blufive's pages

The Browser Wars

(August 2002)

How To Help

Use A Modern Browser

If you're using Netscape 4.x, you're using a fossil. It's not had a significant update for over three years, and it WILL completely mess up any site written using CSS as per the W3C specs. Internet Explorer 4 is better, but not much. Please go and get a modern web browser.

If you're an anti-Microsoft diehard, who ran away screaming when you saw how clunky Netscape 6.0 was, try Netscape 7.0. It's had an extra two years' worth of performance tuning and bug fixing since the Netscape 6.0 codebase.

If you hate the amount of extra crud that Netscape 7 comes bundled with, or its habit of spewing AOL icons all over your desktop, try its open-source sibling, Mozilla.

If you've got a low-spec machine, and you're sticking with an old browser because the new ones are too resource-hungry, try Opera, or one of Mozilla's lightweight cousins (Camino, Mozilla Firebird, Galeon and K-Meleon)

There are other browsers, too, but I've not listed them because I have no idea how good their standards support is.

As you may have gathered, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but speaking as a web designer, I would much rather you used IE5/Mac or IE6/Win than Netscape 4.x. I'd be happier still if you used Mozilla, but it's your choice.

If you write web pages, learn the standards - and use them

If nothing else, learn CSS. It will make your life easier.

If you use DHTML, learn the W3C standard DOM (Document Object Model), and start using it in preference to Microsoft's proprietary document.all DOM. The W3C standard is already well supported by recent versions of IE, the mozilla family of browsers (including Netscape 6/7) and Opera 7. If you want to write one set of code which works in the largest number of browsers, support for the W3C DOM is (depending upon whose stats you believe) already better than support for Microsoft's proprietary document.all API.