Netscape 4 broken - everywhere?

[time]

A customer phoned me complaining that "the internet stopped working" when their PC was upgraded. This translates to an error when using Netscape 4.7:

Alert! Did not find a converter or decoder.

I dropped in for a look, and everything worked perfectly. The customer apologised profusely.

But the customer's wife insisted he try www.yahoo.com.au (amongst others)

*splat*

After the error, Netscape won't play again until Windows is restarted.

Other browsers seemed okay, so I muttered about reinstalling Netscape and disappeared with a promise to look up the error.

Back home, Google (wonderful, wonderful search engine) turned up this interesting post from Thomas Gaines in an Oracle programming forum:

Depending upon the browser that you use and its various plugins, you might not even be able to view this page at all ... If you're in Netscape Navigator, I received the error message "Alert! did not find a converter or decoder" ... To view the file, I had to remove the line containing the string "start of embedded ad" and then it would be okay.

Hmmm, I thought. Let's fire up Netscape 4 and have a look. So I visited Yahoo and lo! *splat*

It seems that ad.doubleclick.net (or maybe just the Oz version?) has taken it upon themselves to rotate in one or more ads that cause Netscape 4 to have a heart attack. Once it does, it's stuffed.

Given that websites and advertising have a symbiotic relationship, this turns the average surfing session into Russian Roulette. Anyone care to fire up the dinosaur and check?

 

[Tea]

Navigator 4.08 doesn't have a problem, or at least didn't when I tried it just now. It might be Communicator specific.

 

[blakerwry]

why are people still using Netscape communicator?

Any ISP that gives out netscpae communicator AND suggests that their customers use it above IE, opera, or mozilla are, IMO, short changing their customers.

Comunicator never ran that well anyway, I would rather run Moz because of (1) the lack of crap ware, (2) excellent mail client, (3) great compatibility (4) overall very good browser.... I would think as long as a decent chunk or RAM is free you could run this browser easily on a pentium class computer.

IMO, the only people who should run communicator are those that know better.... what an oxymoron.

 

[time]

We both have Netscape 4.7x, but my theory is that it is only a certain ad or ads. Given the constant rotation of ads, it may or may not affect someone when they visit afflicted sites.

Blakerwry, calm down, there are worse things in the computer world to rail about. :wink: In fact, many developers still use Netscape 4 as their 'other browser' test, so it works on a surprisingly high number of sites.

You should be pleased to know that my solution for this customer is to run a later version of Netscape; i.e. Mozilla.

 

[blakerwry]

I am one of those developers that used to use Netscape as their other browser... Now I only check Moz(llinux and windows) and IE.. because that is who I care about most.

I don't even bother with comunicator because of the lack of support for CSS and the fact that it's use is declining.


I have an artsy website that has 2285 unique visits. win98 accounted for 40% of the OS's that visited ... win2k & XP account for another 40%...

going with that IE took almost 80% of the browser share... with 12% of the people visiting my site using AOL.

Screen res is evenly split between 800x600 and 1024x768, color is pretty even between 24 and 32bit.


My audience for this site fits very well with how I designed it.... mainly for IE/Moz on win9x and win2k/XP.... mac IE takes a back seat.


However, on my most recent site I am taking care that the site will display perfectly on both IE and Moz and in windows and linux with a screen res of 1024x768 16bit or better color looking best... Mac being completely thrown out of the picture.