Retro browser war: IE6 vs. Netscape in 2011

[qubit]

What if you took the raw, pre-patched, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried to surf the modern Web? What would happen?

...........

Just for fun (my definition of "fun" is fairly warped), I decided to spend some time using the original, pre-patched version of IE6 and a version of Netscape released at roughly the same time. It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death.

I loved this bit especially:

Netscape, meanwhile, simply stopped working after an hour or so, giving me the error message "Netscape application file has encountered a problem and needs to close." Once that happened, I couldn't open the browser at all, even after restarting Windows XP.

Simply reinstalling Netscape didn't work either. To continue testing the browsers I completely reinstalled Windows XP, and moved up to Netscape 6.2.1.

Now, that's what you call a crash!

Read the rest: Network World

 

[qubit]

Bump - I can't believe geeks aren't interested in a review of obsolete software that nobody uses any more!

Heck, that hard crash alone is worth some giggles, lol.

 

[MRCL]

Interesting. My company had IE6 installed on every computer until not even half a year ago when they finally upgraded to IE8. Glad it wasn't Netscape lol. That being said I remember browsing the Net with Netscape as a kid, with Win98. But as so many else we migrated to IE with WinXP.

 

[qubit]

Well, your company is still a lot more progressive than ours - a default PC image is still XP with IE6.

And IE6 is causing lots of problems with general browsing and it's now impossible to log into SSL sites, because some group policy setting has changed on Active Directory. Why stick with IE6? Because of one or two crappy apps that won't work properly with anything later.

In fact, to resolve the SSL issue, we do upgrade the browser on request... to IE7. Great, innit? :shadedshu IE8 definitely causes problems with them, but IE7 is usually ok.

 

[yogurt_21]

shoulda just linked the slide show

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/022411-browser-ie6-netscape.html


more entertaining.

 

[qubit]

shoulda just linked the slide show

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/022411-browser-ie6-netscape.html


more entertaining.

Hehe, this is my favourite: www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/022411-browser-ie6-netscape.html#slide6

"This empty space brought to you by Internet Explorer."

Priceless.