OSNews

Some stat pages (and we all know how reliable they are, but still somewhat useful for seeing just how little used NN actually is):


http://www.thecounter.com/stats/ (effectively 0%)

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm (~.15%)

http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html (~1.77%)

Stats from my own personal site from the last 10,000 hits (first column is hits out of 10,000, last is version #):

7 0.07% Netscape 7.2
3 0.03% Netscape 7.1
1 0.01% Netscape 8.0.4

That's 11 hits out of the last 10,000...and going back further yields more of the same type of trend.

The point of this post isn't to bore anyone to tears (sorry if it does) but it is to point out that by and large NN has well under 1% market penetration. Which begs the question...who the hell over at AOL keeps signing on to develop new versions? And why are AOL shareholders (err, Time Warner I guess) standing for this humongous waste of money on what is effectively a DEAD platform? Firefox would have been long gone, and IE replaced years ago by either a rewrite, or with MS endorsing a different platform and branding it out under the MS trademark.

I mean seriously folks...what gives here?

I think if I was an engineer on the Navigator team, I'd lie to all my programmer friends and just say I worked on Real Player. It's that bad.

Ben Goodger, Firefox's lead developer worked on the very same Navigator team along with quite a few Mozilla/Firefox contributors.

There is nothing to be ashamed about. It was a case of the management not listening to the programmers if you have ready any of their thoughts of how Netscape sank. Those last few releases and version 6 etc, not a single developer wanted to put it out but management made them work on it and release it.

"Ben Goodger, Firefox's lead developer worked on the very same Navigator team along with quite a few Mozilla/Firefox contributors. "

The key word there is worked, which is the point I was trying to make. They had a shedload of talent, and lost all of it due to poor management.

So to rephrase, "If I worked there now... ;-)

"I'm not kidding when I say I forgot Netscape existed for maybe a year or so until I saw this headline."

So did I. I actually haven't thought about Netscape for a good many years so I figured I check out their site.
Turns out that it is still what it was last time I checked (years ago): some shitty portal service thingamabob.

I don't know why you say Navigator is that bad considering the new version looks to be pretty much exactly the same as Firefox with a couple of add-ons. The fact that you seem to think it needs separate testing, when in fact it uses the exact same rendering engine as Firefox, just goes to show how clueless you really are.

All companies I've done outward facing website programming work for have tested against the following platforms/browsers:

IE (Windows and Mac)
FF (Windows and Mac)
Opera (Windows and Mac)
Safari

Navigator is based on the Mozilla/Firefox code. There is no need to test against it specifically.

I'm not kidding when I say I forgot Netscape existed for maybe a year or so until I saw this headline. And I build websites for a living.

Well you are a little clueless but it doesn't matter because:

A. No one uses Navigator

B. If anyone actually did it it would render the same

I think if I was an engineer on the Navigator team, I'd lie to all my programmer friends and just say I worked on Real Player. It's that bad.

I admit that I absolutely hated the old realplayer but I think the new realplayer is actually very good. I use it to listen to real streams, mostly news sites and it works quite well along with fitting in nicely with my GNOME desktop.