Okay, so you make this really cool web page, employing the most recent html and java script. It looks beautiful on Internet Explorer. Then you check it on Netscape. That familiar sinking feeling sets in. Something is terribly wrong here! If you're lucky, they have simply made you look like a moron with a ton of broken links. The truly unfortunate people don't even get that much. You look at their sites using Netscape and all you can see is the html text.

Why is this happening? Why must you endure letter after letter from Netscape users complaining because they can't see your site properly? Some of them even giving your site terrible reviews and making it even harder to get this labor of love of yours out to the right audience. The answer is that there is no simple answer. Experts say that Netscape has trouble reading anything over html 2.0 and that java script is the bane of this browsers existence. But to the users of this browser that means that Netscape's failure to keep up with the rest of the world is causing their internet experience to be less than it should be.

If you try to get answers as to why this is the case, you will hit a dead end. Netscape states very clearly on their site that they do not respond to any e-mail that you send them, but, they say, "rest assured, we do read every piece of mail we receive." Yeah, right.

I've heard that Netscape is planning on having major changes to new versions. That would be wonderful, but I fear that the updates they make will be too little, too late to even hope to keep up with their main competitor, Microsoft Internet Explorer, the one browser that does not let it's users down when they try to look at websites using the very latest in html techniques.

If you are just doing basic browsing and see no need to change browsers, that's your choice. But if you see sites that don't operate properly under Netscape don't complain to or berate the web designers. It is nice if you drop a simple note explaining that it can't be seen properly on Netscape, but the odds are good if the site appears to have a lot of broken links or nothing but html shows up that the problem is indeed with your browser, not with the site.



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