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Yes, I really mean it. Any web developper probably already knows this.
Take the latest problem I had for instance. My bookmarks page is structured as follows: a big table containing for the most part two columns each of which contains another table with the different entries. The idea is that the rows being of different length this allows them to each have their prefered size without interfering with the size of the rows in the other column.
Now if you have had a look at it you may have noticed that the first and second column do not start at the same level. This is not a bug in my html, this is a bug in Netscape. I set both columns to be 'valign=top' and I know for sure that that's what netscape does because if I change the setting I get different results. But still Netscape persists in starting the left column a little bit lower than the right column. Note that this is not a bug of Netscape on Linux. I get the exact same result with Netscape on Windows.
Note: The bug is no longer there, I removed the padding (td.Header { padding: 3px; }) that was declared in the stylesheet and netscape is not longer lost
Netscape's handling of tables in general is crappy. For instance it's because of Netscape that you have to add a fake row of columns containing stuff like '<img src="1x1.gif" hspace="23" width="1">' if you want your columns to be of a specific width in subsequent rows.
It's also only with Netscape (mainly the 4.0 series) that I get problems with some Javascript code so that every once in a while I get a Javascript error. Just reloading the page will 'solve' the problem.
It's still Netscape that has problems with CSS so that sometimes the page will display fine and once the download is finished the page redisplays and suddenly all my CSS specifications are gone! Note that it seems to be in part caused by the presence of Javascripts. And then why is it that Netscape is even more likely to crash when you add SSL to the mix? I know a site where you just merely have to display 2 pages, do Back and that's it. Netscape's gone.
That's one thing that really impresses me with Netscape. How fast it disappears on Linux when it crashes! I mean, you have maybe 5 or 6 Netscape windows dowloading stuff (so that you can read it offline once you've disconnected) and you just click on some link or hit the Back button. And suddenly, in less than one hundreth of a second for sure, all your Netscape windows are gone. They disappear so fast that you are still looking for that Back/Home/Reload button long after they're gone!
At least it's not like on NT where Netscape sometimes stops reacting when you click on a link. When that happens you have two options. "Open in new window" might still work. Otherwise the only solution is to close all your windows and then start the "Task manager" to make sure there is not a rogue Netscape process still running in the background!
Hey Netscape even forced me to give up SSI on a web site. SSI means "Server Side Includes" which means it is totally transparent for web browsers. And yet when I had SSI on the server Netscape 4.05 would almost systematically fail to understand the Javascript applet that was in the page. The only way I can explain this is that there was a timing issue and with SSI the included stuff arrived in a separate network packet thus causing the problem.
Another fun bug, NT specific this one. It's still about the same set of html pages. I preprocess it so that it can be put on a CD. The web site is put in a sub directory so that all the links become something like '/Web/...'. If you start Netscape and drag and drop the index file that is in the root directory on Netscape then all is fine. But not so if you double-click on the index file. All the pages will appear fine except the images in the scrolling news generated by the Javascript applet! Why should it make a difference whether you drag and drop an html file on the browser or double-click on it?
With Internet Explorer 4 I get no such problem. As far as html layout is concerned, IE 4 is far less buggy than all of the Netscape 4.0x to 4.61 versions. In fact when write an html page I always test it in Netscape. If I get it to work in Netscape then I know that it will render well in IE 4.0 ! Some say that the Netscape share of the browser market (is it still a market when everything is free?) has gone from 70% down to 30%. Well as far as I am concerned this is well deserved.
I don't know yet how good Geeko is. I have read very good reviews about it. I hope it will live up to its reviews and I long for the day when I can just ignore Netscape.
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