Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

death to ns4

The market share for Netscape 4 is rapidly dwidling — although may web designers and developers would probably tell you that it’s not disappearing fast enough.

Anyone who designs websites and worries about their sites looking the same across all browsers probably hates NS4. It’s the wrench in the machine. Sure, IE and more recent versions of Netscape (and the open-source Safari, Mozilla, Gecko and Camino, all based on the same engine) each have their quirks, but for the most part, they can be counted on to follow Internet standards (some browsers more than others). It’s NS4, with its random quirks and partial CSS support, that’s most likely to display your site in ways you didn’t expect — or want. And so it’s either recode the site, implement arbitrary tweaks, or create a version of the site only for NS4 — all of which are extremely tiresome.

The Topeka (Kansas) Capital-Journal, with its recent redesign, decided to shut out NS4 users altogether, giving those users a (funny) message telling them to upgrade their browsers:

We tried to support Netscape 4 in our redesign. We really tried, but it kept breaking. In the end we decided it was better to drop support for that aging browser. Some of us cheered, some of us cried. Some of us cried tears of joy. There’s some cool stuff, besides that menu over there, that you won’t be able to use. We sincerely hope you’ll come back with a newer browser and see what other changes we’re making.

Be nice to a web designer. Upgrade your outdated browser. It’s free for you, and saves us hundreds of dollars on Advil.