Not the best browser, but not the worst either
Written: Jun 10 '00 (Updated Oct 10 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Handles code as is without fixing user errors
Cons: Poor table rendering, doesn't recognise all CSS elements
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| redwolfoz's Full Review: Sun Netscape 6 for Unix |
This is a counter opinion to aaanativearts review of Netscape Navigator.
http://redwolf.epinions.com/cmd-review-5D76-10CC25E1-393E3406-prod1
Being a web designer is not all beer and skittles, and the companies that make browsers seem to go out of their way to make our lives difficult. Things display differently on each browser and over each platform, and I won't even go into the horror of designing for the WebTV Liberate box.
When you design web sites you have to take everything into consideration — and that means designing for multiple configurations, not just one. I design web pages for a living and dealing with different browsers, different versions of browsers and different platforms can make you totally nuts at times.
While slagging off the opposition sounds good at first, it isn't going to accomplish anything. You have to deal with the quirks (features?) of each browser.
Netscape Navigator's main problem for me is its inability to correctly handle tables — and as tables are an essential for laying out all but the most basic of sites, this is a serious problem. It renders nested tables very slowly — hence the speed problem aaanativearts mentioned — it has trouble with table backgrounds, as well as an inability to handle a mixture of absolute and percentage cell widths.
NN also has a problem with some elements of CSS (cascading style sheets) It is extremely dodgy with the implementation of the "span" tag and some use of "style" elements within other tags — tends to have trouble picking up the close of the tag and will happily cascade your selected style (a bold, green, 18 point heading, for example) through the rest of your document. Adding these style elements to the CSS itself and implementing them as a "class" usually solves the problem, but when "span" tags are essential, you really have to revert to the older "font" tags.
Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has the wonderful feature of finishing incomplete tags. Cute if you only expect IE users to see your page, but if it's a missing table tag that's been completed for you other browser may just render your page blank. I find this feature extremely annoying, as it is compensating for user error and the people writing the pages are learning nothing from their mistakes.
Both browsers have their individual quirks — rendering text in slightly different sizes and the really annoying rendering of form elements. NN text fields are generally twice as long as those viewed through IE, which can throw your form design into disarray.
I have to strongly disagree with aaanativearts over NN's ability to handle JavaScript and dHTML (dynamic HTML). All level 4 browsers are capable of handling them, just to differing degrees — NN supports JavaScript 1.2 but is not fully compliant with ECMA-262, while IE is. But then NN had JavaScript 1.0 support from version 2 where IE didn't bring it in until version 3.
If you are writing JavaScript you must write it to work on both the major browsers, failure to do so is just laziness on the part of the programmer. For an example of poorly written dHTML navigation, take a look at Microsoft's home page (http://www.microsoft.com/) the navigation does not work in Netscape Navigator — congratulations to Microsoft for yet another attempt at shafting the opposition and annoying users.
aaanativearts condemnation of NN at mishandling the output of a WYSIWYG web design package is misplaced. The fault is instead with the WYSIWYG program. In fact Netscape Composer is atrocious at laying pages out and its bloated code is hideous. But it is still a far sight better than the evilness of FrontPage, with its Microsoft-centric enhancements that are completely contrary to current web standards and its difficulty in integrating user written code.
The worst coding I've seen is the garbage generated by Microsoft when you convert Word or PowerPoint documents using the in-built utility, the bloating produced is completely against the spirit of the web with its fast, easily accessible pages.
IE does comply to the HTML 4 standards better than NN (well it did until IE 5.5 was released) This means that it accepts more of the functions of CSS (cascading style sheets) and javascript than NN does. Although the version 6 in pre-release (or any of the Mozilla releases) far exceeds IE in the web standards department — it renders pages exactly, my personal dream come true.
As I run both browsers all the time, aaanativearts is quite correct in her statement of NN's inherent instability. I crash it constantly, but IE doesn't escape cleanly in that department either, as I crash it quite often too.
One of the necessities of good web page design is testing on different platforms using different browsers. I run IE 4, NN 4, NN 6 and Mozilla M14 together under Windows NT. What I really need is NN 3, IE 3 and IE 5 as well.
While I can set up NN 3 with a bit of tweaking, and IE 3 (provided I use the 16 bit version and load it prior to version 4) but I can't have IE 5 as well. IE 5 does have an option when loading of keeping my version 4 browser, but in reality it mutilates it into a strange hybrid of 4 and 5 — which means it displays web pages differently to a native version 4. And attempting to remove IE is nearly impossible — I managed to get version 5 off my system but it refused to load version 4 cleanly — in the end I was forced to dump my hard drive and start from scratch.
Overall, both NN and IE could do with improvement. But if you write web pages you need both browsers for testing. Using both is essential for all good web designers, and a great learning tool for beginners.
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/
Mozilla Organisation
http://www.mozilla.org/
© 2000 Red Wolf — All rights reserved
Recommended:
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redwolfoz
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Member: Red Wolf
Location: Sydney, Australia
Reviews written: 56
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About Me:
Frequently found in darkened rooms watching the flicker of lights across a silver screen
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