Обсуждение: The Netscape 4 Experience

I tested in Netscape 4.77/Mac. Wow. Talk about nostalgia! The current
site renders pretty closely to what I get in modern browsers, though it
takes quite a while to load (might be my machine, running OS9 in
emulation, might be the nested table structure) and the type is too
small.

Checking the pages I'd worked on, they load fast and all the
information is there, but there's not presentation, as it doesn't apply
the CSS. Again, the type is in general too small.

For some reason, Euler Taveira de Oliveira's pages (model-4.html,
model-6.html, and model-7.html) wouldn't load properly. They'd start to
load and then stall for at least a minute, even locking up the whole
browser. If I went and did something else, trying to get the browser to
refresh, coming back after a minute or two would show the page loaded.
And they look like they do in modern browsers, even with good type
size! But as soon as I would do anything (like resize the window),
Netscape would want to rerender the page and lock up again. My gut
feeling is that there's something in running Netscape 4.7 under Mac OS9
emulation, possibly rendering the nested tables, that's causing this
slow down. (The current postgresql.org page behaves similarly, just
doesn't take so long to render.)

How much support should we give older browsers (4.x and before)? My
little brief excursion with Netscape isn't very realistic. You'd have
to be insane to run Netscape 4.7 in Classic on Mac OS X. Have others
tested these pages on similarly old software? I'd like to see visitors
using older browsers getting the information, and since I'd suspect a
majority of people using 4.x browsers are also on older hardware,
possibly with slower, possibly dial-up connections, page size and
render times may be an issue. Of course I want to help make the
PostgreSQL site look great (otherwise I wouldn't be here). But if it's
important to provide a good experience even with older browsers, I
think "a good experience with older browsers" might mean "a fast,
information rich" user experience rather than "a slow but pretty" user
experience.

So it boils down to two things:

1. Do we want to support older browsers? I think the answer is yes, of
course we do. Why turn anyone away if we don't have to?

2. What kind of experience do we want for people using older browsers?
(and how do we give it to them?)

Michael

Michael Glaesemann wrote:
<snip>
> How much support should we give older browsers (4.x and before)?

Hi Michael,

This might be a useful guide,:

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm

However, for our particular (present) users, we may be better off
looking at the stats generated from our present websites:

http://www.postgresql.org/stats

These are the stats for SourceForge, if that's helpful as well:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?framename=mainright&output=browserdetail

Personally, I'm not aware of even many corporates that are using
Netscape 4.x these days.  My feeling is that we're now finally safe to
move past trying to be compatible with Netscape 4.x at this stage.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


> My little brief excursion with Netscape isn't very realistic. You'd have to
> be insane to run Netscape 4.7 in Classic on Mac OS X. Have others tested
> these pages on similarly old software? I'd like to see visitors using
> older browsers getting the information, and since I'd suspect a majority
> of people using 4.x browsers are also on older hardware, possibly with
> slower, possibly dial-up connections, page size and render times may be
> an issue. Of course I want to help make the PostgreSQL site look great
> (otherwise I wouldn't be here). But if it's important to provide a good
> experience even with older browsers, I think "a good experience with
> older browsers" might mean "a fast, information rich" user experience
> rather than "a slow but pretty" user experience.
>
> So it boils down to two things:
>
> 1. Do we want to support older browsers? I think the answer is yes, of
> course we do. Why turn anyone away if we don't have to?
>
> 2. What kind of experience do we want for people using older browsers?
> (and how do we give it to them?)
>
> Michael
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend

-On [20031115 10:12], Justin Clift (justin@postgresql.org) wrote:
>Personally, I'm not aware of even many corporates that are using
>Netscape 4.x these days.  My feeling is that we're now finally safe to
>move past trying to be compatible with Netscape 4.x at this stage.

That's definately true.  With the TenDRA.org statistics I also noted a
large absence of MSIE 4.x and Netscape 4.x.  Not to mention the amount
of security holes present in those browsers.

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
PGP fingerprint: 2D92 980E 45FE 2C28 9DB7  9D88 97E6 839B 2EAC 625B
http://www.tendra.org/   | http://www.in-nomine.org/~asmodai/diary/
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources...

On Saturday, November 15, 2003, at 06:26 PM, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai
wrote:

> -On [20031115 10:12], Justin Clift (justin@postgresql.org) wrote:
>> Personally, I'm not aware of even many corporates that are using
>> Netscape 4.x these days.  My feeling is that we're now finally safe to
>> move past trying to be compatible with Netscape 4.x at this stage.
>
> That's definately true.  With the TenDRA.org statistics I also noted a
> large absence of MSIE 4.x and Netscape 4.x.  Not to mention the amount
> of security holes present in those browsers.

Thanks for the links, Justin. Someone else (Dave maybe?) to the stats
pages, so I knew that the proportion of visitors using earlier versions
is definitely dropping off (thankfully).

It's good to hear your opinions. So the feeling is that there's no need
to cater to this increasingly small percentage? I wouldn't have a
problem with that. Just one less thing to focus on.

Michael