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Comment by arscan | Hacker News Reader

Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever was, as an important client standardized internally on that forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost). Netscape 4 simply didn’t have the capability to do things we wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost).

Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a ton of goodwill from me that didn’t wear off for a decade or so.

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agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was always the better browser and that people using IE were simply making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology which no-one did.

* Kind of, I was born in the 2000s

Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right. Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated. The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.

Exactly, and in my sad and unfortunate case I had to support it because of that one stubborn client, even though the rest of the world moved on. Actually, it might have just been their CEO accessing the site from his home machine or something?

Oh, what the heck, it’s been 20 years. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: shame on you. In the mid-2000s you had very poor taste in browsers ;-)

> For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology

Man, literally every time the web platform had to choose between the IE way and the Netscape way they made the wrong choice huh.

I hung on to Netscape 4 until the first versions of Mozilla

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