Do you consider NS4 relevant still?

[MetalAges]

How many people here still design your sites with NS4 in mind? I am growing increasingly frustrated with bothering with it to be honest and I would love to finally start using iframes to make my life easier lol. Just curious to what you all still do.

[redux]

as always with these issues, it comes down to the particular target audience of your site. it's probably fair to assume that for a cutting edge entertainment site, the core audience will have all the latest browsers, plugins, etc installed...whereas a corporate intranet in a company which has arcane machines it's probably more likely to find a high percentage of netscape users...

[xhtmlcoder]

Yes, and fortunately a lot of the Netscape 4.7x users have now migrated to new Mozilla, or Gecko based engines. On the whole from last December the numbers were becoming less significant.

Like Redux says it's typically the corporate, or educational establishments where the user, or employee doesn't have permission, or resources to deploy the "latest browser", for whatever reason, etc.

[vgarcia]

I still have to code for NS4 at work, though I've all but abandoned it for personal or freelance projects. My clients haven't really minded, as most of them feel a six-year-old browser isn't worth writing for (given the usual lifecycle of software apps and all).

[amix]

AAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.

well, THAT should set the tone for this post....

i've got a site that looks fine in ie5.5, ns6, opera 5&6... i usually don't bother testing in ns4.7 anymore so i thought i was finished with it. well....one of them asked some people to test it and voila, someone used ns4.7 and it looks like crap. it's in a basic table width=740 and the alignment is totally off on well everything! thecounter.com shows only 1% using ns4.7 - to me that's a good enough answer unless and until their site stats show tons of 4.7 users. am i right or wrong on that???

[abbey]

As much as I have learned to utterly despise NNv.4, I still keep it on my local machine and give it a nod when testing. The stats have it so it hasn't totally disappeared yet and schools, businesses, etc., may not have upgraded as yet.

I code for modern browsers, hide what I can from NN and if it's functioning and not too horribly atrocious, then fine. Most NN users realize they are dealing with a less-than-modern browser and that works for me.

Another source for stats, along with your own stats, is http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

[vgarcia]

Most NN users realize they are dealing with a less-than-modern browser and that works for me.

To be quite honest, a lot don't. Most people don't know jack about what type of OS they run, much less what version of their browser they are using. Ignorance of the standards is what promped the Web Standards Project, in order to raise awareness in people that yes, NS4 really does suck and no, we're not just nit-picking.

[amix]

thanx, i'll add that stats page to my checklist.

any ideas why basic tables don't look ok in 4.7? if you want to see it (please brace yourself first) it's here: newdriversafety.com.

[fatnewt]

I still look at my pages in Netscape 4... and if it's easy to provide an alternative (through another CSS file) when my designs fail in it, I make that effort.

But I don't lose sleep over it anymore.

[Dr Livingston]

I haven't looked at NN4.x for near 2 years now - it's dead and buried - thankfully.

Also I might as well point out that it's worth your time to avoid Opera6.x or less since these browsers are not fully standards compliant either - regardless of what Opera.com state or anyone else says.

Opera7.0 is about the only release you should test for 8)

[vgarcia]

I haven't looked at NN4.x for near 2 years now - it's dead and buried - thankfully.

Also I might as well point out that it's worth your time to avoid Opera6.x or less since these browsers are not fully standards compliant either - regardless of what Opera.com state or anyone else says.

Opera7.0 is about the only release you should test for 8)

Every Opera user I know tends to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible. This is because of Opera's niche market (mainly geeks like me, and embedded stuff like cellphone browsers where people upgrade their phones often anyway), and because of the fact that registered/paid users want their money's worth and want the improvements that they've directly paid for. So yeah, you may want to test your site in Opera 5.x and 6.x to make sure your content is accessible still, but don't lose too much sleep over it.

[fmavituna]

I don't I think we need to just to care about valid code and valid CSS.

