[thelist] Netscape 6 loads page twice

[aardvark]

> From: "jeff" <jeff at lists.evolt.org>
>
> according to thecounter.com they logged a total of 554,519,878 hits for the
> month of october.  approximately 13% of those hits were from nn4 users.  an
> amazing 81% of the hits came from ie4/ie5.  i'm not sure that less than 15%
> of an audience could be considered significant.  i'd rate that as a portion
> of your audience that you're you want the site to be usable for, but not
> enough to warrant the additional development time necessary to make all the
> bells and whistles work for.

i always wince when i read things like this...

if i told a client that we build sites that only cut out 13% of their 
users, i don't think they'd accept that... do you tell your clients 
that?  would they accept it?  especially e-commerce clients?

and if you're making bells and whistles that require the latest 
browsers, you need to consider how those degrade to older, 
alternative, and handicapped browsers... as well as those of us 
with JS turned off...

so, that may be more than 15%, and for those users who are very 
particular about which browser they choose, you may be pissing 
them off, meaning that even with another browser, they may not 
come back...

remember, don't build based on how easy it is for you, build based 
on how easy it is for your users...

> on top of that, nn6 users accounted for less than 0.05% of the total hits.
> not only that, but i don't expect those numbers to change very much any time
> soon.  i think the damage to netscape has been done and it's too much to
> recover from.

that i agree with...

[...]
> personally, i used to be a die-hard fan of netscape and for good reason.  in
> the days of nn2 and nn3 what other options were there?  ie3 was laughable at
> best.  however, i am now quite content to develop exclusively for ie4+
> (preferably ie5.0).  while i applaud netscape for their efforts i think it

i'm always wary of that given IE's propensity to ignore bad code, 
support proprietary standards, and make developers forget that not 
everyone surfs in IE4+ on win95...

> should have been started long ago and should have  been finished long ago.
> i think that in waiting so long they've introduced yet another thorn into
> the side of all developers.  now we not only have to develop for all the
> quirks of the current mix of browsers we're committed to supporting, but we
> also have to code to nn6 as well.  either that or we have to decide to code
> completely to standards, building a site that will work in a browser that
> 0.05% of our audience uses and grin and bear it for the other 99.95% of our
> users who will experience problems.  it just doesn't make sense.

again, as a sample:
http://roselli.org/adrian/

works for 100% of users... and it's standards-compliant...

> bottom line - you should be coding to standards, but don't do it for the nn6
> users cause they're not likely to be around terribly long.  do it for the
> future of your work, but don't do it to the point of giving yourself ulcers.

eh, i still code for the user, *every* user, whenever possible... and 
that happens to be always...