Retro Browser War: IE6 Vs. Netscape In 2011 211
jbrodkin writes "What if you took the raw, pre-patched, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried to surf the modern Web? What would happen? You might think firing up IE6 or Netscape would lead to an immediate onslaught of viruses, but just for fun, I decided to spend some time using these two ancient browsers. It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, and can play Flash and Java content, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death."
Or possibly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly, the fact that large numbers of corporate desktops still have IE 6 means that a non-trivial number of Web programmers code to where IE6 will still work, whereas no one is using old Netscape, even for fun, except for this dude.
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Up until relatively recently you absolutely had to include whatever hacks were necessary to get IE6 running on your site because it was the default browser on Windows and had a huge market share. Netscape hasn't had that sort of status in a really long time. So of course IE6 probably looks pretty good in comparison.
Now, look at more recent sites that don't include that kludge and see if it still looks OK.
Long live Netscape (Score:5, Insightful)
Posted from SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org]. Personally I still like having an HTML editor, browser and email client all in one package.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or possibly... (Score:2, Insightful)
Really this is an apples versus oranges comparison: IE 6 was last updated in 2008. Netscape 6.x in 2002. It's like comparing a Mac G3 versus a modern QuadCore PC. Of COURSE the older technology will not work as well as the new one
If they wanted to do a real comparison, try:
- IE 6 (2008) versus Netscape 9 (also 2008)
- IE 5 (last update: 2000) versus Netscape 4.5 (2001) - both will be about equally broken.