The King Is Dead; Long Live the King

November 7, 2001

The day has finally come. After spending months silently lambasting webmasters who no longer support Netscape 4, I've become one of them.

Recently, I completed the re-write of my site to be HTML 4.01 and CSS 1 compliant. After spending several hours creating the style sheets that control the placement of everything and making sure that everything worked and still validated, I found out that Brain Farts breaks Netscape 4. I tried for a couple more hours to make it work, but it just isn't happening.

So I had to make a hard choice: Give up my (idealistic) goal of having a standards-compliant site, or give up on Netscape 4? I finally decided to put Netscape 4 out to pasture.

I'm actually kind of conflicted about this. I'm by no means a supporter of Microsoft -- for reasons both political and due to product quality -- but I can no longer spend the time on what is essentially my hobby for Netscape's buggy (and sometimes downright wrong) interpretation of the standards.

So if you're like me and don't want to use M$ products, please go download Netscape 6.2 from www.netscape.com or Mozilla 0.9.5 from www.mozilla.org if you want a good browser that is more standards-compliant than anything released on the PC. (OK, technically Opera 5's a little better -- www.opera.com -- but I've been following Mozilla's progress for a couple years now and I'm kinda rooting for it.)

Sorry for the inconvinience, Netscape 4 users.

November 6, 2001November 8, 2001