Metropol

Ron Owen wrote:Does IE4 even WORK anymore?

I remember trying to use IE3 in 2000 and it wouldn't have a bar of any modern site.

IE4 does work, it just makes heavy weather of doing anything and throws up lots of obscure errors about being unable to do anything. You can just about surf the internet on it.

So far as Internet Explorer 3 is concerned, I remember it often used to crash on me when one tried to use cascading style sheets. It had very patchy support for them then and wasn't very happy with the ones it was happy to work with. Needless to say, it shouldn't be showing up in any site logs for modern sites as it just cannot cope.

IE5 / IE5.5 also produce lots of weird errors on every site you visit.

Neil Jones wrote:

marbles333 wrote:

Jake wrote:Looks like it's just me who uses Opera then...

Meh. It looks like just me who uses Netscape then...
Effectively Netscape is based upon Firefox. Though Firefox was a fork of Mozilla Suite Navigator, and the Mozilla Suite is related to the original Netscape Communicator ... so all in all I'm anything Mozilla.

Firefox was originally based on Netscape, only with all the broken bits taken out otherwise known as a full-blown bloody re-write. Firefox is effectively what would have been Netscape 5 after the disaster that was "Netscape Navigator 4.x", possibly the worst browser one could ever wish to work with.

More recent versions of Netscape Browser are indeed based on Firefox.

Netscape 5 was to be built on the original Communicator code using a different layout engine, and NS6 later became the final release based upon the Mozilla Application Suite I think.

I actually have a pre-alpha version of Netscape 5, and its a shoddy attempt on a full suite. There were two versions of pre-alphas apparently, one using the Mariner Layout Engine and the second using NGLayout/Gecko from Mozilla. The Communicator code was far too archaic and cumbersome to work with, so AOL switched to using Mozilla's source.

NS6 and NS7 were based on the Mozilla Suite, whilst NS8 and NS9 are based on Firefox.

Anyway, all in all, the main point is its not Internet Explorer!

no Netscape 6 was built on an unfinished build of Mozilla Application Suite, their versioning system bore no relation to the system that Mozilla used and therefore monged up everything.

Netscape 8 and 9 are outsourced advertising messes with bits of firefox and bits of Internet Explorer. They are out of date versions of Firefox at that and I can see no reason why anyone would want to use them

Hymagumba wrote:
Netscape 8 and 9 are outsourced advertising messes with bits of firefox and bits of Internet Explorer.

Netscape 9 does not have the Trident rending engine. Netscape 8 was a cock-up after it was outsourced. Navigator 9 is currently in beta development stage in-house.You're free to use whatever you want to use you know!

I remember Internet Explorer 1

Slagathor. wrote:I remember Internet Explorer 1

Surprising, most people only saw IE2 when it was bundled with Windows 95. You only saw IE1 if you bought the Win95 Plus! Pack.

Internet Explorer 2 was a radical improvement over IE1, while IE3 introduced us to the layout we all know, which would stick until IE7 was released twelve years later. When IE4 came out in 1997 the active desktop feature was ahead of its time, it worked best with the-then broadband equivalent of the time. IE5, 5.5 and 6 upped web support standards and not a lot else. Internet Explorer then went on hiatus for six years.

Surprising, most people only saw IE2 when it was bundled with Windows 95. You only saw IE1 if you bought the Win95 Plus! Pack.

Rather oddly, if you went to Help/About in IE1 it actually reported itself as version 4.4! Also, IE1 and 2 only seemed to be available in 32 bit versions that only ran on Windows 95. NT 3.51 couldn't run it, and NT4 had it's own special build of IE2 (it specifically had 'Internet Explorer for Windows NT' in the about box, rather than the same build as 95. I've only seen 16 bit versions from IE3 onwards, creating the odd paradox of older versions only running on newer operating systems and needing to wait for a newer version to run on older operating systems!

Internet Explorer 2 was a radical improvement over IE1, while IE3 introduced us to the layout we all know, which would stick until IE7 was released twelve years later.

What was the radical improvement with IE2? It looked exactly the same and appeared to have much the same functionality. Indeed, I've often wondered quite what *is* different between the two versions.

When IE4 came out in 1997 the active desktop feature was ahead of its time, it worked best with the-then broadband equivalent of the time. IE5, 5.5 and 6 upped web support standards and not a lot else. Internet Explorer then went on hiatus for six years.

I agree that IE4 was a bit ahead of it's time, most people simply didn't have connections good enough to exploit the kind of content which it supported. Which is probably why it's still useable today. I liked all the little things which active desktop added - like being able to use a JPEG file as a desktop backdrop natively; before then you could only use a BMP file. Indeed, even with IE7 choosing the 'set as background' option when right clicking a picture creates a BMP file for display rather than just using the file as is even though it hasn't needed to do for years; the way that feature works has never changed.

cwathen wrote:Rather oddly, if you went to Help/About in IE1 it actually reported itself as version 4.4!

Presumably this was reportng the version number for Windows 95, which IIRC was 4.x depending on what service packs/OSR was installed.

..and there was me thinking I was boring waiting in for a mate with a bottle of wine to arrive so we could chill out sat in the garden (My garden doesn't involve sitting in 3 feet of sewage and flood flow) :roll:

StuartPlymouth wrote: (My garden doesn't involve sitting in 3 feet of sewage and flood flow) :roll:

no, but your bush does.

*hey ho*