Netscape 7.0 is Out

MrJones was one of many many users to submit that Netscape has released Navigator 7.0 unto the world. With their dwindling market share, it'll be interesting to see what affect this has on internet users. But here's hoping it makes a dent.

Comments

Wet Slap

[tarsi210]

Dear Internet,

For my sanity, usefulness, and the pleasure of all, please kindly do the following:

1. Don't start up the browser wars again. The browser wars were hell on productivity and usefulness. Since dying down, I can now choose one of my two favorite browsers (IE or Konq) and comfortably browse about 99% of all Internet sites and they render nicely and consistently. All the browser wars did was make people and browser companies squabble over standards and compliance and do backhanded things to undermine the other guy. For us users, it made surfing a living hell of badly rendered webpages and for us developers, a double living hell of development and compatibility.
2. Screw your blessed standards and the horse you rode in on. - The standard is what everyone is using, folks. No friggin' standard does me any good if noone uses it or noone complies to it. You can preach about your W3C standards till you're blue in the face and I'm going to go home and look at non-standards-compliant webpages with a non-standards-compliant browser that will show me what I want, when I want it for 98% of the Internet. I'm all for setting guidelines, folks, but if something isn't standard and yet is used by 90% of the Internet, you have to wonder why it isn't in the standard.
3. Let NS die peacefully - please. - We finally just got all of our clients to acknowledge that NS4x sucks and to switch to IE (which on their Windows boxes runs better, faster, and easier). If NS once again gets the market share or any larger piece of it, support issues fly through the roof and everyone becomes confused again. I hate M$ as much as the next guy but my users don't. They just hate lost time, money, and productivity. IE gives them joy, NS gives them headaches, end of story. Promote the offbeat browsers to the more knowledgeable (Konq rules my world, personally) but leave the sheep to their sheep pen.
4. Force NS to prove that they mean business if you insist on bringing them back. - NS has sucked for so long, even if they released 7.1 tomorrow and said that it had features that would do my laundry, I wouldn't trust it. 4x sucked. 6x doubly so. Earn my respect back, NS, or you'll never get me back. Be consistent, be useful, be stable, be fast, be a resource miser, and be headache-free. Then I'll give you a chance.