http://www.siliconinvestor.com/default.aspx
I just tried logging on to that page. It's possible to do so using a bit of guess work while entering things blind.
Is it that page or is it the login page accessible from there?
This is the page I've been having problems with using either Netscape 3 or 4, and it doesn't seem to matter whether or not Java is disabled:
It's been a while since I've tried that page in Netscape 4.77 and though the site's pretty ugly in it, it was functional. I haven't made many changes to the homepage since trying 4.77 on it.
Javascript definitely doesn't enter into it. I'm very Javascript-averse and only use it when there isn't an equally-efficient VBScript way to do something that needs done. There are exactly 5 places on the site that use Javascript. The two flavors of message-composing pages, where I use JS to put the cursor in the reply box, wherever there's a chart or graph, in which case I have to use the providers' JS tags, and sometimes an ad will be JS, but it should be detecting whether your browser supports JS before attempting to use its JS version, and providing a non-JS version if you don't support it.
On the homepage, there's Javascript involved in the index charts on the left side, but not unless you click in it.
I also read your exchange with Bill about the prevalence of old browsers.
My own observations are close to Bill's. < 1% use WebTV or whatever it's called today. Fewer than 2% use what I could call extremely old browsers.
A heavily-used mainstream site most certainly will not have 25% of its users on Netscape 4 or lower. No way! By heavily-used, I mean over a million page views per day. Newer versions of IE comprise more than 90% of the hits here, so that's what I write code for first. The only time I really pay attention to Netscape is when someone has pointed out a problem resulting from an HTML error I've made (like forgetting <td> tags) that IE overlooks but Netscape doesn't. By and large, later versions of Netscape work extremely well with modern sites.
If your site is a relatively simple HTML thing that doesn't use CSS or dynamic content supported by a database, any browser is likely to work. If it's large, produces large pages, and is so dynamic that the code to get the data for the pages outweighs the HTML for their output, there're bound to be problems with old browsers. Not necessarily the case, but likely the case.
Does Netscape 3 even support CSS? CSS is used on every page here. And unless I'm very mistaken, the HTML standard has been modified to contain quite a few new things since Netscape 3.
I remember doing a lot of work on iHub to make sure it worked in WebTV, but that won't be happening here. I need more real estate than WebTV provides. I also will put very little effort into supporting obsolete (yeah, I said it) browsers. Why? Because of the target demographic of the site. The kinds of people who use this site (for market discussion) are using modern browsers because they probably have an online trading account, charting software, and other tools for making money or trying to lose as little of it as possible (my case) in the market.
If there are people using obsolete browsers and they are able to get away with using the obsolete browsers because the only use they have for this site is to talk politics, I see that as a solution; not a problem. Yeah, I said that, too. <g>
And it's not that I'm not old-school enough to appreciate the simplicity of obsolete browsers. Heck, I'm probably one of only a handful of people here old-school enough to know the syntax of the DOS "FOR" command off the top of their head. I used it the other day.
I actually hate Windoze and if I had my way, we'd all be running DesqView and DOS programs. But I can't have my way. The majority of the site's users use newer version of IE, so that's what I start out writing for and what I use most of the time.
I've used Opera and Netscape (7.1) though and I think they're both great. Opera has a very small footprint and is very fast. And though I'm not sure of the size of NSCP 7.1's footprint, I know it's very fast (feels faster than IE and is prettier) and am pretty sure its eventual footprint is much smaller than 4.x. 4.x had quite a memory leakage problem.
If I were a user instead of a developer, I'd probably adopt the latest Netscape as my browser of choice. I was strictly a Netscape user until I found myself writing websites instead of using them.
And when people report problems involving it (non-obsolete Netscape), I make it a high priority to get it fixed. In every instance I've encountered so far, if something's broken in non-obsolete Netscape, it's not that I have to do something special to make it work for Netscape. It's that I've made a simple mistake that IE will overlook but Netscape won't.
I'm not sure it'll run on a 386, though. |
