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Retro Browser War: IE6 Vs. Netscape In 2011
jbrodkin writes "What if you took the raw, pre-patched, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried to surf the modern Web? What would happen? You might think firing up IE6 or Netscape would lead to an immediate onslaught of viruses, but just for fun, I decided to spend some time using these two ancient browsers. It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, and can play Flash and Java content, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death."
Possibly, the fact that large numbers of corporate desktops still have IE 6 means that a non-trivial number of Web programmers code to where IE6 will still work, whereas no one is using old Netscape, even for fun, except for this dude.
Up until relatively recently you absolutely had to include whatever hacks were necessary to get IE6 running on your site because it was the default browser on Windows and had a huge market share. Netscape hasn't had that sort of status in a really long time. So of course IE6 probably looks pretty good in comparison.
Now, look at more recent sites that don't include that kludge and see if it still looks OK.
The reason IE6 still works is because it HAD to work. People made web apps that only work in IE6 and then Microsoft broke the compatibility in every version after. I admit that if companies were more willing to update their apps IE6 would not still be required by some companies, but you tell them they have to spend their money porting apps.
Didn't work, did it?
Could this be due to the large market share that IE6 still holds? I realize this is a much older version of the software, but many websites are still made with IE6 use in mind, are they not? I'm probably wrong, so feel free to insult me ^_^
Considering IE6 has had an unduly long life in today's software world, it's no surprise. There are still businesses out there that rely with almost thumb-sucking adherence to keeping their sites IE6 compatible.
I'm firmly in the camp of letting IE6 have the browser wars, and letting it graze peacefully into the great software pasture in the sky, but alas, we're nowhere near that area yet.
Considering how much life IE6 still has in it on the internet, and how much of the web was deliberately broken to be "best viewed in internet explorer" and the length of IE6's dominance, I'm not surprised people are creating pages that are mostly compatible with it.
Netscape, however, was pushed out by loads of incompatible web pages and a failure to keep up. So yeah, IE6 is going to still work while Netscape is going to be broken. Thankfully, we have a much more diverse base of browsers that basically drive home the need to be standards compliant on both ends.
IE6 support is being kept alive due to a statistics flaw.
If you look at your visitor stats there will be no NS6 users at all. There will be a few (but not many, I hope for you) IE6 users. Most if not all of these are actually spammers.
Management doesn't know that distiction and decides, we'll need to keep supporting IE6. Or worse, they think that using it isn't that ancient after all and force you to use it.
So, next time you want to know how many people *actually* use IE6 to determine resource spending, try filtering out the unwanted ones first. The same holds for those stats counters.
You misspelt 'Third'
IE6 in all its horror is supported by most frameworks BECAUSE corporate desktops and mindless consumers stayed on it for so very long.
This week I had to do a Win 98 install to test some software. My install came with IE4 and I had some fun trying various sites to see what would and wouldn't work. It was interesting to see how well (and not well) sites degraded to an utter crap view.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
As the article mentions, IE6 is still used by millions of users. Website designers still try to retrofit at least some of their functionality to work w/ this ancient scourge. You don't hear anybody trying to make sure their website will work with Netscape.
Really? People still have emotions about Netscape Vs. IE? Get a life! ;)
No viri or malware here! I was.... uh,popup... *click* ..I was just say... what the?..*click*...*click*... I was just going to sa... *click*..*click*... +++ ath0
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1) IE was the de facto standard of the Web from 1998 to 2009, give or take a year or two on each end. That's what developers used as their main reference client.
2) Netscape ran out of cash to fund the massive development cycles it needed to compete with Microsoft at the time, around 1998 or so. Then they released the browser code as open source. Soon afterwards, AOL bought the whole company; AOL is not a company noted for software development. Then Microsoft seemed to lose interest in anything more than minimal browser development.
3) Netscape's source code was apparently ragged, developed as it was under "Netscape Time" (their term). After their source code was released as "Mozilla", it took several years before anything came out of that project, and progress apparently began after the original source code base was set aside.
