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Communicator Is Losing The War.....
Carnage4Life writes "Here's a ZDNet article that backs up the post by Dave Whitinger..it seems corporate IT types are tired of waiting for Navigator to catch up and may begin to abandon it... Wonder where that leaves Linux users if websites start tending to be IE enabled to perform useful tasks."
I just thought I'd try to sum up the general feelings of users as far as Netscape goes. I work tech support for an ISP and I think this also adresses a lot of issues that regular users run into:
1) Support the damn standards.
I want to build compliant style sheets and tables and actually have them look decent in both browsers. I don't want some wacky bug screwing with table rendering or mucking about with javascript. I want JavaScript to work without specifying which browser I'm taking into account and writing an individual subroutine for each one.
2) Let me download just the browser again.
Dear Netscape Messenger development team;
Messenger sucks.
As someone who works in tech support, I'm sick of explaining to people why there are user interface issues that crop up, why some things are displayed inline and others aren't. I honestly would rather use a 3rd party mail program than that bloated POS. On a wintel platform, follow Microsoft's lead and make the mail and new separate programs, it'll make everyone happier.
Also, nobody uses Collabra, Composer or any of the other crap that you shovel into every release. There are other programs which do the job much better. This goes for AOL IMmer too, I have ICQ thank you very much. If I want AOL IMmer, I know where to get it. A bit of an idea, take all the coders working on that crap and have them work on the main browser, finding bugs and whatnot.
A functional web browser that is under a 10 meg download wouldn't be bad.
3) Tone down the user interface.
Nobody needs a goddamned shop button. I found that I use a grand total of 4 buttons on my browser:
back, forward, stop, and refresh.
That is all, anything else is mostly useless. Nobody uses the Cool sites crap, or anything else for that matter. More features that take up room. People will invariably use the extra crap for stuff it wasn't intended to be used for, breaking the browser, leading to a call to tech support.
4) Keep bookmarks html.
This is the one thing that Navigator has done right. If I want to move bookmarks from one version to another, or one computer to another I just need to copy a file, unlike IE where I have to copy a whole directory.
5) Load time counts.
Yes, the new layout engine is fast, but that doesn't mean anything if the damn program takes 30 seconds to load. The computers that we use at work are pII-266's with 64 megs of RAM, and IE5 loads in 2 seconds, Navigator takes about 30 seconds to load. You can make all the excuses you want about IE5 being part of the OS and all that. That is beside the point, if IE can do it, so can Navigator, figure out a way. Nobody notices if a web page loads in 1.4 seconds in one browser and 1.7 in another, If the interface feels slow and clunky, that is enough to turn me off.
6) Make the interface decent.
See how smooth IE is, attempt to make Navigator look similar. Navigator is too industrial looking for most peoples tastes. This may be harder because M$ has hidden a lot of the API that IE uses (it is undocumented). Netscape can at least try to get Navigator to look close. This is a minor point, but it counts.
7) A bit controversial, but if IE has bugs, occasionally try to make the page look decent anyway.
People write bad html, tested in only IE. IE renders it the way they want it to render and that is enough. I'm not supporting bad HTML, but it is not the browser's job to become style police. There are a lot of bugs out there and a lot of sites taking advantage of those bugs. Navigator is now in a position of playing catch up. Emma in Nebraska doesn't care about HTML correctness, she cares about being able to read webpages, regardless of the platform they were designed on. Keep standards compliance, but don't be totally rigid on it. In situations where the standard is not clear, follow Microsoft's implementation of it.
I was a faithful Navigator user up until version 4. I continued to use Navigator for a while after it was released, but fewer and fewer sites looked correct and I had to switch to IE. I go over to the people working in web adesign where I work and they are constantly cussing out Navigator.
Anyone have anything else to add?
Andrew (patiently awaitng a version of Navigator that doesn't suck dead kittens through straws.)