Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources Unicode and Multilingual Web BrowsersĪlthough Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is widely used, it does not have as good Unicode support as some of its competitors.
Let's hope ISP will wake up, eventually, and update their CDs so that we'll finally be able to use the new possibilities the W3C has been working on for two years. Mozilla is mature enough to replace it, isn't it ? Or even a recent NN version.
I wouldn't be whinning about that here if my customer didn't make me recode his website to make it NN4 compliant (wow, great creepy code with tables, frames, and all).Ī solution would be for the ISP to *stop* distributing this old NN version with their CDs. And to some extent, recent-standards-non-compliant. So if you are a webmaster, and that you or your customers want the majority of the people to be able to view your website, you have no choice but make your HTML code NN4 compliant. I mean it doesn't support recent standards. However, the fact is : many internet users are beginners, and many beginners use the browser they were given in the first place (IE5 or NN, maybe they prefer NN because of its mail client which is less effective in virus auto-install).
We'll see what NN7 will change in this business.
Since NN6 is such a sloooow program, it's not much of a surprise, I agree. So the problem is : I've never seen any ISP shipping its CD with a NN >4 browser. Opera is quite a good, rapid, nice browser, but since the free version has a banner and since it's not on the ISP CDs, it will never make it amongst beginners. But NN4.* doesn't even support CSS1, which is really a shame if we plan to use HTML4.01 Strict.
I mean IE is not the best browser for specs compliance, and crashes quite often. I was a NN user two years ago, when I had no alternative. The fact is, ISP often offer a free CD containing MS IE5 and NN4.7. I'm really amazed to see the popularity of Netscape, especially version 4.* and especially for the "newbie internet users". More details can be found at Netscape Browser Central or in the Release Notes. Netscape 7.0 can be downloaded from Netscape's web site or FTP server. There's also a round throbber with a cool animation. Improved instant messaging features including file transfers, Buddy Alerts and Buddy Icons are provided by AOL Instant Messenger for Netscape and ICQ for Netscape. These include the ability to access Netscape Webmail and AOL accounts directly from within Mail Newsgroups, a button to easily toggle the display of My Sidebar in Navigator and P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) support for automated cookie handling. Netscape 7.0 also has several features not found in Mozilla.
The new version boasts several enhancements over the 0.9.4-based Netscape 6.2, including tabbed browsing, the ability to save complete web pages, print preview, site icons (Favicons), a download manager, full screen mode (Windows only), Quick Search within Mail Newsgroups and Address Book, return receipts, mail labels, (Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) S/MIME mail encryption, CSS support in Composer and one-click web page publishing. This latest release is based on Mozilla 1.0.1, making it the first Netscape browser to be built upon post-1.0 code. Netscape Communications Corporation today launched the final version of Netscape 7.0.