Re: Browsers - Was... Javascript usage in site

On Wednesday 02 January 2002 05:21, Larry Coats wrote:
> I don't feel that they lost
> the war because they charged for the browser. I feel they lost the war
> because they failed to keep up.

Nope. They lost for the simplest of reasons - greed and laziness.
1. OEM's were both (greedy and lazy) in that they didn;t bother to install 
another browser in machines they built if one was included in the operating 
system install (IE). 
2. ALSO M$ had more than a few illegal contracts with OEM's NOT to install 
competing browsers (yes - ILLEGAL - ask the anti-trust findings. The original 
penalty may have been dropped, but the findings of illegal monopolistic 
behaviour still stand).
3. User-land these days is by and large a) not capable and/or b) not 
interested in installing software. Laziness. Lowest common denominator. A 
cultural thing ...

> They took some wrong turns with Netscape
> 4, coming up with the layer tag, a clumsy DHTML DOM, and Javascript
> Style Sheets. They then took far too long to come out with Netscape 5,
> which was never even released.

Agreed. I wonder how much better their implementations would have been though 
if they hadn't had to incrementally lay off the Netscape programming team 
when times got hard.

That wasn't the only mistake they made though. Netscape in it's prime was the 
most arrogant mob of SOB's to deal with. We tried to negotiate to re-sell the 
earlier commercial versions. NS was a total pain and very unpleasant for 
ordinary (small business) mortals to do business with.

> I'm currently using Netscape 6 as my primary browser. I sure wish it was
> truly a Netscape product - I feel it would be much better. I don't much
> like what AOL has done with it, and I really miss some of the very handy
> facilities that Netscape 4 had.

I don't much like the AOL-ing of Mozilla = Netscape 6 either. I guess that's 
why I use Mozilla by preference, even if things break sometimes with new 
versions. (after all Mozilla is a "developers release" and WILL break things 
from time to time - says so in the docs ;-)

> I don't imagine that Netscape 6 is going to become a widely used browser
> unless AOL decides to use it instead of IE for it's next release of AOL.

I understand that is almost exaclty what is going to happen. Not necessarily 
Netscape (as in 6) but a browser based on the Gecko rendering engine which is 
at the heart of Mozilla.

Coding for Mozilla / IE5 is almost fun again. NN4.x is a pain, as is IE4 (mac 
version especially) and I wish they would both disappear! Unfortunately I 
don't have a lot of say in that ... 

UNLESS I only code for Mozilla / IE5. Then NN4 and IE4 people won't bother to 
stay at my sites, and my logs will reflect only Mozilla, NN6 and IE5+. Then 
my problems would go away ;-) (NOTE: for those who missed it this is a 
heavilly sarcastic reflection on people who code only for IE, not checking in 
Netscape/Mozilla, and believe their logs reflect a true cross-section of web 
users. If your sites don't work in NN (any version) then NN users aren't 
going to stay there to make an impact on your logs now ... are they?

Cheers,
KathyW.

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