And still after 22 years of web, webdevelopers don't give anything about standards and have to rely on javascript and flash to even be able to visit websites. I wonder what the results would have been for standard compliant web-sites.
Posted from SeaMonkey. Personally I still like having an HTML editor, browser and email client all in one package.
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If you had a Win98 machine that you'd like to access the web from occasionally, what would be the best browser to do so? Firefox 2.0? Are there any projects still targeting OSs this old? What about something really crazy, like Mac OS 7? Or Amiga OS?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So, Netscape 6.1 used the Mozilla 0.9.2.1 rendering engine.
For reference, Firefox (nee Phoenix) 0.1 used the Mozilla 1.1 rendering engine. Firefox 3.6.13 uses the Mozilla 1.9.2.13 rendering engine.
Needless to say, the commonly used version of Mozilla's rendering engine has been constantly updated, while IE6 still has market-share to this day.
So, not surprisingly, web site authors don't make sites for ancient Mozilla versions, while they do for ancient IE versions.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Did OP forget that vast numbers of developers still code to IE6 standards?
He's comparing a Javascript benchmark in a virtual machine to one on his Windows 7 native install.
It's probably worth noting that Netscape 6 was just the Mozilla Suite (aka SeaMonkey) rebadged... Hard to say it really 'died' since those days. By Netscape 8 they switched to using FireFox as the base.
I just re-installed XP sp 2 last night on an old laptop which comes with IE 6. I didn't really think of it as old. It worked fine until I was able to update,restart,update,restart,update,restart,update,restart,update,restart and then update to IE 8.
That's a strange way of having fun.
You misspelled misspelled :P
After AOL bought Netscape, they decided to keep the Netscape browser on life support (but strangle it anyway) by releasing versions 6.0 and later, which were cut from the maturing Mozilla 5 codebase:
At this point (May 2005) Netscape was irrelevant, as Firefox had taken over among the tech savvy, and word was spreading beyond us. Also, AOL had seen fit to saddle Netscape with ugly, ad-infested themes.
The 6x and 7x lines were premature at best, almost as if they were designed to nail the brand's coffin shut, which they did.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_timeline, and my own memory of the time.
If IE6 doesn't support it, then it's probably not a useful feature for the WWW, being either eye candy or stupid "web app" crap. Fuck off with your need to make fancy drop-down menus and pixel-perfect positioning - the whole point is that you give me marked-up information and I render it how I please.
(Of course, IE6 has some irritating crap in it too - but not even ActiveX is as annoying as HTML 5 in terms of fucking up a decent idea.)
You misspelled ..
Er... the fact that IE6 fairs well is ENTIRELY because we web developers have had to make sure the "modern" web worked in that ancient browser for the entirety of its existence. Nearly every site you look at will have special-case code to handle IE6 specifically. Only in this last year has my shop dropped automatic support for it, and we still have requests to fix issues that appear only in IE6.
Almost by definition, the web isn't actually all that modern BECAUSE it has to work in IE6.
That said, progressive enhancement is one of those ideas that everyone should be implementing but, in practice, almost never actually works the way it should. A truly well-crafted modern site should be able to have fancy HTML5 features but still render in a readable (if not necessarily pleasing) fashion in Mosaic.
as a full-time web designer, we are pretty much forced to make sure our sites are usable in IE6. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten phone calls from clients that go just like this:
client: MY SITE ISN'T WORKING!!!!!!
me: looks fine on my end. what's wrong?
client: transparent images have a solid background, and elements are all over the place, I can't see the drop down menus, and the entire thing looks like crap!
me: what browser are you using?
client: what's a browser?
me: what version of windows are you using?
client: XP I think?
me: have you ever once, considered running the updates?
client: I'm a traditionalist! Of course not!
Of course, they are running IE6. I spend probably 1/5 of my time a day working making sure that sites are compatible in IE6. It's a nightmare. If I could get that extra time back each day, I could get so many more useful project done instead of trying to force the modern web to work with a legacy POS browser that shouldn't still exist in 2011.
