I Hate Netscape 4

I don’t think I’m alone among web designers to hate Netscape 4.x. There are many days (today is one of them) when I wish I could go out and delete every copy of Netscape 4 in existence. What’s wrong with it? The crappy Cascading Style Sheet support, the rendering, the way it handles dynamic html and div’s.

I have this wonderful (well, I think it is) method for generating dynamic form entry fields in a web browser. It means that a user can keep entering data into a single screen without needing to submit the data after every line. The proof of concept works fine for Internet Explorer and Mozilla and almost, but not quite in Netscape 4.77. Netscape would stuff up in other ways too on this form, being unable to resize layers properly without reloading a page.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t always loathed Netscape. When it came out all those years ago I preferred it over Internet Explorer. Nowadays I usually use Mozilla, which is the open source browser that evolved as a replacement for Netscape. Netscape 6.x’s code is based upon Mozilla. Unfortunately, I have two problems with Mozilla – some Java pages, like those of my local library, won’t load properly. The other problem is that we have had trouble compiling it under Solaris 2.6, which is what runs on a lot of machines at work. Maybe this is fixed now. Hopefully Mozilla’s resource requirements are modest enough to run on the systems at work, because it really is a much nicer browser than Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer.

I’ll leave my tirade against Microsoft Word for another day…

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