Netscape 4, navigator or communicator!

[znebojsa]

Hi just wondering, when people say netscape 4 bugs, do they mean navigator 4 or communicator 4, or both?

And one other thing, which Netscape version is the first that is "supportable" such as how IE5 is supportable...

thanks

[DaveWoods]

Navigator and communicator are essentially the same browser. Netscape Navigator has always been the browser and is still referred to as Navigator today

http://browser.netscape.com/

Netscape Communicator was released at version 4.0 and refers to the suite of Netscape tools which also included the Navigator browser.

I think Communicator was dropped when Netscape 6 was released and therefore the last release was of 4.8.

As for supporting Netscape. I don't personally tend to check anything in Netscape. The user base is very small and those that do use it are more likely to be using a modern version which is based on the Mozilla engine so checking Firefox is usually as far as I'd go with testing for Netscape.

[znebojsa]

Ok. What I meant was, When in books and things it talks of Netscape 4 bugs. which 4 are they referring to. Or maybe they were both the same?

[Dan Schulz]

They were referring to the same thing, and given that Netscape 9 is out, you shouldn't even worry about Netscape 4 anymore.

[DaveWoods]

Netscape Communicator 4 wasn't a web browser, it was a package of tools.

Within this package was Netscape Navigator 4 (web browser), Netscape Address Book, Netscape Messenger, Netscape Composer and a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head.

If anyone is talking about Netscape 4 browser bugs then they'll be talking about Navigator.

As I mentioned before though (and Dan has also suggested), Netscape users generally update their browsers and therefore it's very unlikely that you'll need to support anything less than the latest version, let alone attempting to support Netscape 4.

If you did want to support Netscape 4 for some reason though then I'd suggest using the @import method of using an external stylesheet as Netscape 4 would ignore this and simply display plain text in a linearized version which would still be usable with semantic, valid HTML.

[Dan Schulz]

I know the browser was a part of the suite, Dave. I was merely saying that the authors of those books and tutorials used the terms interchangably (in that particular context).

[DaveWoods]

My explanation wasn't aimed at you Dan, it was aimed at the original poster for more clarification

[Dan Schulz]

Sorry Dave, I thought you were talking to me.