“My Site Doesn’t Work in Netscape 4!”

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

I had a client notify me that their newly developed site was working in all newer versions of Explorer and Firefox/Mozilla, but breaking in Netscape. A screenshot was provided, clearly showing an older version of Netscape, likely v4.5 or below.

Said site is developed using mostly CSS for its structure, which as most designers and developers know, older Netscapes have poor support for. This brings to light the frustration that most of us feel when developing sites: lack of proper cross-browser support across multiple versions. Of course, we strive to make sites work on all (relatively) newer browsers, on most platforms.

Some clients, however, don’t know about browser support and CSS and other technical jargon, or even understand it. At times it becomes difficult to explain these things to them in non-technical speak.

As a solution, I propose the following: Self-Destructing Browser Software(TM). Browser software that is at least 8 years old would automatically destroy/erase/uninstall itself from computers. It would then prompt the user to upgrade the software to the most recent version, or even better, it would automatically upgrade.

This would help all of us designers and developers tremendously. All you Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla developers out there, please add this feature into your next software release. Thank you.