** Adam Trickett <adam.trickett@???> [2007-12-29 13:12]:
> On Friday 28 Dec 2007, Tim wrote:
> > AOL pull the Netscape plug
> >
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7163547.stm
>
> Indeed the King is Dead, Long Live the King...
>
> Actually I've not seen anyone use Netscape in years, I didn't know AOL even
> bothered with it anymore. When you look back at Netscape it didn't really
> have an illustrious history.
>
> 1) Netscape browsers have a history of being buggy and nonstandard compliant.
Not sure about the buggy side of things, I had few problems, but I
always thought they were more standard compliant than IE. Of course they
were prone to trying to define the standards, I really can't remember
whether they were nicer about doing this than the MS embrace and extend
concept :) I do remember that they were much better for developing
websites with, since IE was very bad at guessing what you meant, so if
it guessed right you never fixed your HTML. If I had a penn for the
number of broken sites I've visited that worked fine in IE...
> 2) Netscape was expensive for companies to use.
When you had to purchase the browser yes. I got my first copy on one of
the Netscape amnesties where those that used it without paying could get
a cheap license :) On the other side of the coin, the server side
products worked out much cheaper per head than MS Exchange, and that was
before you factored in the higher hardware requirements.
> 3) Netscape did run on multiple platforms.
True enough, I had it running on OS/2, and that was before they'd
written a native OS/2 version. From memory it took a little tweaking for
running in Win-OS/2 - I can't think why it would be an achievement
otherwise, unless it was the Win32 library issues just prior to the
release of Windows 95.
<<snp>>
> When you look back the noticeable thing is that they weren't Microsoft and
> their stuff worked on Unix. Without them the Internet wouldn't be as it is
> today, but that's probably not because of their browser more because they
> provoked Microsoft into action.
You can take that two ways. Without Microsoft stagnating things, what
innovations would we have had by now? ;)
** end quote [Adam Trickett]
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