Friday, January 6th, 2006
On old browsers and operating systems
I know someone who insists on using Netscape 4.7 on Mac OS 9.2. Not only that, they insist on telling other people how good Netscape 4.7 is and telling people they should design their sites for Netscape 4.7.
For those of you doing the math, the Netscape 4.x line started in June 1997. The last of the 4.x versions, 4.8, was release in August 2002. More history is available from the Netscape Browser Archive. Depending on the exact version number Netscape 4.7 was “current” anywhere from September 1999 to November 2001. In early 2003 Apple stopped shipping systems with the option of OS 9.2.
Don’t get me wrong, older technology is great if it’s all you have and it does what you need. I still have Lynx installed on my Windows XP box for testing accessibility. I know the limitations of using a text only browser in 2006. Netscape 4.7 wasn’t even a good browser when it was current.
How do you get someone stuck in the last decade to see the light. There are scores of reasons to move on and sometimes a line must be drawn . So how do you get someone out of an outdated technology rut?
This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Information Technology and Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.One Response to “On old browsers and operating systems”
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Written by Dan Greene, web designer and library geek. Topics covered here include Library and Information Science, Information Technology, web design, and maybe even a monk or two (more...)
There have been 392 entries and 345 comments posted since this blog was started in May 2003.
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January 13th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
[...] As I’ve said before Netscape 4.x is a horrible browser, but I wanted to make sure the content was accessible for that 1% of people that are unfortunate enough to use it. The site is also accessible in Lynx. Further testing at Browser Emulator shows that the site will work in several older browsers, Netscape 1.0 for example Speed tests show that the site is at least bearable on a dialup connection. I also checked against WCAGandSection 508 guidlines and didn’t find any problems. [...]