internet Explorer never suffered from backwards compatibility issues in the same way that Netscape always did.  That was because rendering flexibility and versatility had always been inherent in the IE program. 
Netscape 7.x certainly rendered pages very quickly.  Users were no longer tormented by those frustrating "Transmission interrupted" error messages which had plagued the 4.x versions when trying to fetch any big web pages for the first-time.  Speedwise, Netscape was, at last, on a par with Internet Explorer, Opera, and Firefox.  The latter had gradually been making inroads into Internet Explorer's dominant market share ever since its release in October 2004.  That was something web designers were needing to take note of.  Some web designers had long since given up bothering to check their pages for duality in Netscape and IE.  But Firefox definitely meant the need was back for designers to systematically check for cross-browser compatibility.  Especially as there were still certain things a designer could take for granted would work as intended in IE which would still not work properly or fully in Netscape or Firefox.
 
  
                
 
Surfing statistics in 2004 showed that the obsolete Netscape 4.x was still hanging on to a small number of long-suffering users.  Our Fig 2, from that time, shows the Advanced Preferences menu for version 4.76. There was an option in there (see the 5th check-box down in the screenshot) that allowed users to permanently disable cascading style sheets (CSS).  That undesirable option was, in fact, only intended for use by partially-sighted surfers who, otherwise, had no way of increasing the size of fonts on sites formatted with the then new CSS techniques.  Netscape 6 gave users an alternative, new option under View > Increase Font.  This meant, thankfully, that the ability for a viewer to disable style sheets in Advanced Preferences could be, and was, dispensed with.  For users who were still using version 4, and had normal eyesight, we were advising them to ensure the 'Enable style sheets' option remained ticked.
According to browser-usage statistics in early 2004, some 13% of surfers were doing so with JavaScript disabled (up from 10% in 2002).  However, we suspected that surprisingly high figure must have also included users with Java disabled (as the similar names of these unconnected programming languages are easily confused by computer users).  We thought that because the only PCs we had ever come across with JavaScript disabled (as opposed to Java) were the few tightly-restricted, free-to-use computers to be found in public libraries.  As far as Internet Explorer users were concerned, who, at that time, accounted for some 97% of all surfers, few of them, in our experience, even knew how to disable JavaScript - let alone actually do so.  So, where the 13% figure came from we could not imagine unless, of course, it did include Java.  However, even if the real number was only half the figure stated it would still be a sizeable chunk.  And the figure was, evidently, growing, for whatever reason [malicious JavaScripts were not then the major security issue they were to become by 2008 and onwards].  This implied it was a good idea for web designers to check how their pages would behave in a browser with JavaScript disabled.  And there was no easier way to do that than with any version of Netscape, be it 4, 6 or 7.  You could do that simply by toggling on or off the JavaScript option in Advanced Preferences, followed by clicking the Reload button on the browser's toolbar.  We should mention, though, that disabling JavaScript in Netscape 4 also disabled style sheets, even if the 5th check-box down (in Fig 2) was ticked, so the page being tested would look pretty ugly until you toggled JavaScript back on.  That particular bug was fixed in version 6.
 
Fig 2  The screengrab below, from an ancient Netscape 4.76 on a Windows 98 machine (using XP colours) shows the Advanced Preferences area referred to in the column left.
Fig 2
 
  
              
 
Summary
For surfers
Our suggestions, in those old pre-Firefox days, were (i) if you were using Netscape 7, to set up the Script preferences as per Fig 1 [unless you were/are blocking JavaScript intentionally], (ii) if you were using Netscape 4, to set it up as per Fig 2 (it was fairly similar for Netscape 6.2) and, (iii) if you were a visually impaired surfer using Netscape 4, to change to Netscape 6.2 or 7.1 [that would be to Firefox today, of course] and then enjoy all the popular websites (which had standardised on a smallish font, usually Arial 13px) in a larger font size that suited you.
 
  
For web page designers
Our suggestions, in those pre-Firefox days, were (i) use Netscape 4.76, 6.2 or 7.1 as an easy way to test, off-line, how your pages (and the NOSCRIPT message) would look to users with JavaScript disabled, (ii) not to be afraid of installing, and running, several versions of Netscape/ Firefox side-by-side, as conflicts do not occur and (iii) to take the precaution of checking if all aspects of your pages worked properly not just for the 75% of surfers then using IE but also for the growing 25% then using Netscape 6 & 7 or Firefox 1.5, 2 & 3 [percentages being Oct 2008 figs.].
 
 
 
 
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First posted 3.5.04 (dmy)    Last amended 10.10.09    Copyright (C) 2004-2009 PM Designs   All Rights Reserved
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