"Mindless consumers" upgraded, either because they bought new PCs that came with IE7 or IE8, or because Windows Update would update their browser for them, or because they'd get a dialog box offering to upgrade their browser, click Yes, install some piece of malware toolbarness and have to uninstall IE entirely and upgrade to a new version to kill it off.
Corporate desktops, yeah, because the corporations were using applications developed for IE6 (using toolsets that were specifically incompatible with Mozilla so you had to keep IE6) which didn't work any more under IE7 or IE8, and the IT department didn't want to go through the pain of replacing them, while the corporate security standards bureaucrats didn't trust IE7 (they didn't trust IE6 either, but they were stuck with it.) I finally got to upgrade to IE7 last summer, though of course I use Firefox and Chrome for anything that doesn't insist on running IE.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How about trying NCSA Mosaic?
Similarly, Top Gear should do an episode where they try to see how practical early-1900s cars are in today's world. Think of all the manual crank-starting, rear-only belt-braking, 1WD fun to be had at speeds of up to 30mph.
Maybe they've already done something like this and I just don't know about it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The Netscape name has died a death but its engine, Mozilla, is approaching 30% usage now.
There's a very good reason you can still surf with IE6, and that's because most web devs like myself still have to bloody support it. It hung around for so long that even now I'm still having to put specific IE6 fixes into everything I do. I'm willing to bet if you took away all the IE6 specific javascript and css from every website then the results would be completely reversed. I can't remember what the Moz 0.9 engine was like to dev for but I'm pretty sure even then it was more standards compliant than IE.
Now, if you looked at IE 5 vs Netscape 4 I'd say IE was the better browser at that time, but by around Moz 1.0 it had become the better engine (even if the Netscape interface they put on it was bloated). I reckon if you did the same test again in 10 years time once IE6 is no-longer supported (fingers crossed!) and all the IE6 fixes had slowly filtered out of use then the old Moz engine would do a better job of rendering pages.
The original Opera was wonderful - the install image only used half a floppy disk, and it was really fast! It took me a while to accept tabbed browsing (Opera's original tabbed-only was annoying, but being able to have tabs and windows both is great.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
no such thing.
At most it shows the most 'web master' are complete idiots.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At least use IE4 and Netscape 4 Gold. Netscape post 4 was the AOL crappified Netscape.
It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, and can play Flash and Java content, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death."
Well, if IE6 had died instead of Netscape, then the "Netscape standard" might be able to surf the modern web, did you think about that ?
And we would all be talking about "the time when Microsoft tried to pervertise the Internet browser market."
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Tee hee. This is very funny. IE6 is still a modern browser for millions of people. I get it, you're saying that IE6 is like Netscape or something. Oh, that is funny.
Now go out and shovel the sidewalk.
... for the simple and painful reason that much of the web, even to this day, is built to account for IE6....
All this means is that an unmodified version of Netscape 6 didn't stand the test of time as well. Netscape 6 (and up) was based on the same underlying software as Mozillla/SeaMonkey and Firefox. Were Netscape still being updated today, it would be running a newer version of Gecko, making it a very capable browser.
I only support IE6 if a client pays extra for it. FFS it's 10 years old.
I recently did the following. On an old laptop I installed Windows 95. Then IE4 and Netscape Communicator 4.08
I couldn't browse anything. I mean, not even microsoft.com.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
And like the common cold, it's not going to cause as much damage as say, smallpox - even though there's no cure for it yet.
I did exactly that last year in a Virtual PC VM. ISTR I had to install IE, Win32s, and MS's 16-bit TCP/IP stack to get it all working. The result was surprisingly usable, considering the OS dates from the early '90s. Not to say that it rendered everything well, or that it didn't crash, but it was an interesting exercise in retrocomputing.
It did a lot better than Mosaic 3 on WinXP, which would crash upon loading /any/ website, so far as I could tell.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Wake me when the author pits NCSA Mosaic against lynx.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
perhaps it is not a matter of websites still supporting old browsers, but old websites using old standards - like using tables for layout and font tags instead of CSS - and they still work in the new browsers because new browers still support the old standards.