TheCounter GlobalStats (2003 May)
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/browser.php

NN4 = %1
MSIE 6.x = 58
MSIE 6.x = 35

[earther]

Here are the Netscape stats for my site. 20.42% of all visitors were using Netscape. Needless to say, I still design with NS 4x in mind:

Netscape 100.00% (20.42% of all visitors)
6.0 45.26%
4.0 24.80%
2.0 10.85%
4.5 2.93%
4.7 2.39%
7.01 1.68%
4.79 1.66%
3.0 1.45%
7.0 1.27%
4.78 1.18%

[vgarcia]

2.0 10.85%

10.85% use Netscape 2.0! Where do most of your visitors come from?

[earther]

10.85% use Netscape 2.0! Where do most of your visitors come from?

They come from all over the world - Australia to Zimbabwe. Also lots of schools from k12 through universities (often from lesson assignments), state and federal government offices and foreign government offices too. There's a lot of good info on that site!

[Wavelan]

Unfortunately, the majority of our clients want their site to be compatible in Netscape 4.7.

I have worked my way through countless bugs over and over again and now find that because I have done it so many times, I know how the browser will respond to what I am doing, (most of the time) and I don't need to test the site until the coding is finished in order to pick out the little mistakes.

A world without Netscape 4 sure would be nice though.

[redux]

I don't I think we need to just to care about valid code and valid CSS.

TheCounter GlobalStats (2003 May)
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/browser.php

NN4 = %1
MSIE 6.x = 58
MSIE 6.x = 35

i've said it before and i'll say it again: these kinds of stats are worthless unless they relate to your own site. also, with thecounter.com, i would posit that a) they only collect stats of users using their counter b) not many corporate sites use their counter...so the stats reflect the amateurish pages which use their counter service...*ducks*

add to this browser spoofing (Opera, Mozilla, etc), and these stats mean nothing at all...

[fmavituna]

Basicly you are right @redux but it's still the same in my personal website. [directly related to web tech.]

Weblogexpert Lite Report
Internet Explorer 6.x 69.01%
2 Internet Explorer 5.x 23.51%
3 Netscape 6.x 1.08%
4 Opera 0.87%
5 Download Accelerator 0.65%
6 Netscape 4.x 0.58%
7 Netscape 3.x 0.54%
8 Internet Explorer 4.x 0.40%
10 Netscape 2.x 0.33%
12 Netscape 7.x 0.29%

[redux]

another factor to consider: it's a chicken and egg problem with browser stats...you see from your stats that you don't have many netscape 4.x users, so you don't test your site in nn4.x, which in turn prompts users of nn4.x not to look at your site because it messes up in their browser, which lowers the percentage of nn4.x users in your stats, which then further reinforces your impression that "nobody uses netscape 4.x anymore"...

what came first ? the lack of nn4.x users, or the site that doesn't work in nn4.x ?

(p.s.: by "your site" i didn't mean "YOUR site"...it's not meant as a personal criticism and/or compatibility review, it's the "generalised" "your" form )

[fatnewt]

I tried to give up NN4 for good a while ago.....

The result: I had a client call me up and panicing because someone called him and said she could barely see his site in Netscape.

Even though barely anyone was coming with that browser, it was enough to make me look into it and fix the problem. Now I make sure that there's a decent page there for Netscape 4 users... just to avoid that phone call.

another factor to consider: it's a chicken and egg problem with browser stats...

A good point.


Personally I think there should be a push to upgrade browsers as much as possible and avoid this headache. http://www.webstandards.org/

But it all depends on your target audience... for example - a design firm may want an impressive site that makes use of some more reent CSS and flash...etc... while government and internationally-known sites should be as accessible as possible.

[fmavituna]

@redux you are specially right about "target audience";

I think we need to care about the code, I'm always care about it and we need to make all of websites still visible in NN.

If you are using CSS and valid HTML with valid ways your web site still visible and readable by NN or any other browser (most).

Also for NN @importing the CSS files is a good trick.

//BTW I did not tested my web site in NN4 but it must be good.

[redux]

BTW I did not tested my web site in NN4 but it must be good.

your server is not responding...otherwise i'd give you a screenshot

[fmavituna]

your server is not responding...otherwise i'd give you a screenshot

Feel free I'm waiting

[redux]

BTW I did not tested my web site in NN4 but it must be good

Q.E.D.

[fmavituna]

wouwwww that's great

Man I'm surprised, Now I need to care about it !

But NN really sux for my pc (crashes....) do you know any place or program for browser testing ?