Deja Vu already? It offers in-current-browser emulations of old browsers like NCSA Mosaic and others. It works very well.
Zeldman has found
Zeldman has found a site for something called the Health and Racquet Club Group. When you go to the site, however, all you get is a page that says “You have been directed to this page because of the use of an old browser…” and suggests that you use a browser that supports web standards. People have been trying to get the real site to load using any number of browsers – it won’t load the real thing under my IE5/Mac – but everyone gets the same message. Which suggests to me that it might be a mild hoax, a bit of a media hack – but if it is, it’s pretty oblique.
Upon further consideration,
although Netscape 6 does work in broad terms – and what it does well it does very well – it is so rife with bugs I can’t even think of any commercial software or shareware that I’ve ever used that is as unfinished.
Luckily few of the bugs are crashing bugs, and my machine hasn’t frozen due to any of them. But they drastically affect the usefulness of Netscape as an alternative browser. Some examples of bugs I’ve found:
- text entry boxes are flaky (text jumps around, spaces and soft wrapping is wonky);
- it uses its own interface elements, not widgets from the UI, and so is very slow at rendering certain things, and when it does, they don’t conform with the OS under which it runs;
- changes to preferences don’t always take;
- new windows are quite slow to open;
- some of the program’s other behaviour deviates both from what one would expect from the OS and from older versions of Netscape;
- and the whole thing takes at least twice as long to load (in spite of having fewer plugins in my case) than IE;
- the whole thing takes up twice the space (browser only, no email stuff included on my machine) and more memory than IE5;
- and I can’t seem to drag and drop URLs or links onto the favourites bar.
Add to that the fact that I can’t scroll with the wheel on my mouse and their own skin updating/loading procedure doesn’t seem to work and it’s a mess. The worst though? They’ve buried their release notes so you can’t even make a reasoned judgement for yourself without downloading the installer. It should be online, and prominent. [I found the release notes after posting this]
The idea of user-developed wireless networks
The idea of user-developed wireless networks is great in so many ways. First of all, whether the commercial space is ready for it or not, such open wireless access is how the whole thing will have to work for it to avoid ultimately being no more significant than Compuserve or the old Prodigy – which were important but couldn’t really last in the face of the internet. But it’s also pretty cool that the guy in London is using Web Stalker as his network mapping system. Web Stalker was an art project. An award winning art project – and very cool, if inscrutable. What I like about it is that it reaches back to an earlier era on the web – when people were still getting used to browsers in the first place, Web Stalker came along as an alternate browser, deconstructing an idea that had barely taken root in the public consciousness. Kind of like the wireless project itself.
As of this minute
, there’s no longer a counter on mikel.org. Every one I tried was simply too slow and unreliable – and prevented the whole page from rendering in some browsers. I’ll miss the “live” referrer info – I enjoy knowing where people are coming from when they arrive at mikel.org. If anyone can suggest a better solution I would appreciate it.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- Next Page »
