Explorer Vs Netscape

The Battle of the Browsers. (A HolyWar?)

Microsoft has basically won. But in doing so have raised the eyebrows of the UsGovernment?. The rest (of course) is history.

I prefer InternetExplorer. The latest version of NetscapeNavigator (6b) is supposed to be dire. Unfortunately it was so bad I trashed it before I could see what it was really like. -- MatthewTheobalds Thanks for that well-researched conclusion.

(Current version [Aug 03] is 7.1, which is miles ahead of 6.)

The problem remains: what to do if you run Linux? For a long time, it seemed that Netscape was the only choice. But now the KDE project has produced a nice lightweight file manager and web browser, kfm. And KDE 2 has a much more featureful browser, the KonquerorBrowser. -- StephanHouben

MozillaBrowser is probably the best choice (Dec 2003). I use MozillaFirefox and it works beautifully.

I downloaded OperaBrowser for the Mac and like it, except that it doesn't work with Citibank's online banking for some reason. Opera has the appropriate level of encryption, but still fails, possibly due to lack of java support (just a guess). Other than that, it seems good. I like the idea that Opera guarantees to be fully http 1.2 compliant, although I haven't personally tested my pet peeve with Explorer, lack of ServerPush?. -- AndyPierce

Some of us don't like KDE, but further on that should be placed in KdeVsGnome. Anyhow, there is the GaleonBrowser. A problem is that Gecko is an MPL program, and Galeon is a GPL program. Those to licenses are incompatible, and thus the authors of the GaleonBrowser had to give permission, that as a special exception it is allowed to link it with Mozilla. That brings me to WhyMplIsEvil?.

I have a practical problem, as a long term user of Netscape and therefore used to its ways. Web pages with a dark background and light text will not print for me (PC Win9x). The background is made white and the text stays white - a blank page. InternetExplorer (IE) at least does some sort of transformation on the text colour as well as the background. -- JohnFletcher Well, it's nice to hear that Internet Explorer gets something right when printing.

Does anyone have URLs to recent surveys breaking down browser usage by vendor and version? I'm also interested in comparisons of the features supported by each browser version. We're beginning a new development and trying to determine how many users we may lose if we target HTML 4.01 vs. 3.2, CSS1 vs CSS2 vs. nothing, JavaScript, etc.

I've been searching off and on for the last few days and haven't been able to find anything more recent than 1998...

Try http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BrowserUsageStatistics

The worst thing about Netscape for me is that on Linux the Fonts are a real mess - usually too small. I have read every font HowTo there is and applied all known fixes to no avail. It is just bad, plain and simple.

For browser stats have a look at: http://InternetEKG.com/

That seems to be metabrowser, if that. (http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MetaBrowsing) In fact, the browser statistics links to http://browserwatch.internet.com which is on the MeatballWiki site. Am I missing something?

-- ChanningWalton

I've been using Mozilla continually since about 0.7, on both Windows and Linux. It is now at 0.9.1 and remarkably faster and more stable. It is certainly well beyond the Netscape 4.7x, and while Netscape 6.x is built from the Mozilla code base, it seems to suffer from some sort of kitchen sink malady, and is nowhere near as pleasant. http://www.mozilla.org/ Just try it. What if it is better? -- StevenNewton

Personally, I can't stand using anything other than mozilla (WinXp?). Tabs, [ctrl] + (click || [enter]) for new window or tab, loading links in the background, etc, are just too addictive to give up, imo :)

Apparently, AOL has just announced the death of Netscape. Anyone have more details?

AOHell -- source of much Internet evil -- seems to be pretending they are going to back up Mozilla development. Uh, oh.

I thought IE had won, hands down, after all many sites don't even work with other browsers. But my own job gave me reason for pause. We develop a web application, and all of our users are IE users, so we don't bother with cross-browser compliance very much. Recently, howewever, we've started using more client side JavaScript ... this would normally encourage more browser-specific code, but not for us. We have found value in unit-testing our JavaScript with HttpUnit. Now we aren't happy unless HttpUnit is happy and a quick visual inspection with IE looks good. Since HttpUnit uses Mozilla's JavaScript engine (RhinoInterpreter), we are moving towards more cross-browser functionallity. If this crazy unit testing fad catches on, maybe the professional sites on the web will become more cross-browser friendly by happen-stance. And if we can really have a good browsing experience with other browsers, maybe we'll gravitate to different ones. So today, IE has won. It seems unlikey, but maybe tomorrow UnitTesting will level the playing field. --EricHerman

I've really only encountered one site I needed/wanted to use that doesn't work right in anything but Internet Explorer (and then only on Windows -- it even breaks in the Mac version) thanks to a lazy WebMonkey? somewhere who didn't debug his JavaScript. Where is this implied mass of "many" sites that require IE? Said site now works; I know of zero sites that I actually use that don't work in Mozilla.