Browser Wars v.2004: Part 1 Netscape: The Early Years Lee Underwood
Netscape
The first widely used web browser was NCSA Mosaic. In addition, there were several other browsers, designed mainly through universities and independent projects.
By 1994, several members of the Mosaic team partnered with Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen to create the Netscape web browser. By mid-1995, Netscape had captured almost 80% of the browser market, but by 1999 Netscape had fallen to second place behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This loss of market share was largely a result of IE's inclusion with the Windows operating system. In 1998, Netscape became open source software. Later that year, AOL bought Netscape, although it continued to use Internet Explorer as its main browser (AOL is contractually obligated to use the IE browser until 2010).
The current viable versions of Netscape are 6.x and 7.x. Although there are still some people who refuse to upgrade from version 4.x, the design standards have changed too much to try to design for any version earlier than 6.x (there was no version 5.x). So how do the current versions of Netscape stack up for usability from a design viewpoint?
Netscape uses the Mozilla source code. As such, the Mozilla open source organization is dedicated to following W3C standards and not inventing its own. Strangely, and because of this, that can make web page creation more difficult.
Compliance with the W3C standards means that in order to use the newer versions of Netscape, developers are no longer able to use several features that were available in Netscape 4.x and IE. For instance, according to Mozilla's developer's notes, "because layers are not part of any W3C web standard, Netscape 6/7 and Mozilla do not support layers. Like any other browser that doesn't support layers, Gecko1 [the new Netscape version] renders the HTML as if the LAYER, ILAYER, and NOLAYER tags were not there". The Netscape developer's web site provides information for updating DHTML web pages.
This also means that many of the JavaScript programs created for Netscape 4.x browsers may not work in the newer ones. The older scripts used document.all, which was and still is only supported by Internet Explorer. To provide Netscape 4.x compatibility to such a script, document.layers was used, which remains unsupported by Gecko-based browsers (Netscape 6.x, Netscape 7.x, and Mozilla 1.x).
Netscape's developer's web site states, "Netscape 7.1's support for web standards continues to improve with consistent cross-platform implementations for HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), XML 1.0, XHTML 1.0, XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, partial XML Base, simple Xlinks, XPointer, FIXptr, Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1), the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), partial support for Document Object Model level 3 (DOM3), Simple Object Access Protocol 1.1 (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)."
1What is Gecko?
Netscape 6.1, Mozilla, and other Mozilla-based browsers have identical implementations of the DOM. This is because they use the same technology. Gecko, the software component in these browsers that handles the parsing of the HTML, the layout of the pages, the document object model, and even the rendering of the entire application interface, is a fast, standards-compliant rendering engine that implements the W3C DOM standards and the DOM-like (but not standardized) browser object model (i.e., window et al) in the context of web pages and the application interface, or chrome, of the browser. Though the application interface and the content displayed by the browser are different in many practical ways, the DOM exposes them uniformly as a hierarchy of nodes. [Gecko DOM Reference]
