Re: OT: CXS chart and machine-readable Unicode->CXS mappings

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 01:05:38PM -0500, jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM
wrote:
> Netscape 4 is (a) used by well under 1% of the web audience these days
Confirmed.  We get almost no hits from Netscape 4 browsers on cnn.com
these days.  But until *very* recently, Netscape 4.x was the dominant
Netscape-family browser version; it appears that people are finally
noticing that Netscape 7 isn't the horrid piece of not-ready-for-release
crapola that Netscape 6 was.

To be fair, Netscape was in a big hurry to release 6 because they still
thought they had a shot at regaining their once-dominant position in
the market.  But it was too late; the long hiatus between 4.7 and 7,
engendered by the Mozilla project's decision to completely rewrite the
browser from scratch, had given IE all the extra boost it needed.  Not
that it needed one, probably; simply being the browser that comes with
the OS was probably enough to guarnatee its eventual dominance.  But
despite very high-quality browser products from other companies like
Opera, Netscape was the only one that ever had a real shot at competing
with IE.  A shot it lost by not releasing anything for too long.

Technically, the result of the rewrite decision is a far superior browser;
I use Firefox as my daily browser of choice and absolutely love it.
There's little doubt it's a better browser than IE; but
market-share-wise, I don't think that will make much difference.

In any case, these days Netscape 4 is pretty much only used by folks who
have older machines which don't have the resources to run the newer
browsers.  A large subset consists of those with older Macs; there
aren't a lot of browser choices for pre-X versions of Mac OS these days.

> and  (b) incredibly broken about Unicode
Indeed.  From the Unicode point of view, Netscape 4 belongs to a
prehistoric era, when one could almost safely assume that web pages were
Latin-1.

-Mark

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