Re: The Netscape 4 Experience

Michael Glaesemann wrote:
<snip>
> How much support should we give older browsers (4.x and before)?

Hi Michael,

This might be a useful guide,:

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm

However, for our particular (present) users, we may be better off
looking at the stats generated from our present websites:

http://www.postgresql.org/stats

These are the stats for SourceForge, if that's helpful as well:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?framename=mainright&output=browserdetail

Personally, I'm not aware of even many corporates that are using
Netscape 4.x these days. My feeling is that we're now finally safe to
move past trying to be compatible with Netscape 4.x at this stage.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

> My little brief excursion with Netscape isn't very realistic. You'd have to
> be insane to run Netscape 4.7 in Classic on Mac OS X. Have others tested
> these pages on similarly old software? I'd like to see visitors using
> older browsers getting the information, and since I'd suspect a majority
> of people using 4.x browsers are also on older hardware, possibly with
> slower, possibly dial-up connections, page size and render times may be
> an issue. Of course I want to help make the PostgreSQL site look great
> (otherwise I wouldn't be here). But if it's important to provide a good
> experience even with older browsers, I think "a good experience with
> older browsers" might mean "a fast, information rich" user experience
> rather than "a slow but pretty" user experience.
>
> So it boils down to two things:
>
> 1. Do we want to support older browsers? I think the answer is yes, of
> course we do. Why turn anyone away if we don't have to?
>
> 2. What kind of experience do we want for people using older browsers?
> (and how do we give it to them?)
>
> Michael
>
>
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