Netscape Users Rejoice

Well, SatireWire has a new story about "the last 14 remaining Netscape users" rejoicing over Netscape. It's pretty biting, but funny as hell.

Comments

We demand a recount!

[Arlet]

With such a small number, it is important that the will of the people is respected. We will therefore demand a manual recount, starting with netscape strongholds: netscape.com, mozilla.org, and aol.com.

We'll take every legal step to make sure that every browser is counted. Even in those cases where the people clicked on the "download netscape 6" button, but due to a faulty mechanism, didn't press their mouse button down far enough, thus producing a soft "cluck" instead of a firm "click". We will have all mice inspected for "clucks", and we'll make sure these count as well! It's the intention that counts!! Long live democracy!

unfortunately

[cybercuzco]

Unfortunately satirewires website was configured to only handle users of netscape, and so was slashdotted when greater than 14 people tried to access it

Netscape 0.9

[Calle Ballz]

Kinda netscape related. I was searching around www.abandonkeep.com and found netscape version 0.9.. It doesn't load very many pages, but it was weird remembering what graphical webbing used to be like.

Biting Satire? The article is LAME.

[Byter]

This article brings up NOTHING new that the impatient people haven't complained about here for a long long time. It's another "Oh, the release is LATE LATE LATE" complaint, only this time, these people are idiotic enough to make the complaint AFTER talk like this made Netscape shove Netscape 6 out the door at least 2 months too early.

If we're just going to base everything on what was released to the market first, then ALL companies might as well just release TOTAL crap to the customer as quickly as possible. I thought that we were a more knowledgable community and we wanted better quality software. We're entering a new era of software construction, where we can write better quality and more maintainable code. But to take advantage of that, we're going to have to re-write a lot of code, code that was built in the 80's and 90's hackers ethic. RE-WRITES TAKE TIME.

There are people here who say that they wished Netscape had released a Netscape 5 with improvements in a short period of time. Well, they actually did that, only they were more honest and called it 4.5. Without a re-write, any future Netscape browser wouldn't have gotten much better than 4.x, and probably would have gotten worse. The code base was ANCIENT. It was written in another era. So 6 months after they started working on Netscape 5 (using the old code-base), they scrapped it, and started the re-write. I tried out "Mozilla Classic" (had a debian package or two), and it wasn't much better than 4.x. This decision was made in November.

The year of 1999 was basically spent in re-write and architecture land. Some components were re-written multiple times. At this time, the browser wasn't "dogfood", it wasn't really usable by anyone without a huge amount of struggle. Some people here still think Mozilla is like that. At the end of 1999, Mozilla started driving to dogfood, and by February of 2000, it was at least dogfood (I used it for my daily browsing, although some times it was very very slow). That's the point where I started seeing constant and steady improvement on each and every build. (With a few regressions on the day or two after the milestone). Then another rapid increase in quality began around the end of May. 2000. Then another burst of polishing through all of August. If Netscape had given us 2 more months like August before clamping down, I think Netscape 6 would have been significantly better. If a significant bug got fixed after August, it tended to not get into either the trunk or the branch.

around July and August is when end-user/programmers started to swarm in to Mozilla as outside contributors, as Mozilla had finally reached what JWZ had said "A user could add a patch to the browser and have a browser + his patch." It would have been very exciting if we could have had two more months like that. We'll have them again in January and February, as everyone recovers from the holidays, and the Netscape employees come back from their vacations.

Mozilla is MORE then just a browser. I'm sure there are a lot of people who kept crying out that that's ALL it should have been, but that's their typical small-minded thinking, and it's THAT fact that will eventually get Netscape on to end-user computers, even if they already have Internet Explorer on them. I don't think you can write a completely cross-platform XUL application using Internet Explorer technology. :P Almost NONE of Internet Explorer is cross-platform. And those people who think that cross-platform doesn't mean anything aren't thinking too far ahead. There's going to be an explosion of embedded computing in the near future. PC's won't be going away, but they won't be the main way that web pages are accessed anymore. And it is much easier, both in time and in resources, to write a XUL based application compared to a Java based application. It is also INFINATELY easier to fix bugs in the base code of XUL, something that cannot be done with the current closed-source nature of java.

