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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.
Posted from SeaMonkey. Personally I still like having an HTML editor, browser and email client all in one package.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I would say this is one time we should all be damned happy that MSFT didn't stick with its famous backwards compatibility. Why? One word: ActiveX.
At the time ActiveX sounded like a good idea, an easy way to write code for intranets that could be easily deployed and updated from the corporate office but sadly whomever was in charge of security at MSFT was playing hooky that week and it turned out to be a malware writers wet dream. Thanks to how deeply ActiveX was allowed to hook into the underlying OS simply viewing a web page could give a well written piece of ActiveX malware complete control of the system, while even a shitty piece of ActiveX malware could hook into the browser and do all kinds of nasty things.
So we should all be glad that someone at MSFT got the memo and realized that ActiveX was a seriously BAD idea and killed it deader than Dixie. Oh and for all the complaints of web developers about IE 6 and the shitty code you had to write for it? Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.
Yes MSFT deserves every single bit of hatred for walking away from IE after they won the battle against Netscape, hell they probably should have been hit with a class action for the risk they put every XP user through by not upkeeping their browser while still leaving it installed and default. But let us not forget that "web standards" were more like web suggestions at that time and BOTH sides played seriously fast and loose, remember the "blink" tag in NS?
Frankly both sides sucked the big wet titty and I'm just glad that today we have a wealth (some might even say a glut) of choices, from Firefox/Seamonkey/Kmeleon to Chrome/Chromium/Dragon/Safari to Opera all by its lonesome. Now users have so many well running choices that it is more a personal preference than anything else, and IE is increasingly becoming a footnote of history just like Netscape. Thankfully the bad old days of two shitty browsers is behind us and we can surf the web OUR way, not spend all our time dealing with the "quirks" of one of the big two.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.