I'm currently using Internet Explorer 6.0, and I can say I'm fairly happy with it. It's fast and compatible, and some of IE's features are completely irreplaceable for me like the ability to save a web page with its images. Until this point, the whole story was from a user's perspective, but now here comes the gory part: Why it is so painful and time consuming to design web pages for Netscape that look as good as in IE, especially when you are designing complex pages:

1. Too Many Nested Tables Make Netscape Crawl like a Turtle!
   If you've ever happened to think why Netscape makes you wait so much on some pages while the same pages come soooo fast in IE, the answer is heavy use of nested tables. Many studies found that visitors don't like to wait (e.g. Changes in Web Usability Since 1994 by Jakob Nielsen). So, if your design causes pages to load slower, you will definitely lose some of your visitors. The solution is simple: Use as few nested tables as possible. However this sometimes limits designers because the most precious page element we currently have is tables. Almost nothing can be achieved without using tables, and page layout heavily depends on them too. A partial solution lies in CSS positioning, but then again you can't use CSS layers to create dynamic-width designs (correction: actually you can -- see feedback).

2. Poorest CSS Support on the Planet
   Netscape's CSS support is the poorest of all (IE 3/4/5, NS 4/5, Opera 3.5). You can check CSS Bugs and Workarounds at CSS Pointers Group to see the incredibly long bug list for Netscape 4.x, which is several times longer than the other browsers. If you use style sheets to dynamically change fonts on pages you design like many others do, you have probably already hit the problem of font sizes in Netscape. There is simply not a smooth transition between 8 and 9 points (or 11px and 12px)! This is completely unacceptable since 8 points is too small while 9 points is too big to be used as the standard body font.

3. Assigning Table Column Widths Requires Zensufi Patience
   When assigning column widths by using either proportional or fixed values, Netscape almost always resists not to use your values particularly in free-width tables. It overrides your original values and assigns some arbitrary values instead. The only solution is to use one-pixel GIF files to set column widths rather than using the WIDTH attribute.

4. Table Background is Wrapped in Every Cell of a Table! Aaargh!
   What would you do if you want to put an image in the background of a table. You would probably write something like <TABLE BACKGROUND="something.gif"> and then expect to see the background image would cover the background of the whole table. Well no, Netscape knows what you want to do better than you, and decides to wrap the image for every single cell in your table.

5. Table Background Colors Don't Work If the Parent Table has a Background Image
   So you assigned a background image inside a big parent table and you want to add nested tables inside this table. You simply can't assign background colors to *any* cells of the nested tables unless you use a single-color image file as the background image (that is BACKGROUND="something.gif" rather than BGCOLOR="something").

Fortunately, the new Gecko engine used in Netscape 6.0 fixes most of the problems stated above. However, migration to new Netscape 6.0 would probably be slow, and we will live with the deficiencies of Netscape 4.x for a few years more. At least there is some good news: the market share of NS 4.x is now less than 10%.

Rating: 7.6 (3 votes)