I'm sick of the anti-mozilla bias that has been fostered on Slashdot, propagated by short-sighted, impatient and ignorant people, and i'm dismayed at CmdrTaco et al continuing this trend with stories like this, especially when they are misrepresented in the opening comments. I certainly don't know of any other full-featured commercial quality browsers that I can get the full source code to.

I completely fail to see what CmdrTaco sees as "funny as hell" about this article. Is it the "14" users statement that does it for him? Is it the constant assertion that once people switch to Internet Explorer that they'll never switch back? Is it the implication that only Netscape users would want to try the New Netscape? Or is it the comparison of Netscape with Apple as companies who didn't fill the general market niches at the given time, and therefore "deserve to die"? Here's a hint: For something to be considered good satire, it has to blast BOTH sides (if there are clear partisan sides), it has to frame it in a new, unexpected light/situation that is halfway believable(probably framing it in the structure of something else that is established), and most of the facts (or the behaviours if we're looking closely at a specific person) have to be generally undisputed. Oh, and a bit of intelligence helps. This article fills NONE of those criteria. It is *extremely* one-sided, doesn't blast Microsoft at all for the obvious defects, the situation is completely unrealistic (a person saying that if his company had released something 3 years ago, it would have had a chance, but it wasn't, so it doesn't? Yeah right!), and most of the facts are under dispute. And finally it does not sound intelligent, the tone/ideas in this article are extremely childish (*14* users? Why not just say *3*? Hell, if you're going to completely underestimate/state the Netscape base, why not say *0.0001*?) and short-sighted (Hmm, so when someone has the majority of marketshare in one area, they NEVER lose it, even when someone comes out with a better product? I think Lotus and IBM would strongly disagree with you.). At best, this is highly partisian humour, and something that only Microsoft employees/lovers would laugh at, or people who are extremely EXTREMELY bitter at Netscape.

All this article has done is repeat the mantra "Ship the browser NOW NOW NOW NOW or you'll be irrelevant!", only they've done it AFTER Netscape SHIPPED THE DAMN BROWSER (A bit too early to satisfy you whiners), which means they are flogging a dead horse. Something is biting if it is undisputably true, which this isn't. This piece isn't even relevant. And it doesn't even consider any other platform besides Windows! I can ASSURE you that there isn't a large number of people on Linux switching to Internet Explorer. CmdrTaco, have you COMPLETELY forgotten your original demographic?

Re:Biting Satire? The article is LAME.

[Bongo]

I can ASSURE you that there isn't a large number of people on Linux switching to Internet Explorer.

Thanks for a solid burst of rationality. Just today I was wondering what did the industry brainwash us into believing about 'platforms'? And 'compatability' and 'market share' and 'industry standard'? There's the famous (?) story told by Nelson Mandela, who upon his release from prison was sitting on a plane to leave RSA. When he saw that the pilot was black, he found himself thinking "God help us, a monkey is flying the plane" (or words to that effect). The racist meme had gotten into even his brain.

I overheard a woman in a store today, walking past the iMacs, saying "everybody's telling me to stick to PCs...." It's like this automatic belief about the 2% Death has really infected our culture. It's like there's something wrong with you if you don't own MS Office, or AutoCad, or Explorer.

It's one thing that 50% of desktops are Win98 or whatever, but what's gotten into people when they turn themselves into walking adverts for the products they own? You don't just buy it, you believe in it... you preach it and send to Hell and Damnation anyone using a different product.

So instead of welcoming diversity (How many species do you want to exterminate today?), we're laughing at these "weak, misguided fools who don't know whats good for them". No, don't be a fool, join the majority, the strong and wholesome (read: 'compatible', 'industry standard', 'works best with', 'market share', 'certified'...) so called 'Leaders'.

Are we just instruments of corporate marketing machines? How many of your opinions (both for and against) Windows, Macs, Be, Linux, Sun etc etc. were put there by the corporations?

We can all find fault with anything. It's too big, it's too small, its too slow, too fast, too bright, too dim, too common, too rare etc. And I think that the parent post was highlighting the "netscape is dead" attitude (I personally downloaded it... it runs... it renders pages... it has developers... therefore it is not dead) which people are swallowing. So we can all find a million "faults" with NS6 that "clearly" show it's inferior. What bias! What utter blindness! What opinionated crap! We've been 'educated' to believe it's dead, and therefore proceed to kill it.

