Re: Windows NT (removing Internet Explorer)

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, mike shupp wrote:


> But to play devil's advocate, the "contest" between IE and Netscape
> may well be over by now. I'm seeing steady increases in the number of
> websites that suggest (or even require) IE for proper viewing, and
> encountering more and more sites which apparantly cause my system to
> lock up when using Netscape. I don't particularly like the Microsoft
> browser, but I've gotten very tired of rebooting my computer every
> hour or so.

Then the creators of those sites are terribly short-sighted. As
prominent usability engineer Jakob Nielsen has pointed out repeatedly,
users are slow to give up older browser versions. Unless site owners
want to discourage visits to their sites by massive numbers of potential
audience, they must accomodate a reasonably broad range of browser usage.

BrowserWatch tracks 24 varieties (platforms and versions) of IE and 27
of Navigator stretching back to 1.1. Usage projections from StatMarket
data lead Nielsen to conclude that

  * 	sites will have to support users with version 3 browsers until
	early 2001
  *	version 4 browsers will have to be supported until late 2003

("Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003," Alertbox Apr. 19, 1999)
	http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990418.html

It's also a good idea to track the accelerating development of Netscape
5, which is rock-solid standards compliant, compared to flaky compliance
from IE5.0x, and pathetic compliance from Netscape 4.x. Mozilla looks
like it will be available in beta version in about a month. The current
alpha version really looks good (and it's nice to see what all those
stylesheet- and xml-driven pages *should* look like).

If you're getting a lot of crashes in Netscape, try quitting and
deleting both the history file (netscape.hst) and the *entire* contents
of your cache directory. Residual bits of ill-behaved Javascript can
continue to play havoc with later pages, and that simple cleanup can
restore you to smooth browsing--till another time...

	Dorothy

*****
Dorothy Day
School of Library & Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx
*****

	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."