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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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... |
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| 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). |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| Continued from LH col |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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