On Wed, 28 May 2003, John Hudson wrote: > At 08:32 PM 5/28/2003, John Cowan wrote: > > >Netscape 4.x is dead. > > I wish it were. Monitoring the web traffic at one of the sites I'm involved > with, I am dismayed to see that more than 5% of visitors are using Netscape > 4.7.
You should not be dismayed. We have a web application for use in my organization that uses Javascript extensively for providing interactive data manipulation on the client side. In my tests, Internet Explorer 5+ and Mozilla/Netscape 6+ run the Javascript code in some cases *much* more slowly. These tests covered Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms. Slow performance is obnoxious, so we recommend Netscape 4.x for that application since it showed the best performance across different platforms in our heterogenous environment. We could have gone with client-side Java, but the reality is that we would then risk having even *slower* performance. Lots of organizations may have reasons like these for sticking with older, arguably obsolete software like Netscape 4.x. With regard to Unicode/UTF-8 support, a legacy program like Netscape 4.x naturally has limitations.