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Bruce Kratofil, of BJK Research, is the NABE webmaster.

Windows on the Web: August 2002

Let's talk about browsers.

Your browser choice is an important part of your web experience. When designing features for NABE.com, knowing what browser you use is important. However, the important choice isn't necessarily the choice of which brand - Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Netscape. What may be most important is the generation of browser. Why? Because older browsers may incompletely handle, or ignore, certain well-established web technologies. While NABE.com does not adopt cutting-edge technologies, we do use more than basic HTML. Thus the age of your browser will make a difference here.

Here's a fast look at your choices, both by brand and by generation.

Microsoft Internet Explorer: Visitors to our site overwhelmingly use IE. According to the user logs, 79 percent of our page views were done by some version of IE. The latest version of IE is IE 6, which shipped with Windows XP, and was available for download on Windows 98/ME/2000. Microsoft is also supporting Internet Explorer 5.5 and 5.01. Earlier versions of IE are no longer supported by Microsoft. It's important to have a supported browser - what support means is that a company will continue to supply fixes and upgrades, especially the all-important security fixes. Use IE 5.0 or any earlier version, and you are susceptible to many different threats by hackers. (As far as NABE.com is concerned, anyone using IE 5.0 or higher will be able to access all the technologies that we use on the site.)

Follow the link below to download IE 6, which will typically be around 17 MB in size. It can also be ordered on a CD for $10 US ($15 Canadian), if you have a dial-up connection and want to skip the long download.

Netscape: The current version of Netscape is 6.2.3. When Netscape 6.0 was first introduced almost two years ago, most reviewers, including Windows on the Web, said it was buggy and that users should avoid it. However, the subsequent upgrades have taken the bugs out of Netscape. It is now a solid choice.

Some people out there still use Netscape 4.x. This browser is essentially four years old, and it shows its age in a couple of places. (Since time on the Internet is often said to move like in dog years, a four year old browser is more like 28 years old. Imagine cruising the information superhighway in a 1974 Pinto.) Netscape 4.x will have problems with NABE.com in a couple of areas. First, it does not completely work with Cascading Style Sheets, a technology that NABE.com and most other sites use extensively to control font style, size, color and the like. If the browser can't handle CSS, the pages will still be readable, but will have inconsistent fonts and text sizes. The second big problem with Netscape 4.x is in pages and tables that resize dynamically. This will especially cause problems with pages that have forms.

Only a small minority use Netscape, and only a portion of those still use Netscape 4. This small number does not justify giving up an important tool such as Cascading Style Sheets. So people should strongly consider upgrading their browser. After all, it's free and only requires the time of the download. Feel lucky? Then you might want to try Netscape 7 Preview Release 1. (A preview release is more advanced than a beta version. There are usually only a few last bugs that need stomping.) However, read the next paragraph and consider switching to Mozilla instead.

Mozilla - Mozilla is the open-source version of Netscape. The source code to Netscape was released to the public by America Online, and a non-profit organization of volunteer programmers, called Mozilla.org, rewrote the code which became both Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1. But since they were doing this on a non-profit basis, they didn't worry about rushing their code out to the market. It went through almost two years more testing before Mozilla 1 was released to market in June 2002. It works just like Netscape 6 (which looks a lot like Netscape 4), and works fine. They have just upgraded to Mozilla 1.01 to take care of some bug fixes.

The main difference between the two is that Netscape carries with it a lot of baggage from its corporate parent, America Online. You have to register with Netscape NetCenter, it comes with an Instant Messager system, and generally works as a marketing tool for a lot of the AOL Time Warner empire. (To be fair, Microsoft uses IE as its own marketing tool, too, and it also comes with its own corporate baggage.) Mozilla is a cleaner package, shorn of the marketing. It is also a true open source program, which means that you are free to make as many copies as you like, study the source code, or improve the program (if you have programming ability.)

Mozilla is also the most "standards-compliant" browser. It adheres very closely to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) recommendations, meaning that the programmers didn't add any special features that work only in this browser, and not in others. It is about a 10 MB download.

When we develop new pages at the NABE.com web site, we now test them with three different browsers, IE 6, Mozilla, and Netscape 6.2. There are also copies of IE 5.5, Netscape 4.7 and 6 around, used for trouble-shooting purposes. These are all on various Windows platforms. Budget constraints keep us from testing against a Mac, but if anyone wants to donate a Mac that we can use for testing (in particular, one of those really neat new Mac OS X models with the 17 inch flat panel, if anyone wants to know!) we will test on that platform, too.

Microsoft Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/

Netscape: http://browsers.netscape.com/browsers/main.tmpl

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org