Its light fast and does not display websites correctly, does not do HTTPS either, take a walk on the wild side with 2.0, makes for a good website text reader. ; -) I tried it in Windows 7 the other week, 725kb of pure fun, what nostalgia!
We're still trying to get certain software to play nice with IE7 and IE8. Therefore, IE6 is still deployed to all computers.
Deploy IE6 and Chrome Frame. That way, sites that opt in to Chrome will get Chrome, and all other sites will get IE6.
Some time ago I tried running todays web with IE1.5. THAT was hardcore, no frames support ftw!
It imaged display:table/table-row/table-cell better than Firefox 3.6.13. Much better, in fact, it was downright gorgeous. It couldn't handle display:inline-block, but it handled Mozilla's "-moz" CSS for rounded rectangles just fine. jQuery 1.5 traversed its DOM perfectly, but it reported wrong sizes for block elements in .width() and .height(). (It was in QuirksMode, and by that I mean that $.support.boxModel was false. So it appears that jQuery used the MSIE 6/7 QuirksMode algorithm for height and width, when it should have used W3C box model algorithm instead.) AJAX and JSON worked fine.
I just finished working on a CSS-manipulation jQuery plug-in, so I had a tester page handy to research this stuff. It's not like I researched it for hours or anything. I had all of this info at my fingertips pretty quickly. All in all, it appears that Netscape 8.1 was pretty amazing for its day, and well-tolerable, even now.
I couldn't stop myself from reading this post in Pixelfari.
I work a fair bit at a US national lab which will remain nameless, but as a Foreign National I'm not allowed to use most of the machines. Instead there's a handful of *old* Sun boxes running CDE and Netscape Communicator 4.0. I shit you not. I half expect to hear the familiar warble of a modem, and browsing the half of the internet which isn't blocked by the filter becomes nearly impossible. Does mean I get a surprisingly large amount of work done though.
I have been developing websites commercially for about 5 years now and it sickened me when I had to add IE6 compatibility on some websites because it was requested to have that compatibility. You can get the layout to look mostly like how you want it to but the functionality is greatly degraded. You might be able to design an entire site around javascript but that would not only be hell but it would destroy the purpose of adding IE6 compatibility as those who still uses that browser (the few) won't have javascript enabled because it's all business. I'm sure there are those who don't know any better but they were usually never our target audience to begin with, at least on paper. Some clients were cool and didn't care to support IE6 and you definitively come across programmers that feel obligated to support it and that you're breaking a commandment if you don't. Honestly? It all depends on who you're target audience is. Already you have to add IE 7, 8 and 9 compatibility and they all handle things differently, and sometimes you might have to do subversion support as well, then there's firefox, opera, safari, chrome, etc... But for the most part, you can make it universally compatible if you program for firefox. You'll encounter song transparency errors and maybe things will be off by a pixel or three on occasion but thankfully it's not as bad as like IE handles things. If you program correctly, you might be able to get 4/5 browsers to work just fine, if you have to adjust things, you'll need to create a javascript file that detects the browser agent and send them to the correct css file. It's a true pain but that's what programmers have to deal with when there's not a single standard for every release. The w3c is a guide, not a standard unfortunately =/
The 6x and 7x lines were premature at best
I still vividly remember trying Netscape 6.0.
It was, and still is, the single worst piece of name-brand software I have ever tried in my life. It was clearly pre-alpha quality.
In the space of just 15 minutes, I realized to my amazement that I had just witnessed the death of the "Netscape" brand name before my very eyes. I knew that no browser brand name could possibly survive the widespread release of pre-alpha code -- especially in light of the high expectations that everyone had after waiting for several years for Netscape to release anything new.
I also realized that there must be terrible internal problems within Netscape to allow that code to be released. I knew there was only a tiny chance that the company could survive a management team with that magnitude of incompetence.