Some real stats

[toastyman]

According to pcdata.com, and a few other "web demographic" sites, www.stileproject.com is in the top 2000 visited sites on the net. Granted, due to the adult content of the site, it's largely viewed by home users. But, a site this does get a nice breakdown of the net as a whole. Here are the stats we see:

85.6% Internet Explorer
12.0% Netscape
01.2% "Netscape Compatible" browsers
00.2% Opera
00.07% WebTV

In my experience, largely "geeky" websites see huge amounts of netscape users. Our breakdown by OS:

93.35% Windows
03.22% Macintosh
01.80% Unknown (browser doesn't report OS)
01.38% Unix variants
00.07% WebTV
00.01% BeOS
00.004% OS/2
00.003% RISC OS
00.002% Amiga
00.0002% OpenVMS

Since it may be of interest to people here, here's the Unix breakdown:

79.18% Linux
07.28% FreeBSD
04.19% SunOS
03.85% Other Unix variants
01.94% OpenBSD
01.85% IRIX
00.61% OSF1
00.51% HP-UX
00.30% NetBSD
00.26% AIX
00.0002% BSD/OS

The Unix/Linux users seem kind of high, but it may be due to the Linux Girls Gallery getting linked everywhere.

-- Kevin
(hoping this won't be considered spam, but rather info that I keep getting asked)

a rant on stuff

[vw_bob]

I need to rant:

<rant>
Ok. As a web developer I want to bitch about the state of browsers.

Call me uninformed, stupid or whatever you will, but after having played with Netscape 6, IE 5.5, Opera 4 and Netscape 4.72. I can't imagine that there's anything that can be done to make my life easier as a developer.

For a long time, and I've said this on Slashdot before, my main problem with Opera 4 and Netscape 6 is that they don't freaking display layers the same and NONE of them support JavaScript the same way. Using JavaScript in all four of these browsers is pretty much a lost cause as far as I'm concerned. You may as well learn four distinct languages.

Now ok, as a Developer I do write a lot of stuff by hand. But lets face the fact, using an editor like DreamWeaver make a hell of a lot more since as you can hammer something out reasonably quickly with typically good code.

As a side note, I just got my paws on DreamWeaver 4, which claims to be WC3 compliant. So, in theory anything I write in DreamWeaver 4 should work at least as well in Opera 4 and in Netscape 6. Right? No!

Here's my several hour story about disappointment. I've been working for several monts on a site that makes creative use of layers on the opening page. (I'd show you, but it's not live yet.) This first page was originally created in DreamWeaver 3 using DreamWeaver 3 behaviors to show and hide layers as necessary. Worked great, but only in Netscape 4.7x and IE 5+. Netscape 6 and Opera 4 wouldn't display the layers when it was supposed to. This boiled down to something I never took the time to figure out in the actual JavaScript of the DreamWeaver 3 behavior.

Now the other day I got a copy of DreamWeaver 4. Macromedia claims that it's WC3 complaint. Excellent, this is the solution to my problem. I'll simply redo the page real quick in DreamWeaver 4 and it should work in all these browsers. Much to my surprise the JavaScript worked! My problem though is that the browsers seem to handle the layer and other such tags differently. In Netscape 6 the entire layer is shifted a pixel up so it doesn't align where it's supposed to. Other than that, it worked fine. In opera the link in the image map on the image in the layer wouldn't work. It wouldn't do a think. I tried setting on onClick to load the next page with JavaScript. No luck. IE and Netscape 4.72 seemed to work fine.

Which brings me to my point: What the hell?!? These two so called WC3 complaint browsers won't display code created in a WC3 compliant editor the same way! What use are these bloody standards? I understand they're complicated as hell and that I sure couldn't do the work, but it seems to me that there's truly something lacking for all of the options.

So here's my proposal: Let's get all of the major and some of the minor browsers companies together and (by some miracle) get them all to agree on standards or something. Then make THEM be the consortium that creates the standards. Then if browsers like IE want to implement other proprietary features, then that's FINE. (as long as they don't go calling them standard.)
</rant>

But it's past my bedtime so I must go sleep. Bye now.

Doug

Numbers slightly skewed...

[Mike Schiraldi]

While the so-called "official" count shows only 14 Netscape users, there are reports that dozens of senior citizens who had intended to download Netscape accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan.

--

Browser Archive!

[WD]

That's nuthin.... Check out the Evolt.org Browser Archive. There's pretty much every browser that ever existed there.